Global Citizenship

I am often confronted with the puzzling question "where are you from?" Hmm.. this seems like it should be an easy one, shouldn't it? I was born and raised in Doha, Qatar, in 1991. My dad was born in New York, moved to Canada, finished his last year of high school in Egypt, and came to Qatar, where he remains to this day. My mother was born in Qatar, and both of my grandparents have mixed national backgrounds.



I went to a British kindergarten, an American primary and secondary school, and an American Jesuit university. I speak predominately Arabic with my mom and predominately English with my dad, and travel often, exposing myself to different cultures and languages. So whenever I'm confronted by the topic in a conversation, I usually announce, proudly and with a sheepish grin, "I guess I'm a global citizen then."



People often discount such a statement as too cheesy or cliche; however, rare is it when an individual realizes the implications of such a statement. I'm not saying I'm profound or anything, I'm just a byproduct of this global culture, of the phenomenon obsessively termed globalization by the masses. It connotes Western ideological domination over the East and Northern economic supremacy over the South. However, in his book Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, sociology professor Roland Robertson, described the process of globalization as "the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole," and sociologists Albrow and King define globalization as "all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society." Waters concedes that it is a "social process in which the constraints of geography on economic, political, social and cultural arrangements recede, in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding and in which people act accordingly." I see this everyday in Qatar; expatriate, or non-Arab/non-Muslim kids saying insh'Allah or getting karak,



or a Corvette with an American flag bumper sticker driven by a young Qatari male, or a non-married Arab couple walking and holding hands. More and more everyday cultural norms are readjusted and boundaries redrawn. The sheer proliferation of mixed-sex education in the Middle East shows the ideological rearrangement between what once might have been mores or even taboos (such as having Qatari men and women in the same classroom socializing outside of an appropriate cultural context). The fact that I sit in the atrium of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, where education based on the Western Jesuit experience is imported from the United States of America to Qatar, writing on a laptop that was manufactured in another part of the world, wearing clothes from designers that claim to be Italian but have factories in China and India. All our societies are connected on a microscopic level, and our ancient cultural heritage, although to be held with pride and regarded as majestic, has slowly changed and molded itself with the proliferation of mass media and travel, exposing a majority of people in all corners of the world to an ever-flowing milieu. For our last class, on Wednesday, we discussed functionalist theory, which views that different social environments maintain an orderly and consistent status quo, where people actively endeavor to maintain stability and order. David Grazian believes that popular culture is functional for society, acting as an agent that maintains stability the systematic nature of social worlds. Popular culture, accordingly, includes rituals and totems that are shared across the world through the appropriately titled "popular culture." Rituals are cultural acts of solidarity, social cohesion, and rebellion, according to Grazian, and that they enable groups to gather and enforce their collective identity. Through globalization and mass media, especially through popular mobilization media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, we see people that would never otherwise have met build relationships and experiences vicariously. They become desensitized and their sense of understanding of the world they inhabit expands outside their immediate national sphere of influence, and a supra-culture that transcends national or regional boundaries is developed. Popular culture, as base and denigrating as it can get in some cases, unites people through ideas, songs, dance, blogs, personal pages, and other forms of expression, forming a massive culture paralleling the consumer culture, although more and more we are connected by ideas in lieu of commercial products.

Bibliography Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Waters, Malcolm. Globalization. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2001. Albrow, Martin, and Elizabeth King. Globalization, Knowledge and Society: Readings From International Sociology. London: Sage Publications, 1990.