When we think of the globalization of culture, we tend to think of the consumption of cultural goods produced in the West and the effects of these goods on the values and practices of non-Western consumers. The literature on the globalization of culture also tends to focus on how Western markets for non-Western cultural goods affect patterns of cultural production in the non-Western world.Footnote ¹ Naturally, this focus on markets tends to draw our theoretical interest toward questions of capitalism. However, when we look at societies without a history of capitalism, new questions come to light. That men wear Western-style suits in both Uzbekistan and Italy, that orchestras use polyphony in both Kazakhstan and Austria, and that King Lear is popular in both Turkmenistan and England cannot be explained by the dynamics of capitalism.

What, then, has structured the world in such a way that these artifacts of Western cultures are so widespread throughout the globe? Another common explanation is related to cultural imperialism, and since Central Asians first adopted suits, polyphony, and Shakespeare after Russia colonized the region in the mid-1800s, there is some truth to this explanation. However, suits are not samovars and Shakespeare is not the same as Pushkin, so we must look not just to Russian cultural influence but also to the way Soviet institutions served as conduits for the globalization of culture in Central Asia. Central Asia presents us with a rich case against which we can test many of our assumptions about the role of capitalism and cultural imperialism in cultural globalization. In Soviet Central Asia, there was culture production without a market economy, modernity without capitalism, and globalization without transnational corporations. It was also an example of Soviet imperialism that differed radically from the more familiar British and French cases in terms of the role the imperial power played in deliberate “development” of national cultures (Grant Reference Grant1996; Slezkine Reference Slezkine1994a; Reference Slezkine1994b; Suny Reference Suny1993; Reference Suny, Suny and Martin2001).

In this paper I argue that in order to account for cultural globalization in multiple forms of modernity,Footnote ² the effects of both capitalist markets and cultural imperialism need to be understood within the context of modernity's drive for universalization (Giddens Reference Giddens1990; Robertson Reference Robertson1992). By understanding how global cultural forms have been used by culture producers in a non-Western, non-capitalist region to communicate both their culture's universalism and its particularism, we can sharpen our theorizing about cultural globalization more generally. Specifically, I examine the ways that the performing arts in Central Asia were globalized during the twentieth century.Footnote ³ Since global cultural forms became “universal” in the Soviet Union at roughly the same time they did in other parts of the world, I argue that Soviet culture producers adopted international cultural forms as a means of symbolic communication with an often imagined, and sometimes real, audience beyond their local communities.

Westernization and imperialism are issues that concern many scholars, and there are a variety of ways these questions have been addressed in the sociological literature in relation to the globalization of culture. Structuralist theorists who approach globalization from a critical perspective tend to see cultural globalization as a process of culture loss, as local values are wiped out by the homogenizing forces of consumerism (Sklair Reference Sklair1995; Reference Sklair1999; Wallerstein Reference Wallerstein and King1997). However, those who jump to the conclusion that the adoption of imported cultural forms is evidence of Americanization or Westernization have usually fallen into the trap of what Hannerz critically terms the “master scenario” of homogenization by failing to pay attention to either production or reception (Hannerz Reference Hannerz and King1997; Liebes and Katz Reference Liebes and Katz1993; Tomlinson Reference Tomlinson1991). We need to ask why cultural forms are increasingly similar across the globe, whether content follows form, and if not, does the homogenization of form itself produce new opportunities for diversifying and localizing culture, or does the new container simply reproduce traditional cultural meanings?

In order to address these questions, it is helpful to make a distinction between cultural form (meaning on a structural level, for example, genre, or manner of production) and cultural content (meaning on an interpretive level, for example, symbols, or stories) (Adams Reference Adams2005; Berezin Reference Berezin1994; Williams Reference Williams1981). The analytical separation of form from content is felicitous since it questions assumptions about values and practices inevitably following forms. Often in the debates about cultural convergence, the analytical separation of form from content is overlooked and the evidence of form, which is relatively easy to measure, is taken as evidence for content. However, globalization scholars who take a more culturalist approach have argued that what we see empirically is that as culture globalizes, it both homogenizes on the dimension of form and diversifies on the dimension of content (Appadurai Reference Appadurai and Featherstone1990; Hannerz Reference Hannerz and King1997). This, as Appadurai argues, means that globalization allows everyday life to embrace a plurality of imagined communities, “a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern” (Reference Appadurai1996: 4). Global forms transform content so that local culture is not just reproduced but infused with new, locally determined meanings that diversify the meanings available in comparison to “traditional” culture. Furthermore, as Schneider argues, globalization of culture should be seen as a hermeneutic process of appropriation, which means “a taking out of one context and putting in another … [that] consequently implies not only that cultural elements are invested with new signification but also that those who appropriate are being transformed” (Reference Schneider2003: 224). Schneider advocates an empirical focus on the agents doing the appropriating rather than on the cultural objects that result from this process, which can lead us to take seemingly familiar forms at their face value without investigating the ways the “original” meaning of the cultural product is subverted in its new context (ibid.: 225).

Another criticism often directed toward structuralist approaches is that they focus solely on a macro level of analysis (using countries or international organizations as the units of analysis), which often leads the authors of such studies to infer rather than investigate the motives of the agents involved.Footnote ⁴ It should be noted that new institutionalists and world polity theorists usually assume that there is a mismatch between formal structure and actual practices, but few investigations of globalized culture coming from this approach have investigated the meanings being made within the models. However, the broader trend of theorizing about global models and institutional isomorphism points to the importance of understanding what motivates the decision-makers in this process of adoption of new models. The institutionalist approach suggests that homogenization of form (isomorphism) can result from actors seeking to minimize uncertainty, comply with coercive regulatory environments, or gain legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell Reference DiMaggio, Powell, Powell and DiMaggio1991; Meyer and Rowan Reference Meyer, Brian, Powell and DiMaggio1991). Certainly any of these may be the case in a particular situation, but in the evidence I present here, we can see the importance of legitimacy (normative isomorphism) and world models for creating standards to which elites want to adhere. The many empirical studies in the world polity literature all point to normative factors (prestige, legitimacy, status competition) that bring about similarity in institutional forms across the world through “global models” of nationhood, education, civil society, and so on (Boli and Lechner Reference Boli and Lechner2005; Boli and Thomas Reference Boli and Thomas1999; Meyer et al. Reference Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez1997; Schofer Reference Schofer2003; Schofer and Meyer Reference Schofer and Meyer2005).

Recent scholarship on the diffusion of global models calls attention to the importance of elite networks and the practices of epistemic communities that constitute the very transnational institutions that serve to diffuse global models.Footnote ⁵ The state-driven approach, as exemplified by the work of Diana Crane, is another approach that attends to both transnational networks and the agency of elites (Crane, Kawashima, and Kawasaki Reference Crane, Kawashima and Kawasaki2002). Crane and her colleagues examine not just the nation-state but also a broader category of “cultural policy strategies,” focusing on culture production and elite decision-making. Elites, institutionally located in government and other large organizations, are the key actors in a scenario where “cultural globalization is a process that involves competition and negotiation as organizations and countries attempt to preserve, position, or project their cultures in global space” (Crane Reference Crane, Diana Crane and Kawasaki2002: 4).

These strategies of competition and negotiation are not driven solely by economic motivations, but also by a universalistic orientation that is a product of what Giddens has called modernity's time-space distanciation and processes of disembedding from local social contexts. For Giddens, modern societies bind time and space in a way that distant social influences have an increasing reach across time and space (through print, communications technology, rapid transportation, etc.). In modern societies, social interaction often takes place without physical co-presence, time is no longer linked to place—it has become distanciated and disembedded from local context through the mechanical clock, the Julian calendar, and so on (Giddens Reference Giddens1990). These features of modernity allow us to pair a Weberian approach that sees globalization as distanciated social action (or as Robertson [Reference Robertson1992] puts it, an increasing consciousness of the world as a single place), with one that grounds these disembedding processes (such as the diffusion of global cultural models) in transnational networks. This perspective explains outcomes on multiple levels: in terms of actors taking each other into account as a more anthropological approach would dictate, in terms of state policies as in the work of Crane and her colleagues, and on the inter-state level examined by world polity theorists. In what follows, I concentrate mainly on these first two levels in order to show that the striving of culture producers for international recognition of their own culture and the competition for status as an artist of “international quality” are the primary reasons global cultural forms are adopted by culture producers who imagine themselves to be part of an elite global community (a la Anderson Reference Anderson1991). The desire for international recognition that drives the globalization of culture is not just vanity, as in the desire of an individual artist to be internationally famous; it is not simply about individual virtuosity. It is also a perception that international recognition enhances the legitimacy of local cultural practices at the level of a local or national collectivity.

I argue that the structure of rewards for artists at the local and international levels can most clearly be understood in terms of a global cultural field.Footnote ⁶ As Motti Regev argued in the case of rock music, shared aesthetics, idioms, and institutions create global fields of culture production in which all participants in the genre are oriented toward a common status hierarchy (Reference Regev1997; Reference Regev2000; Reference Regev, Ulrich Beck and Winter2003). Here I am building on Regev's conceptualization by suggesting that “the game” of culture production is played on a set of geographically nested fields, each with its own prestige structure for cultural capital, but each of which is also subject to the prestige structure of the broader fields. As Faraday contended in the case of film in the Soviet Union, the Soviet “field of power” was structured by political, not economic, status, though in other ways the Soviet cultural field was remarkably similar to the French field as described by Bourdieu. Both fields were structured around an “autonomous” and a “heteronymous” principle of hierarchization, which Faraday labels in the Soviet case as “art” versus “opportunism” (2000: 91): artists, and particular cultural products, competed either for the symbolic rewards (prestige among cultural elites) accorded by the autonomous principle, or for the mass appeal of the heteronymous principle, which resulted in both political influence and economic rewards. To this characterization based on a view from Moscow, I would add that the Soviet field of culture production had multiple levels that corresponded to republic, national, and international boundaries, and that the prestige structures of each field were increasingly influenced by the structures on the next higher level. The result was a growing homology among local fields as well as an expanding potential for the transposability of schemas across locales.

This grounding in the habitus of culture producers brings us back to the question of how globalization can be both homogenizing (on the level of form) and diversifying (on the level of content). I argue that homogenization on the level of form is a result of culture producers choosing ways to communicate the particularity and uniqueness of their national or local culture through a universal medium that makes their culture intelligible to their international peers. These forms operate as global means of exchange that translate prestige across various levels of cultural fields. So while global cultural forms allow communication to take place between geographically distant cultural elites, a theory of global cultural fields helps to explain why such communication is desirable in the first place. It also explains how cultural content becomes more diversified through the application of multiple prestige structures (though I confess that in this paper I deal more with form than with content).

The Soviet state's rapid modernization of Central Asia and its ideological and material commitment to internationalism opened an emerging global cultural field to Central Asian culture producers. This field provided new rules for the game of culture production through both the direct participation of artists in the global cultural field and the imagination of the global arena when producing culture back on the home field. The empirical basis of this argument comes from my analysis of the introduction and development of two performative cultural forms: folklore, the expression of local cultural content par excellence; and mass spectacle, a thoroughly global form which, in the genealogy of genre, is a close relative of the Olympics' opening ceremonies. Both these cultural forms have the advantage of embodying multiple genres in music, dance, costume and literature, thus giving a more comprehensive picture of the overall cultural field.

My substantive analysis of these forms is framed by Robertson's concept of globalization as the “institutionalization of the two-fold process involving the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism” (Reference Robertson and King1997: 77). The increasing popularity of folk-culture performances in Central Asia, beginning in the post-WWII era, is an example of the “universalization of particularism,” which is the aspect of cultural globalization that recognizes a nearly infinite array of differences that are understood in a single universal matrix. The choice of mass spectacular concerts by contemporary culture producers in Uzbekistan to express new visions of national identity is one of the manifestations of the “particularization of universalism,” which is the process by which “the idea of the universal [is] given global-human concreteness” (ibid.: 102). These two processes are heavily intertwined and in both folk culture and mass spectacle we can see both universalizing and particularizing tendencies. However, I will argue that this process relies heavily on globalized cultural forms to communicate both particular and universal aspects of cultural content. This is more specific and more restrictive than what culturalist theorists term “hybridization” or “indigenization” because what is important here to culture producers is that the myriad content they wish to create is expressed through a “universal” cultural form. This form provides a means through which they can effectively communicate their equivalence to their international peers (even if their similarity is premised on difference). Whereas culturalist theorists often celebrate hybridity, here what we see is less often playful adaptation by local culture producers than it is compliance with a set of incentive structures determined from above, and in the Soviet case, by the state.

I chose to study performative forms because the bulk of the globalization-of-culture literature has focused empirically on recorded culture, which is easy for companies to reproduce and distribute and convenient for scholars to study. The global industries that produce television programs, movies, music, and print and electronic media have all been dissected from various perspectives, most of which are rooted in analyses of capitalism.Footnote ⁷ That these cultural products are produced by industries naturally results in a greater degree of homogenization, as many decisions about form and content are made by a small group of executives, often located in a Western country. However, if we shift our focus to the performing arts, we can see that different dynamics are at work in how form and content are determined. Local actors directly create their performance, whether based on local or global models, and globalization in the performing arts requires active cooperation on the part of local elites. Performances, by the very nature of their production are less commodified than recordings, and by examining globalization in the performing arts, we can separate the effects of capitalist markets from other influences on globalization even more clearly.

Though I am using field theory as an analytical device, methodologically I am doing something different from other empirical studies of cultural fields (e.g., Benson Reference Benson1999; Faraday Reference Faraday2000). Faraday, for example, examined the strategies film directors used to jockey for position in the already elite field of film production in Soviet Moscow. However, rather than studying the positions of genres or collectivities in a cultural field, I am examining here the adoption of cultural forms as part of a struggle to legitimate particular positions in the field. Thus I leave the relative dominance of positions unanalyzed and focus on certain subordinate positions and the groups that occupy them: folk artists and the purveyors of spectacular kitsch located on a global cultural periphery.Footnote ⁸ However, I take these artists seriously, and examine how the genres they produce are able to draw on global cultural models in order to legitimate their art.

THE GLOBALIZATION OF CULTURE IN CENTRAL ASIA

“Central Asia” in this paper refers to the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Before the Soviet period, the people inhabiting Central Asia were united by a common identity as Muslims, which for many was as much a cultural as a religious identity. They were divided not by national borders, but by splits between the nomadic culture of the Kazaks, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and others who do not today have their own nation-state, and the sedentary culture of the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and others. While the Uzbeks share a common Turkic linguistic and ethnic heritage with the Kazaks, Kyrgyz, and Turkmen, their lifestyle more closely resembles the Persian culture of the Tajiks, with whom they shared the urban civilizations of Samarkand, Khiva, and Bukhara.Footnote ⁹

Until the nineteenth century, the culture of Central Asia was distinctly pre-modern. Most of the nomadic cultures did not have written languages and the sedentary cultures had become isolated and stagnant after the decline of the flourishing of Muslim civilization of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁰ Modernization came to Central Asia with the arrival of the Russian tsarist army and its accompanying agents of civilization: ethnographers, linguists, and teachers (Khalid Reference Khalid1998; Slezkine Reference Slezkine1994a). In response to the pressures of the Russian Empire, the nomads sought to create alphabets for their languages and schoolteachers in the cities eagerly implemented a more worldly curriculum. Local Muslim elites who traveled to the cosmopolitan centers of Islamic learning and the modernizing capitals of Turkey and Egypt brought back with them ideas about how to modernize their own culture through education, print media, and theatrical productions that propagated their new, modern sociability (Khalid Reference Khalid1998).

From the nineteenth century into the twentieth, culture production was rapidly transformed from a locally idiosyncratic system to one that can increasingly be characterized as modern and international. Across the Russian Empire prior to the twentieth century, a variety of cultural forms were shared mainly by face-to-face communities and dispersed groups of elites. The Soviets ushered in what Baudrillard termed the “age of simulation,” by moving cultural performances out of the context of everyday life and into a public sphere increasingly reliant on mass media (Reference Baudrillard1983). Cultural consumption was modernized and democratized at the same time that excess and transgression were limited by the state's control over both performers and spectators.Footnote ¹¹ While the experimental culture of the 1920s in Russia did not make its way to Central Asia, the new Stalinist forms of spectacular culture were produced there beginning in the 1930s (Petrone Reference Petrone2000).

The spread of Stalinist culture was seen as the “development of culture,” which framed progress as movement toward a more European ideal of form and style, while fostering content that expressed both local flavor and Socialist ideals (Nedoshivin Reference Nedoshivin1971; Samatov Reference Samatov1990; Shermukhamedov Reference Shermukhamedov1961). Cultural development was carried out as part of a larger project of Soviet development, which said that the Central Asian republics were supposed to “leapfrog” across Marx's historical stages of development, moving from feudalism to socialism in one giant drive of industrialization. Although economically the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union lagged somewhat behind the others in many indices of modernization, the progress made in nearly seventy years was striking. While much of the population remained rural, infant mortality was low and literacy rates were high. The urban centers of Central Asia had highly developed, industrial economies and the standard of living was high, with cheap, clean public transportation and a television in many homes. Each of the Central Asian capitals had high-quality institutions of higher education and some, such as Tashkent and Alma Aty, had some of the Soviet Union's finest theater and opera companies. The Soviet Central Asian republics bore little resemblance to the overseas colonies of France and Great Britain, or the “third world” nations of the twentieth century.

In the first decade of Soviet power, nationalism was frowned on as impeding the development of the revolutionary working class. However, Stalin shifted Soviet ideology toward primordialism during the 1930s, celebrating the exotic folkloric cultures of the Soviet peoples while increasingly promoting Russian culture as the first among equals (Martin Reference Martin2001: ch. 2). Over time, the paradigm of the “Russian elder brother” was thoroughly institutionalized, as was the teleology of cultural development for the non-European nationalities. The program to develop the “national” culture of all Soviet peoples used a Russo-centric standard to assess development, but it did include the promotion of “worthy” (non-bourgeois) indigenous cultural forms.Footnote ¹² Eventually, the cultural elites of non-Russian nationalities largely accepted this schema of cultural development, and only after independence was it openly condemned as cultural imperialism. Today, however, even as other aspects of the Soviet past are criticized for being totalitarian or imperialist, cultural elites in Central Asia continue to see the introduction of European cultural forms in the twentieth century as having brought development and progress (Adams Reference Adams2005).

This understanding of the modernization process as a mixture of Russian/Soviet impositions and international progress is related to the way that Soviet institutions translated global culture to the local level, and brought local culture to the global level. Soviet institutions created a strong center-periphery dynamic that resembles the kind of coercive cultural impositions described in accounts of cultural imperialism. The Soviet Union organized its administration according to a geographic hierarchy that ended up structuring the hierarchically nested cultural fields I discuss later in this paper. Soviet governmental and Party administrative units were replicated on various levels, each responsible to the next higher unit, going from neighborhood to city (or collective farm to district) to province to republic to all-Union levels. The latter, in turn, was subject to an emerging global field structured by institutions of the world polity. These administrative structures served to institutionalize cultural production hierarchically and are not unique to the Soviet state, but can also be found in other states that take a strong role in culture production.

During the first fifteen years of independence, two of the Central Asian states embraced capitalism to some degree, while the others relied predominantly on Soviet-style economic control. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan opened their economies to foreign investment and allowed market forces to dominate more of their cultural production. In Kyrgyzstan, which had a mere five million people, this was a huge blow to culture production, since their market was too tiny to attract serious investment. In Kazakhstan, however, with a much larger market of fourteen million people and a more stable economy, both local and international investors began to take an interest in the prospects for Kazakh culture. Uzbekistan, with its twenty-five million citizens, also had a large market, but there the government continued to subsidize and control most culture production, so although culture producers there were still able to survive, they chafed under continuing government restrictions on what and how they created. Turkmenistan, led by an infamously egomaniacal dictator, all but abolished culture production; the government closed the opera and ballet, required permits for all gatherings including weddings, and eliminated most of the institutions of higher education in the republic. Tajikistan, which like Kyrgyzstan had a small population, was also recovering from a civil war, and culture producers there survived mainly on international charity. While much of my argument in this paper applies to the whole of Soviet Central Asia, my arguments about post-Soviet realities will focus mainly on Uzbekistan.

FOLK CULTURE AND THE UNIVERSALIZATION OF PARTICULARISM

From its very beginnings, Soviet ideology was informed by international intellectual traditions encompassing both Marxism and European romantic nationalism. One example of the latter is the Soviet Russian concept of fol'klor, which included a wide range of artistic expression: folk tales, folk dances, traditional dress, oral poetry, ritual songs, wedding rituals, games, masks and puppets, props representing household implements, and the demonstration of everyday life activities associated with contemporary rural life or the everyday life of past, such as spinning yarn or pounding grain (Kuvatov Reference Kuvatov, Aliev and Bulio1979; Nadzhimov Reference Nadzhimov1992). The state-sponsored institutionalization of folk culture in Uzbekistan began in the 1920s with professional dance and music that incorporated folk motifs. In what Terry Martin calls “the cult of narodnost' [the popular]” that began in the mid-1930s, the Soviet state created dozens of institutes devoted to the study and propagation of ethnic folk cultures (Martin Reference Martin2001: 171). The interest was especially keen in folk music culture, which reflected an interest in codifying and propagating particularistic cultures of the non-Russian peoples (Tomoff Reference Tomoff2004).

The production of folk culture is intimately tied with a sense of reflexivity, that one has a folk culture, and that this is something to be not just lived, but also preserved. This reflexive consciousness, what Francois Bourricaud calls the “ethnographic approach” to mankind, is a defining feature of modern societies. It allows us both to become culturally relativistic and “to discover the universality of a principle common to all men” (Bourricaud Reference Bourricaud and Eisenstadt1987: 16). At the same time, reflexivity and relativism make it possible for actors to employ the rules of other cultural fields. Universalism creates externally legitimated discourses and practices that are potentially transposable to any particular context. In the Soviet case, this modern reflexivity was carefully cultivated by the state and by elite networks of intellectuals: ethnographers, musicologists, and ideologists. In the early years of the Soviet era, famous musicians from around Central Asia were invited to their local capitals to record, notate, arrange, harmonize, and research traditional music and, significantly, to study European music. In a cooperative effort between preservationists and professional choreographers heavily influenced by European dance, especially ballet, emblematic dance styles were developed for each region of Uzbekistan and institutionalized as official “national dance” (Doi Reference Doi2002).

Though seen by its Soviet advocates as the modernization and professionalization of culture production, this particular brand of globalization—the standardization of local cultures according to the conventions of European institutions—did indeed have the homogenizing effects on cultural content that many critics of globalization worry about. In this case, the rules of another cultural field were imposed on Central Asian culture producers, coercing them to Europeanize if they wanted to pursue a professional career. For example, European musical notation and tuning was used to record and perform music based on other tonal systems, limiting the ways that content could be expressed and still be considered “professional.” These “official” versions of local culture were then propagated through state educational institutions and professional performances (Djumaev Reference Djumaev and Christensen1993; Tomoff Reference Tomoff2004). Some traditional methods of reproducing the performing arts (such as the guild system) were wiped out early on, and by the end of the Soviet era, other methods (master-apprentice relationships outside the official education system) were rare (Adams Reference Adams2005; Levin Reference Levin1996).

These European aesthetics and modern methods of culture production became widely accepted standards and filtered down to all levels of culture, as in the case of how ballet training and staging before an audience had an impact on how folklore should be performed. The director of an amateur folk ensemble recounted her view of the history of the modernization of folk culture: “What the Soviet choreographer would do was to make the dancers face the audience, ‘Raise your head!’ they would say, ‘It looks better that way.’ They cleaned up the movements, standardized them… . The real Khorezm movement might be like this: [she hunches over and shakes her shoulders], but the Soviets would want them to throw back their shoulders, or something, so that it's no longer the way the people would do it at home, but for the audience. They thought it looked better that way, and now that's how everyone does it because that's how they've seen it done.”Footnote ¹³

Through these kinds of stylistic adjustments and the addition of socialist content, the Soviets were transforming folk cultures both through professionalization (doing it “for the audience”) and through “internationalization,” which Soviet theorists saw as enriching and developing local cultures through the adoption of new forms and genres of culture (Ergeshev Reference Ergeshev1985; Rasulev and Atamuradov Reference Rasulev and Atamuradov1986). This internationalism meant that “communist civilization … turns every national culture into a harmonious unification of the international (the general) and the national (the specific)” (Ergeshev Reference Ergeshev1985, 36). Thus the Soviet instantiation of the universalization of particularism had a built-in hierarchical prestige structure where both aspects of European culture and aspects of modernity (such as “professionalization”) equated with the universal, whereas the local was seen as particular. The Soviet ideal was not that all local cultures should gradually be abandoned for Russian culture, but rather that the methods of production be modernized, and that the “progressive elements of national traditions and folklore” would be united with the “progressive possibilities” of international cultural forms. This would transform “traditional-folk forms of festivity already existing in the republic by the inclusion of techniques and elements of international artistic culture” and enrich “borrowed forms and genres … [with] the folk traditions, arts, and folklore of a particular region” (Konovich Reference Konovich1990: 111).

This “international artistic culture” had more than its fair share of European, and specifically Russian, attributes, but it also increasingly came to be represented by kinds of culture that were “unmarked” by national origin, such as staged folk culture, Olympics-style mass spectacle, and “techno” music. However, this homogenization according to (European) international standards did not just limit the expressive possibilities of Central Asian culture producers, it also gave them the schemas and resources of another cultural field to apply to their own work (Sewell Reference Sewell1992).

FIELDS OF FOLK CULTURE PRODUCTION IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the late 1950s, the Soviet state went from sponsoring the ethnographic recording and preservation of folk cultures to the active “development” of folk culture. This allowed Central Asian folk artists to participate in broader cultural fields, and experience for themselves the universality of their particularism. This was accomplished through their participation in local, regional, national, and international folk competitions. Locally, folklore groups participated in “socialist competition” much as factory brigades did, in order to encourage productivity and to provide the motivation to work harder. However, increasingly these competitions were internationalized, as Soviet-sponsored folk festivals involved socialist and underdeveloped countries within their sphere of influence. These friendship festivals were one of the few places (along with sister-city agreements, youth festivals, and the Olympics) where there was a cross-pollination of cultures across the Iron Curtain. From the perspective of world polity theory, it is just these kinds of international institution-building activities that form the basis of “world culture,” contributing not just to a universal recognition of the importance of folk cultures, but also to the universalization of values such as human and minority rights (Boli and Lechner Reference Boli and Lechner2005).

The participation of Central Asian folk artists in these competitions was not just at the initiative of the Soviet state eager to paint a picture of the joyous life of its happy minorities. This process was also driven by the agency of ordinary people who were increasingly experiencing their lives through a modern subjectivity and who were coming to see the value of marketing their culture in geographically expanding fields. For example, the Besh Karsak (Five Claps) ensemble from Uzbekistan's Samarkand region was formed in the mid-1950s at the initiative of local musicians who wanted to revive some of the old songs indigenous to the region. In our interview, the leaders of Besh Karsak explained that they based their songs on “the old people's memories,” though for competitions and festivals they changed the words to praise the Communist Party and Lenin. Thus we can immediately see how moving between cultural fields facilitates the diversification of content: the old content was used to develop new content, and though the new content was what provided access to the higher-level cultural field, the old content was propagated locally and re-legitimized by its institutionalization (as the modern practice of “the preservation of tradition”) in the newly prestigious, award-winning local folklore ensemble. In the local field of culture production, directors of folklore ensembles now had the resources to move into a higher status position and to compete with other cultural entrepreneurs according to the new criteria of professionalism and socialist internationalism.

Besh Karsak was one of these successful folklore ensembles and participated in some of the first folklore festivals in the Soviet Union, traveling to Moscow in 1958. In our interview, the ensemble leaders clearly articulated the “social action” orientation of these performances by repeatedly stressing that their purpose was not just preservation but to “display our own culture.”Footnote ¹⁴ Soviet folklore groups certainly served local purposes as creative outlets or as means to preserve traditions, but they were also part of a conscious crafting of local identities for presentation before non-local audiences. Participating in this universal cultural form allowed folklorists to communicate the specificity of their own culture to interlocutors beyond the local or even regional field of culture production. The process of participation in national and international folk competitions in some ways was in conflict with preservationist impulses, since groups would change the lyrics to fit with Soviet ideology and modify their performances to be more professional, and stereotypically colorful or ethnic in order to please judges. Nevertheless, folklore entrepreneurs were motivated by the desire to legitimate the study and performance of folk culture in the local cultural field, and it is the rules of the broader global cultural field (which emphasizes cultural preservation and served as a counterweight to the Europeanizing drive of Soviet cultural development) that allowed folk artists to make this bid in their struggle for legitimation.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the idea of ethnic sovereignty and cultural preservation as a way to counter the destructive effects of modernization and imperialism united elites around the globe in a moral consensus: ethnic cultures are precious and should be treasured. However, for this ideology to effectively spread it required institutions that would legitimate these local cultures at a supra-local level, thereby creating a means to translate the value of cultural capital from one geographic field to another. In the 1960s and 1970s, one could receive a degree in folklore at a Central Asian institute of culture, and the “department of popular creativity” of Soviet Republic Ministries of Culture oversaw a huge expansion in the network of Soviet “houses of culture,” which, among other things, employed these accredited folklore specialists in organizing amateur folklore ensembles. By 1990, there were about 1,300 folklore-ethnographic ensembles involving 30,000 participants in Uzbekistan, and these groups were expected to participate in republic- and nation-wide activities. Groups who merely performed at local occasions were criticized in Ministry documents for shortcomings such as not raising their level of professional development by attending seminars.Footnote ¹⁵

This professionalization and standardization process was propagated in the post-Soviet era as well. An example of this is askia, an improvisational verbal battle of wits associated with the subculture of Central Asia's Ferghana Valley region. Askia was incorporated as part of official Soviet Uzbek national culture through the institutions of houses of culture and international contests, both of which transformed the traditional art by placing it in the frame of a modern cultural form such as the televised competition, or a staged, lip-synced performance for a festival. These performances retain the content (double-entendres, plays on words) of the living tradition of askia as it can be found in other venues even today (private parties, teahouses), but when put in the context of a mass spectacle for example, the performance is inevitably transformed. The performers stand on stage in front of an audience of ten thousand spectators who are seated in bleachers and clearly separated from the performers; the jokes are carefully scripted and recorded onto a soundtrack, so that on stage the performers are merely mouthing the words and simulating the laughter; and the performance is one of a set of pieces representing the culture of the Ferghana Valley region. This, in turn, is part of a mass spectacle that required weeks of rehearsals and about a million dollars in government funding.

As with the Europeanization of Central Asian music before it, the “spectacularization” of folklore had a more dramatic effect on the form of performance than on content. In syncretic cultural products, form becomes the structure of power itself, the choice of which echoes the prestige and priorities of modern, global culture. The main trend in Central Asia's performing arts in the late Soviet era was a continuing institutionalization of global cultural forms that incorporated elements from both European culture and traditional Central Asian performance. Indigenous performance forms were institutionalized to a lesser degree than European forms, and they were often incorporated within larger “modern” forms such as national and international folk-life competitions or mass spectacle. Clearly, in this case the globalization of culture took place through the universalization of particular cultures rather than through some sort of erasure of particularism. However, the universalization process imposed standardized versions of local content and caused significant changes in cultural form that have shifted creative energies from improvisation to predictability and from everyday life to performance.

This account of the universalization of particularism is somewhat different from critical structuralist or cultural imperialist accounts that assume the outcome of globalization is the homogenization of content and the uprooting of local values, though that certainly did occur (for example, the transformation of gender norms, the growth of professionalization). This account is also at odds with the dominant analytical approach in the literature on the globalization of culture: the study of cultural flows and hybridization (Appadurai Reference Appadurai and Featherstone1990; Friedman Reference Friedman and Featherstone1990; Hannerz Reference Hannerz and Featherstone1990; Reference Hannerz and King1997; Pieterse Reference Pieterse, Mike Featherstone and Robertson1995; Robertson Reference Robertson, Mike Featherstone and Robertson1995). This is because the administrative-territorial structure of the Soviet Union shared an important feature with other empires (as well as with many contemporary states): a strong center-periphery dynamic.Footnote ¹⁶ This center-periphery structure limited the possibilities for cultural flow until the end of the Soviet Union, and even now has left a large imprint on how cultural fields are structured in Central Asia. Central state control meant that folk performances were carefully controlled activities that did not reflect playful syncretism across national forms on the part of culture producers. In fact, the mixing of cultures was and still is looked on by many culture producers as abhorrent and destructive to allegedly “pure” cultural traditions, though the ubiquitous mixing of styles is obvious to outside observers (Adams Reference Adams2005; n.d.; Doi Reference Doi2002).

While there were temporary exchanges (e.g., business trips, cultural exhibitions), there was little permanent movement laterally among the cultural elites of Soviet republics and Eastern Bloc nations (e.g., migration, artistic training). A Georgian costume was not seen on an Uzbek performer, unless that performer was supposed to be representing Georgian national culture, as occurred in a part of a Tashkent holiday parade representing the Soviet friendship of peoples. Just as one could not fly from Tashkent to Tbilisi without going through Moscow, cultural borrowing had to go the same route, since Moscow set the standards for what constituted “international” culture. Given that national cultures were to be “developed” through internationalization (i.e., conformity to Russian and global cultural forms while retaining local color), it was not acceptable for the cultures of the less-developed periphery to borrow from one another. The producers of various folk and national cultures of the Soviet republics did not compete with each other for their positions in the broader field of Soviet culture production—they all occupied the same subordinate position. Competition with each other in the terms of the rules of their own local fields did nothing to change their status, while “development” and “internationalization” could raise the status of particular artists relative to others on the Soviet field. The Soviet state set up a system of nested cultural fields in a way that made the national cultural capital of the Soviet peoples a currency without a means of exchange. Artists found no profit in adopting the culture of another Soviet republic, but it did make sense for them to increase the value of their own cultural capital by translating it into the currency of the Soviet Union or the global marketplace.

So what was the motivation of culture producers at the center of the Soviet center-periphery dynamic? Why, aside from an ideology of internationalism, were the players on the Soviet-level field of culture interested in translating “national” and “local” cultural capital to the global level? Here we can turn to Crane's argument about globalization as inter-state competition for legitimacy and prestige in the later decades of the Soviet era, when Soviet culture producers became increasingly attentive to global norms and to the public relations benefits of developing folk cultures as objects for consumption. In their competition with the West for the “hearts and minds” of third-world peoples exploited by capitalism and imperialism, performances featuring folk and “national” culture showcased the Soviet Union's allegedly more respectful approach to local cultures. Performers of national or folk culture from Central Asia were sent on tour to Eastern Bloc countries about once a year (Uzbekistan Central State Archive f. 2487 r. 3 y. 4255). This frequent travel served not just to keep the artists happy and motivated, but beginning in the 1960s, they were also an advertisement to third-world countries that were candidates for the Soviet global sphere of influence. Globalization theorists tend to see capitalist markets as the driving force of cultural exchange, though in the Soviet case cultural exchange was also a form of public relations. In the Cold War competition between the capitalist West and the Soviet Union for the allegiance of post-colonial Asia and Africa, the flourishing ethnic cultures of Central Asia were often used as a selling point for the Soviet model of development.

Since the consumption of Soviet folk cultures was based more on status than on market competition, we can clearly see the growing importance of non-material forms of capital in the global cultural field. Local cultures gained prestige as they adapted to the rules of play (such as professionalization) on the Soviet and global cultural fields. This is not to say that material rewards played no part in the motivation of folklore performers, and I attended several folklore competitions in the 1990s where the prizes were boom boxes and other consumer goods. Rather, my point is that the form of folklore itself derives its value in relation to a global cultural field that is structured as much by shared cultural schemas as by the broader field of power.

PARTICULARIZING UNIVERSALISM THROUGH GLOBAL CULTURAL FORMS

I have discussed the propagation of the value of folk cultures and their institutionalization as an example of the universalization of particularism, but in practice, it is difficult to separate that process from the particularization of universalism. One example of folk culture that nicely exemplifies the interpenetration of universalism and particularism comes from the remote Boysun region of Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan's Boysun Folklore-Ethnographic Ensemble is an example of folk culture entrepreneurs who one might say have won the game on the global cultural field. In 2001, UNESCO designated the “Cultural Space of the Boysun District” a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This designation incorporated the Boysun Ensemble in an international program designed to “safeguard, transmit and revitalize this extremely precious asset of the human cultural treasury and to maintain the world's cultural diversity” (UNESCO “Proclamation of Masterpieces”; UNESCO “Uzbekistan—Information Related to Intangible Cultural Heritage”). By being recognized as a unique instance of a universal human culture, the culture of the Boysun region brought folklore's universalization full circle back to particularism: the particularization of universalism means that one's own culture (not just European culture) is recognized as having its universal aspects.

In the era of independence, Central Asian culture producers found various ways to particularize universal cultural forms, such as promoting symphonic orchestras made up of folk instruments or national holiday performances deliberately modeled on Olympics-style ceremonies (Adams n.d.; Toda Reference Toda2003). The particularization of universalism was not about the reproduction of traditional culture through universal cultural forms (as in an ethnographic film of a local folk practice), but rather, it was the process by which local elites adapt universalistic values and practices to the conditions of the local cultural field. The main example of this process that I analyze here is the way that Olympics-style mass spectacles have been adapted for the celebration of two of Uzbekistan's main national holidays: Independence Day, and Navro'z, the spring equinox “new year” holiday. The producers of Uzbekistan's national holidays used Olympics-style mass spectacle to showcase both particularistic and universalistic aspects of contemporary national culture. Spectacle numbers had both regional folk dances and military bands, both maqqam (traditional classical music) and pop music influenced by Turkish, Iranian, and Spanish dance-club riffs. The content of these numbers included all sorts of universalistic themes (the praise of nature, patriotism, success in international sport, material well-being), as well as themes grounded in a particular linking of geography to history or culture (the medieval scientist and ruler Ulughbek, the architectural monuments of Samarkand, values of hospitality, traditional songs). Over the course of these ninety-plus-minute Olympics-style outdoor mass spectacles involving a cast of thousands and costing upward of a million dollars per show, Uzbekistan's cultural elites tried to craft a vision of national identity that adequately communicates who they are to an imagined audience of global society.Footnote ¹⁷ This globalized imagined community is a symptom of a broader globalization process, which Appadurai characterizes as “a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes. The world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life” (Reference Appadurai1996, 31).

Scholars of the Olympic Movement have shown that the Olympics serve as an important element in a country's orientation toward global society (Roche Reference Roche2000: 7). Olympics-style ceremonies, like rock music and other global cultural forms, are seen by culture producers around the world as proper frames within which a modern nation celebrates and propagates its unique identity (Regev Reference Regev2000). Such was the case in Uzbekistan, which, unlike other Central Asian states that had closer ties to Russian culture, jettisoned the Soviet way of celebrating national holidays in favor of a more universal cultural form. Soviet holidays such as the Anniversary of the Revolution and Victory Day were celebrated with parades that had more or less of a militaristic quality, though holidays such as May Day also had a festive and colorful element. Post-Soviet holidays in Uzbekistan, on the other hand, had a small military component and largely eliminated the parade element, opting instead for a stage-and-audience format.

As with the examples of the introduction and development of folklore, the genre of Olympics-style spectacle came to Uzbekistan on the initiative of elites working through Soviet-level institutions to translate global culture into local practices. The 1980 Olympics in Moscow and the subsequent “Hollywood” Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984 set new standards for the level of spectacle in the opening and closing ceremonies. To fill out the portrait of this global network, it should be noted that the Los Angeles ceremonies were directed by Ric Birch, an Australian, who went on to do such projects as orchestrating Singapore's twenty-fifth anniversary through mass spectacle (Entertainers 2007). In addition to the usual ceremonial entry of the athletes, lighting of the torch, and bidding farewell to the athletes, the Moscow ceremonies (and Los Angeles was surely not to be out-done, especially in these tit-for-tat boycotted games) included mass gymnastic displays, fireworks, entire sections of the stadium holding colored cards to form animated pictures, and Misha, the games' mascot, in the form of a huge inflatable bear who waved goodbye to the crowds before floating wistfully away.

In order for global cultural fields to affect the choices that culture producers make, the agents in question must have at least a subjective perception that they are somehow interacting with other participants in a global field of culture production. The Moscow Olympics served as the direct link between global cultural forms and contemporary mass spectacle in Uzbekistan when this spectacular way of orchestrating live performance was imported to Uzbekistan from Moscow by the director of the 1980 ceremonies, who was also in charge of Tashkent's two thousand-year anniversary celebration a few years later. He worked with a team of local directors that included Rustam Hamidov, the lead director of Uzbekistan's contemporary national holiday spectacles. Hamidov was chosen precisely because of his experience with this genre, which was apparently seen as the ideal cultural form to express Uzbekistan's new national identity.

The Olympics are a tightly controlled, seemingly de-politicized arena for the competition of nation-states, and the government's choice of Olympics-style spectacle relates both to the state's need to control cultural expression and desire to appear as if it were conforming to international models of nationhood. Hamidov, in fact, was able to actively participate in Uzbekistan's learning from global models: during the preparation for Uzbekistan's fifth anniversary, right in the middle of the most intensive rehearsal period, the holiday's organizational committee sent him to Atlanta during the 1996 summer Olympic Games so he could get ideas about how to make Uzbekistan's Independence Day celebration more closely resemble its role model. The impact was not dramatic, but it does provide a concrete example of the more mundane aspect of the particularization of universalism: the mastery of technology. The most notable change Hamidov made in the 1996 Independence Day show because of his Atlanta visit was to use “torches” made of jaggedly cut fabric in the colors of the Olympic rings and “fueled” by fans from below.

The ideology behind the spread of this cultural form is very different from what justified the institutionalization of folklore. The Olympics (“a festival of human unity,” as Coubertin called his venture) is the ultimate universal cultural form, and the genre of performance seen in its opening and closing ceremonies is unmarked by any specific national culture. This made it ideal for the purposes of Uzbekistan's cultural elite. By staging their national holidays as Olympics-style spectacles, they were able to demonstrate (both domestically and abroad) world-class technical proficiency while at the same time showcasing state-sanctioned elements of the ideology and culture of Uzbekistan.

The audience that the producers of these spectacles had in mind was not just a local one, but also that of “the world,” or the international peers of Uzbekistan's cultural elite. As very few culture producers could afford to tour or broadcast internationally anymore, this was largely an imagined audience, though an influential one, especially in the choice of cultural forms. In 1996, the holiday spectacle's directors would regularly admonish performers to work harder since the whole world would be watching them, even though, in reality, the broadcast probably reached few households outside of Uzbekistan. Another holiday producer said, “[This year's Independence Day spectacle] had a lot more about ties with other countries, in the audience and in the performance. Now Uzbekistan has this status. Earlier it was very difficult for us to have such international connections. And our dancers are performing all these dances from around the world. The arts are the best way to communicate with other nations because it's understood right away.”Footnote ¹⁸

Imagining a world audience for the spectacle also affected what content was deemed acceptable by the government. Spectacle producers were extremely self-conscious about the image of Uzbekistan they were projecting, and this resulted in a degree of homogenization of content. But they adopted a set of standards consciously chosen by them, and not necessarily those of Russian or Western culture. The imagining of not just a generalized global audience, but also a more narrow “significant other” such as other Muslim countries, as their interlocutors demonstrated the way in which multiple fields at the supra-national level shaped the choices of the spectacle producers. One director talked to me about how a dance he worked on for the Navro'z holiday spectacle was artistically interesting for him, but it had to be cut because of concerns about how it would play in different countries. However, he said he understood why the dance dramatizing pre-Muslim Zoroastrian rituals was cut from the final program after the government's review of the dress rehearsal: “[The dance] was interesting in and of itself, but since different viewers would see it, since it would be transmitted by television and tapes would go to different countries, it was an issue of Uzbekistan being a Muslim country, a Muslim state … There are these political nuances. ‘What are they worshipping? Where are they going with this?’ So that we don't give the wrong impression to our neighboring countries, to Muslim governments.”Footnote ¹⁹

The producers of Uzbekistan's national holiday spectacles treated them as if they were what Roche calls “mega-events,” large-scale cultural events which have a dramatic character, mass appeal, and international significance (Roche Reference Roche2000: 1). Although Uzbekistan's national holidays had no international significance, this is not how their producers perceived them. For their creators, these holiday events are, like mega-events, “key occasions in which nations … construct and present images of themselves for recognition in relation to other nations and ‘in the eyes of the world,’ … in which national ‘tradition’ and ‘community’… [are] invented and imagined not just by and for leaders and citizens … but also by and for the publics of other nations” (ibid.: 6). The participation of Uzbekistan's cultural elites in Olympics-style productions legitimated their nation-building project within the terms of the global cultural field. This case of the particularization of universalism indicates the importance of the orientations of culture producers toward an international audience, even as they adapt universal cultural forms to suit particular cultural and political needs. Internationally recognizable global cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle are useful to elites who wish to demonstrate their culture's universality as well as its uniqueness. When combined with “national” or ethnic content, these forms are powerful vehicles for communicating the particularity of a local culture within the universality of international culture.

CONCLUSION: NESTED FIELDS AND CULTURAL FLOWS

In the post-Soviet era, the center-periphery dynamic persisted in Central Asia, but increasingly, cultural flows disrupted the neat hierarchical ordering of fields that I described earlier. Beyond the field of each republic, there were now multiple fields (Soviet, Muslim, Asian) on which to play, in addition to more direct access to the global field. This resulted in the increased application of non-local prestige structures to local culture, diversifying culture production at the local level. Nonetheless, in tracking these lateral cultural flows through institutions, we can still draw on the idea of nested fields to understand why, for example, some artists may not find success in their cultural borrowing, not just because the rules of the local field do not favor them (“electric guitar music isn't to the taste of people around here”), but because the rules at the next higher field also put them at a disadvantage (“electric guitar music is less cultured than acoustic guitar music”). This general model can be applied to regions in geographically heterogeneous countries as well as to countries that were formerly part of a larger grouping such as a multinational state or an empire. However, even the cultural field of the imperial metropole is subject to the rules of the global cultural field, and groups occupying otherwise subordinate positions in the intermediate cultural field can draw upon the status they receive from the global reward structure.

By emphasizing these center-periphery dynamics I do not mean to say that globalization is just imperialism writ large; indeed, in order to be considered truly universal, a cultural form's cultural-territorial origins must be relatively unmarked. The cultural form of the folklore ensemble is not marked as specifically European, even if we can trace its genealogy to Europe through Russia. Even less marked is the cultural form of the Olympics-style spectacle. Over time we can see that what might have been called cultural imperialism was transformed into a process of universalization, with the cultural forms being adopted showing less and less of a pedigree in a specific European heritage. As predicted by cultural flow models, contemporary Central Asian pop music borrows more from Turkey and Iran than from England or Germany (as is more the case in Russia, for example). And while Central Asian young people consume American rap music where hip-hop style stands for American culture (e.g., Eminem), they also produce their own rap music where hip-hop is understood as a universal cultural form (e.g., the group Bolalar; see also Kaplan Reference Kaplan, Diana Crane and Kawasaki2002). If there is a single center of the global cultural field, it is not one that can be conceived in strictly geographical terms; perhaps it is no more than an imagined center called “modernity” that is reproduced in specific locations around the world. However, center-periphery dynamics do persist in the form of nation-states with strong central governments. When we look at other, non-imperial center-periphery relationships, we see homogenizing tendencies similar to those noted by the proponents of cultural imperialist models of globalization (Foster Reference Foster1991). In Southeast Asia, for example, the performing arts are often commissioned by government institutions that prefer the performances to be a bland, homogenized version of national culture, or at least recognizable elements of local cultures (Lindsay Reference Lindsay, Diana Crane and Kawasaki2003). It is, in large part, the desire to communicate across cultures that drives these aspects of the homogenization of culture.

I have argued that the adoption of global forms is often rooted in the communicative goals of elites. As their modernist reflexivity increased, Central Asian culture producers adopted international cultural forms in order to communicate to an international audience and to compete for status with others in a global cultural field. Seen apart from the dynamics of capitalist markets, globalization becomes a phenomenon of modernizing nation-states and their elites: syncretism takes place through the choice of global forms to propagate local content; centers (but not necessarily European centers) try to dominate and transform peripheries; peripheries draw on global models to enhance their status relative to other peripheries; and states encourage cultural flows outside of market relations as a form of public relations. In order to give specificity to this approach to cultural globalization, future research should focus on studying culture from the perspective of the culture producer. We also need to avoid making assumptions about values and practices automatically following the globalization of cultural forms. By analytically separating cultural form from cultural content, we can see how culture producers use universal cultural forms to express particularistic cultural content, thus legitimating both the modernity and the tradition within their culture. Globalization does change traditional culture, often in ways that disempower local communities. But the globalization of culture also provides new tools through which people express authentic lived culture. To better understand this aspect of globalization, we need to further investigate how multiple prestige structures diversify content and enable culture producers to exert agency in new ways.