Introduction

Reflections on the Global Condition

Julian C. H. Lee

This book has its beginnings in the office of Professor Joseph Siracusa. 'Philosophers used to be concerned about what it meant to be human', he said during one of our conversations there. 'But now', he continued, 'the question is, what does it mean to be human in the age of globalization?'

His question points to the way that our lives are fundamentally intertwined with people, entities and processes of which we often have little understanding, about which we frequently have little awareness, and over which we often feel that we have little influence. In our attempts to know ourselves, his question leads us towards the fact that now, more than ever, this cannot be done without understanding ourselves as part of a globalized world.

But the word 'globalization' is now commonplace. What globalization means has been and remains indistinct and dependent on context. Siracusa notes that globalization 'is a hotly contested term. There are all kinds of encyclopedias and handbooks on what globalization is' (RMIT 2014). The historian Paul Battersby adds that it is a broad concept that 'means many different things to many different people' (ibid.). With such diversity being the case, the reader will forgive us for not confining its meaning by providing a definition, instead allowing the meanings of the term to come through in the course of this book's chapters. As the anthropologist Eve Darian-Smith writes, there is value 'in the process of arguing about what the field of global studies is and could be, rather than coming up with any definitive answer' (2015: 165).

That the world is 'global' or 'globalized' is also now taken for granted. In the same way as we are unable to perceive an aroma when we spend too long in its midst, a problem in thinking about ourselves in a global context is that 'globalization' is now so omnipresent that we can sometimes fail to detect its influence, even though its effects are all around us, i