Theories of hybridization

In one sense, “explaining” hybridization is far beyond the scope of this book. After all, even accounting for absorption, rejection, or assertion alone, in an empirically grounded fashion, requires a truly intimidating amount of cross-cultural and comparative research. One might, of course, reduce each strand to a small sub-set of concrete referents in order to simplify the analytical problem, but only at the expense of eliding the interconnectedness among ideas and practices which is so essential to globalization and the social response it engenders. Moreover, as the above discussion suggests and as the remainder of this book will argue in greater detail, the distinct strands of hybridization are best understood as interrelated, meaning that any effort to comprehend each separately is doomed to failure. This, I would suggest, is because there is something truly foundational about the dialectic described by the patterned responses to globalization – which explains why the pattern recurs so widely all over the world. That is, the combination of absorption, rejection, and assertion represents a basic imperative of national identity formation, which consists of becoming an integral part of global society while at the same time remaining unique. And yet, this process operates at such a high level of abstraction that falsification becomes virtually impossible: alternative explanations are not only equally plausible, but are equally supportable in general terms. Attempting to explain the entire pattern of hybridization thus seems bound to lead to rather bland theoretical insights.