Sweeping Proclamations and Local Nitty-Gritty: Knowledge and Social Problems

The paper argues that sweeping proclamations about the effects of globalization relate to a world which is antithetic to that of real people. While, for example, politicians strive to meet what they 'know' to be the demands of socio-economic globalization; people con tending with the problems such policies raise, deploy a repertoire of local knowledge and concomitant practices. Their knowledge combines traditional lore and lessons learned over a lifetime from dealings in ordinary local contexts. With the help of theorizations of glob alization and of everyday life, it is possible to show how local knowledge interacts with the global, and to touch on indicators which are potentially decisive for the differential evolution of the 'glocal'. "At the local level, knowledge is generated by previous and new experiences Local particularities such as knowledge on environment, law, or rites do not vanish, even the opposite takes place: a redefinition." (Mueller, 2004, p. 139) Whether taken as a sign of progress or as an indication of the decline of civilization, there is widespread agreement that society is globalizing, and that at the core of this process in contemporary human experience, is the exponential growth of knowledge. Furthermore, it is contended that this growth is the basis for extremes of cultural change in the evolution of late modernity. In this paper, I take issue both with those who show unbri dled admiration for globalization and with those who fear it for backing the economically privileged and for flattening cultural differentiation. Convincing as the arguments may be on either side, I suggest that the clusters of assumptions on the effects of globalization relating to the lives of most people are academic conventions that enable theorizers to evade confrontation with the particularities of social experience, and with the messy real-life problems that people have to deal with. Changes in culture, which are after all, a constant in human life, are contingent on deploying