Abstract
Globalization is commonly defined as time–space compression, a view that relies on an idea of ‘empty’ time and space where these dimensions have been stripped of local meanings by abstraction and standardization. This notion is incompatible with the globalization of culture literature that suggests that these processes do not erase local meanings but rather mix local and global culture in a process Roland Robertson calls ‘glocalization.’ However, glocalization research tends to look at culture within the bounds of time and space, without problematizing changes to these dimensions themselves. By examining the local appropriation of global soccer (football) in a rural Ecuadorian community called Chota, this article bridges these perspectives and shows that globalization actively reconfigures the meanings associated to time and space.
Introduction
The literature on globalization is marked by two themes that have passed each other like ships in the night. The first sees globalization as the intensification of global connections where images, ideas, capital, and people move faster and farther than ever before (Appadurai, 1996; Giddens, 1990; Holton, 2005; Robertson, 1995). Put another way, globalization is the reconfiguration or compression of space and time. The second approach looks to culture, focusing on whether globalization means the creation of a hegemonic, homogeneous global society (Barber, 1996; Ritzer, 2010) or whether it makes visible and sharpens local differences (Bairner, 2001; Pao-Min, 2000). Many now agree that the answer is neither, that globalization produces an interpenetration of global and local culture (Hannerz, 1996; Holton, 2005; Robertson, 1995; Roudometof, 2003). This process is alternatively called ‘glocalization,’ ‘hybridization,’ or ‘syncretization,’ referring to a blending of global and local meaning structures that creates a new, ‘glocal’ culture.
These two approaches seem complementary: the first describes a rapidly changing stage of action while the second examines culture within this stage. However, both have contradictory understandings of what this stage actually looks like. Despite extensive literature that calls time and space cultural constructs (for example, Arias, 2010; Durkheim and Mauss, 1963; Gieryn, 2000; Munn, 1992), the first perspective treats time and space only as objective realities. Writers in this vein speak of temporal and spatial standardization and abstraction away from local idiosyncrasies, going against findings in glocalization research that show how local culture is rearranged rather than replaced by global standards. Hence, a more nuanced understanding of how the meanings of time and space are changed is called for. So far glocalization scholars have not answered this call, focusing instead on how culture is transformed within the bounds of time and space. What is more, some of these authors implicitly treat these bounds as relatively stable despite arguments of ‘acceleration,’ ‘compression,’ and ‘stretching.’ In other words, each approach has a slightly different understanding of time and space, even though they each have the tools to potentially enrich the other. This article is an attempt to bridge this gap. By looking at an empirical case where a global cultural product is adapted to a local context – the glocalization of soccer in a rural Ecuadorian community – I show that globalization involves a restructuring of space and time not only as objective dimensions of social life but also as subjective, meaningful constructs.
Literature review
‘Glocalization’ or ‘global localization’ refers to a practical and semiotic exchange between the global and the local, a two-way although generally uneven conversation (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009: 40). This conversation has two components: first, the global spread of cultural objects, concepts, and relations and second, ‘the selective incorporation, absorption, decoding, reinterpretation and, ultimately, particularization of [this global]’ (Roudometof, 2003: 45). In a sense, glocalization is the translation of global culture into the local language, the creation of a new ‘glocal’ culture. Nearly two decades ago Roland Robertson wrote: ‘there has been little attempt to connect the discussion of time-and-space to the thorny issue of universalism-and-particularism’ (Robertson, 1995: 26). This critique is still valid today as scholars of culture tend to overlook changes to the stage on which global–local conversations take place. Many of these works treat the local as a static cultural container and provide rich descriptions of glocalization within this container, looking at cultural production, consumption, mass media, and performances (Cho, 2009; Condry, 2006; Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009; Kraidy, 1999; Silk, 1999). However, changes associated to the meaningful bounds of the container remain underexplored. Noteworthy exceptions are the works of Banu Helvacioğlu (2000), Terence Lee (2006), and Jan Nijman (1999) that examine how meanings associated to neighborhoods, suburbs, and cities change with their increasing participation in the global plane, or Robert Hassan’s book on how globalization creates a new network society with alternative interpretations of time (Hassan, 2003). Still, while these works add to our cultural understanding of time and space, they are nonetheless limited to the field of urban sociology and do not tease out broader conclusions about globalization. In his own writings Robertson initiates a more explicit discussion on time and space by examining how globalization links localities or ‘invents’ new meaningful local spaces (Robertson, 1995: 35). With this article I pick up where he left off by examining how the meanings of time and space change in glocalization processes.
If glocalization scholarship is characterized by attention to specificity and meaning, that on space and time for the most part subscribes to a neo-Weberian project that sees meanings stripped from social life by technology, abstraction, and dislocation. Probably the most influential of these theorists is Anthony Giddens. Giddens argues that globalization is about ‘time–space distanciation’ or the tensions between ‘local involvements’ and ‘interaction across distance’ (Giddens, 1990: 63). This argument is historical: Giddens writes that in pre-modern periods, time and space were intricately linked so that ‘no one could tell the time of day without reference to other socio-spatial markers: “when” was almost universally … connected with “where” ’ (Giddens, 1990: 17). Modernity, however, brought about mechanisms that ‘expressed a uniform dimension of “empty” time, quantified in such a way as to permit the precise designation of “zones” of the day (e.g. the “working day”)’ (Giddens, 1990: 17). Time became independent from space, and space was similarly ‘emptied’ and separated from ‘the physical setting of social activity as situated geographically’ (Giddens, 1990: 18). For Giddens, modernity is essentially about draining time and space of their meaningful local particularities and globalization is the consequent ‘stretching’ of these dimensions (Giddens, 1990: 64).
This emptying and extending process creates a ‘runaway world’ or the sense of living in a risky, de-traditionalized planet where identity loses its stability and security (Giddens, 2003). Giddens argues that social relations become ‘disembedded’ as social processes no longer need to be bound by space and time – a board of directors can instantly effect changes in distant factories or local revolutionaries find foreign support, circumventing local power structures. Occasionally, these disembedded social relations are ‘reembedded’ into local settings ‘so as to pin them down (however partially or transitorily) to local conditions of time and place’ (Giddens, 1990: 80). Thus, multinational corporations collaborate with local businesses and global celebrities drop into local theaters. However, Giddens contends, this modern ‘place’ is fundamentally different to pre-modern places. It has become ‘increasingly phantasmagoric’ in that it is thoroughly shaped by distant, abstracted social forces (Giddens, 1990: 19). Giddens, therefore, envisions a volatile world where social relations are freed from spatial and temporal constraints, where time and space are emptied of local particularities, and where the local is rendered ghost-like.
Giddens’s description of globalization is drastically different to that put forth by glocalization scholars. While the latter focus on the cultural dialogue between the global and the local, Giddens suggests that the very stage on which this conversation takes place has objectively changed. When Giddens calls local place – and by extension its time and space – ‘phantasmagoric’ he contradicts glocalization research’s empirical findings that suggest a ‘thick’ local culture that shapes how actors engage with the global. If this is so, can time and space really be all that ‘empty’? Is local place really ‘phantasmagoric’? Or is it perhaps meaningful and solid for local actors? Could the bounds of time and space themselves be ‘glocalized’? In short, can we develop an understanding of how time and space play out in globalization that is more sensitive to meanings?
These are the questions I address in this article. I argue in the familiar way that in processes of cultural globalization, local actors are in dialogue with global culture. Yet I also claim that time and space are meaningful local dimensions through which time/space distanciation is filtered and comes to have effects. By looking empirically at how soccer is enjoyed in a rural Ecuadorian community, I show that global culture entering a local context must first breach the local symbolic boundaries of time and space. Local actors, in turn, establish a new imagined time–space environment, one that combines global and local elements. Consequently, globalization not only involves an exchange of cultural products but is a re-evaluation of the very stage on which culture is activated. This is not an empty Cartesian theater, but rather an imagined world of meaningful time and space.
Research site and methods
Chota valley, Ecuador is a remote rural setting populated almost exclusively by Afro-Ecuadorians. Most glocalization research focuses on developed countries and urban centers. Not only does this exclude the majority of the planet from the knowledge base – 49% of the world population lives in rural areas and 82% live in developing regions (United Nations, n.d.) – it also conducts research in spaces where dense connections of exchange between the local and the global have existed historically, complicating the works’ analysis and findings. As Ahmed Gurnah notes, cultural exchange presumes the pre-existence of cultural ‘common denominators,’ most of which are ‘continuous and fragmented’ and are ‘very difficult to isolate and remove by analytical surgery’ (Gurnah, 1997: 123). Hence, within the urban settings of developed countries, studying the globalization of culture is messy as one cannot easily determine what occurs as a result of specific global processes and what corresponds to historical trends or cultural similarities. The few works that do look at settings with weaker connections to the global core have shown that local actors have much more cultural agency than the overall literature suggests (Fair, 2004; Jonsson, 2003; Oduro-Frimpong, 2009). Following their example, I examine a rural setting in a developing country, paying attention to local agency.
Chota is a small community of approximately 14,000 people (SIISE, 2004: 34). The valley has no geopolitical delimitation but is nonetheless identified as a bounded place with a distinctive class, racial, and cultural makeup. Because of this lack of political recognition, there is no demographic information specific to Chota available. However, if we analyze the larger parishes the settlements belong to we can have a general idea of what life in Chota and its surroundings is like. 1
By far, people’s most frequent occupation in this area is agriculture (48.88%), followed by small-scale commercial activities (10.56%) (INEC, 2010). This is an area with low levels of education; by 2010, 70% of the population had only finished sixth grade or lower (INEC, 2010). It is also a historically poor space: in 2001, 52% of households did not have a shower and 49% did not have a toilet: they either shared a bathroom (12.22%), had a latrine (11.46%), or had nothing (25.69%) (INEC, 2001).
By 2010, the situation had improved somewhat: now 58% of houses have a shower and, more significantly, 74% have a toilet (INEC, 2010). Still, Chota and its surroundings remain underdeveloped. Almost half of the houses are found on dirt rather than paved streets, 21% have dirt floors, one-fourth do not have access to running water, and one-third do not have access to public sewage (INEC, 2010). However, like most of the country, almost all of these homes have electricity: in 2001, 92% of homes (INEC, 2001) and by 2010, 98% (INEC, 2010). Although the census does not ask how many people own televisions, in my research I found that most households had one. It is through these televisions that people are able to access global soccer amid their marginalization. 2
Chota’s people are mostly Afro-Ecuadorian, so it is important to understand the country’s racial composition. Ecuadorians define themselves as Mestizo (a ‘mix’ between white and Indigenous, approximately 72% of the population), Indigenous (7%), White (6%), or Afro-Ecuadorian (7%) (INEC, 2010). Ecuador is strongly divided along these racial lines: a national survey revealed that about three-quarters of the population is racially prejudiced, especially towards Afro-descendants (SIISE, 2005: 62). This clearly isolates Afro-Ecuadorians and people from Chota – Choteños, as they call themselves – are no exception.
Afro-descendants were brought to Chota as slaves in 1599. Slavery was abolished in 1851 making way for a sharecropping system that was dismantled in 1964 (Ribadeneira, 2001). Up until then most Choteños had never left the valley or had any formal education, and only for the past 20 years have Choteños had access to the media (Pabón, 2007). Migration is still limited, only 3% of people from this area older than 18 currently live elsewhere within the country or abroad (INEC, 2010). Contact with the world, therefore, is a new phenomenon and in many ways soccer has helped accelerate this contact. Many young Choteños have become successful soccer players nationally or abroad, especially after Ecuador’s qualification to the 2002 FIFA World Cup with a team that included several players from the area. Many of these players have since invested in the valley’s material, social, and cultural development. Soccer has played an important role in bringing Chota into a globalizing world, making it ideal for the study of glocalization.
In June and July 2010, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 Choteños. I talked to 10 women and 15 men between the ages of 18 to 80 and with varying degrees of interest in soccer (see Appendices 1 and 2). I wanted to access as diverse a group as possible so to tease out ideas held in common. This way I can provide a thick description of Chota’s overall imagined space and time.
The glocalization of space
Chota is located on the intersection of the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi, in Ecuador’s northern highlands. Steep mountains confine this wide, arid, largely empty valley. Next to the large sugar cane plantations that historically employed many Choteños, one sees small patches of farmland growing beans or avocado. A thin, winding river cuts through the valley and most of Chota’s settlements gather around it. These settlements are composed of small cement houses haphazardly arranged. There is hardly any distance between residences, providing little space for streets or public areas. This makes the highway a public space where people dry beans or play soccer.
Space, however, is more than an assortment of material things, it is also meaningful. From my interviews, I determine that Choteños ascribe four main codes of meaning to their valley: Chota is natural and healthy, poor, racially homogeneous, and organized along strong communal and familial bonds. Choteños’s depiction of their space is usually contrasted to ‘the city,’ an abstraction of all cities. This contrast is not exclusive to Chota; as Raymond Williams has shown, powerful opposing ideas about these spaces have characterized western civilization. The country is usually considered ‘a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue [but also] backwardness, ignorance, limitation’ (Williams, 1973: 1). Similar ideas have developed in Chota, where there is an emphasis on the wholesome, poor, black, and communal nature of the valley.
Chota as natural
Most Choteños are farmers. As Elisa explains ‘here agriculture is the main thing, everyone works the land.’ Although a limited variety of crops grow in Chota, Justo states that ‘this land is so beautiful, you never need anything because you take two steps and you have the river, another two steps and you have your crops.’ Michele describes life in Chota as ‘wonderful’ because ‘there is always a lot of sun.’ Esmero believes that ‘life here is healthier, the food is fresher … Food goes from the land to the table, not like in cities where things are processed.’ This makes Chota a wholesome space: according to Alberto ‘we don’t have drugs, marihuana, none of that has come here … People here live with a healthy mind and heart.’ Chota is more natural, more pure than the city; Michele calls it ‘paradise.’
Chota as poor
Although they idealize their valley, Choteños are aware of its poverty. Elisa recalls how some have migrated because ‘sometimes the farmland isn’t enough.’ Alberto describes how only recently some settlements have sewage systems and paved streets, some still lack running water. Poverty, therefore, comes from the land, from the difficulties related to agriculture. It is also inscribed on the land, evidenced in dirt streets, scanty houses, and lack of amenities. Still, some Choteños romanticize poverty; they believe it makes them more humble and decent than other people. Esmero is proud to be a ‘simple, peaceful person that lives in this poor and simple valley.’
Chota as black
Chota valley is almost exclusively populated by Afro-Ecuadorians, which is why the valley’s space is intimately tied to conceptions about race. Although Afro-Ecuadorians also live in cities, the interviewees always spoke of city-dwellers as ‘white’ in contrast to the valley’s ‘black’ residents. Also, out of the 25 interviewees, only one mentioned Ecuador’s Indigenous population even though there is a large, majority Indigenous city close to Chota. Cities are always described as white, racist, and discriminatory. Chota, in contrast, is called a black, welcoming space.
Interestingly, almost all of the interviewees’ experiences of racism had to do with people not wanting to share space. Alberto describes how in the capital ‘you would go to a club and they wouldn’t let you in if you were black.’ Anibal, Jairo, Ansieto, and Fabian all had people cross the street when they approached. No white person has ever sat next to Edgar on the bus and Magali has been repeatedly asked to take a seat at the back. Conversely, Fabian explains that in Chota ‘we always like it when someone new comes along.’ Chota’s space is safe.
Chota as a close-knit community
Chota’s settlements are small and cramped. Therefore, in Chota ‘everyone knows everyone,’ unlike in the city where ‘if you ask for someone no one knows them because a city is immense.’ Alberto believes that ‘here we never lost our unity; … everyone always helps out.’ According to Bladimir, this unity is social, not political; Enma specifies that it revolves around the family. In Chota, families live in the same houses and neighborhoods for generations, inscribing kinship and solidarity geographically. This is yet another difference between Chota and the more individualistic city.
Overall, Choteños speak of the valley as a wonderful place dialectically opposed to ‘the city.’ In Chota, nature, adversity, race, and community converge. Obviously the codes described here do not fully capture the richness of Choteño culture but, along with Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, I believe that this country–city binary is not reductionist but rather allows us to sketch the basic framework from which people build cultural texture and imagine space (Alexander, 2003). Through these codes Choteños understand global culture and this access to the global transforms the local framework.
In the following sections, I examine the two ways Choteños encounter global soccer: through the media and itinerant Choteño soccer players. In the last 20 years, both these channels’ influence has changed and intensified. Since the 1990s, Choteños have had more access to television than ever before (Pabón, 2007) and in 2002 Ecuador played its first FIFA World Cup with a team that included several Choteños. In what follows, I go over how these changes affect the meaning of space.
Reading soccer through the media
Choteños watch all kinds of soccer: informal, national, or international games, usually games played by adult men. 3 However, there is a general consensus that a game is ‘important’ when the national team plays another country or when a local player performs abroad. Important games, in other words, are those that put the local on the global stage. Here Choteños encounter and read global culture; an encounter that can, in turn, affect the local sense of place. However, as my interviews show, Choteños do not read this globe indiscriminately. Local actors first superimpose ideas about the local onto the compressed global space, making it legible. Only then do they translate the global into the local language, creating a glocal culture with new meaningful spatial bounds.
Interviewees began describing their relationship with soccer by naming which players and teams they watch. Almost all of their answers made reference to pre-established ideas about space, specifically about race and community. For instance, most follow teams with Choteño players. Justo explains that ‘personally I mostly watch players from the valley’ and Edgar similarly admires Choteño ‘Ulises de la Cruz because he is an idol, at least within Chota.’ Nohemi is not a soccer fan herself but she likes Christian ‘el Diablito’ Lara, ‘because he is from here, that’s why.’ Chota, the idealized valley, weighs heavily when Choteños decide what to watch, despite the fact that soccer is global and they have the whole world to choose from.
When local actors see Choteño players perform in foreign stadiums against global soccer celebrities they see people much like themselves traveling in and out of global space. Regarding De la Cruz, Jacinto said:
When Ulises came back [from the World Cup] we kept asking him ‘how does it feel to play with someone like Ronaldinho or Beckham?’ And he [answered] ‘… Once you are up close they don’t look so big!’ That was something that always struck me because if I’m going to play with someone like Messi or with people like that, … before I could play I’d have to go ask them for their jersey and touch them, see if they’re actually real!
Watching these games and listening to players’ experiences proves the accessibility of this distant global, a global that is understood through the code of a tight-knit community.
Choteños also read global culture through the code of race. When they are not watching local players, Choteños overwhelmingly support Brazil. Marlene explains ‘we like Brazil because it’s more related to us, it is more similar.’ Ansieto is more specific, ‘we support them because there they have people of our same race.’ Maria Edita concurs: ‘in anything if there is a black person I support them because that’s me.’ Thus, the global is not decoded arbitrarily. First it must be read through a meaningful local lens.
After watching soccer, Choteños bring the sport into the local landscape. For instance, local actors named a dirt field the ‘Estadio Monumental’ in honor of many homonymous stadiums around the world. Also, Artemio describes how today, most young boys 4 are being named after Brazilian soccer idols, ‘they call them Rivaldo, Robinho, Ronaldo…’ In naming these spaces and children, Choteños try to associate them with the iconic global that, among other things, represents power, success, and possibility. Marcos explains that it is not common to find children named after local players: ‘No one has looked at Agustin Delgado and thought “I should name my kid Agustin.” “No,” they say, “call him Ronaldinho.” ’ It is the glamorous global that is blended with the local, a global that is nonetheless considered accessible.
Choteño soccer players write on the local
Global soccer is not only read, it is also written into the landscape. The players that help familiarize global space return to Chota often, reducing the distance between the global and the local, traveling on compressed global space. Jairo says that they ‘come when they can … and they bring a bit of the city with them.’ They also bring a bit of the world in the form of investment, experiences, and global recognition.
Participation in FIFA World Cups was lucrative for Choteño players and it propelled many towards high-paying national and foreign teams. Many then return to the valley to economically help their family and friends or to establish non-profit foundations. Defender Ulises de la Cruz and striker Agustin Delgado built medical centers in their home-settlements. Through his foundation, De la Cruz also gave his settlement running water, a sewage system, irrigation channels, paved streets, a new school building, and a sports coliseum. De la Cruz, goalkeeper Giovanni Ibarra, and striker Giovanni Espinosa all lobbied so that the Ministry of Housing would build homes for the homeless. Glocalization is all the more apparent in De la Cruz’s case since he called this housing complex ‘Little London,’ self-consciously inscribing his local community with his international experience. Furthermore, Choteños believe it was their success in soccer that garnered the government’s attention, an institution that has also been investing in the valley. When visiting Chota, one witnesses this recent influx of money: almost every settlement has new buildings being constructed, roads being paved, and small businesses being set up, changing the appearance of local space.
Soccer has changed Chota symbolically as well as materially. Interviewees repeatedly said that the sport ‘put Chota on the map’ and that, finally, the rest of the country and the world have turned their attention to this space. Jacinto remembers that ‘during the World Cup [journalists] would ask where did these black players come from because in Ecuador there are no black people. People came from other countries to make news stories about us and they finally saw that there are a lot of black people here.’ Sonia also recalls how ‘this used to be a forgotten town but through soccer and the foundations more people have come to Chota.’ Chota has been transformed from an overlooked space to one that is recognized and celebrated.
Recognition has encouraged Choteños to take further action in reshaping the meanings of their space. Speaking of his home-settlement Piquiucho, Alberto explains that ‘our ambition is that Piquiucho becomes a parish, the first all-black parish [in the country].’ Ideally Piquiucho and Chota will no longer be defined by the poverty code whereas race is emphasized with pride. Moreover, the valley has been given new meanings: it is now associated with achievement and potential for growth. Edgar states: ‘See how much Chota has changed? I can only imagine that it will keep growing. In 10 years it might be a city!’ The country–city binary underscoring Chota’s imagined space, therefore, is being re-examined.
Glocalization requires actors to superimpose their local cultural frame onto the global. This allows only certain global elements to enter the local space, elements like celebrity, capital, and racial pride. These elements, in turn, alter the local sense of place: Chota becomes more proud to be black, less accepting of poverty, more invested in community building. Basically, the meanings of local space are dynamically involved in glocalization and are being reconfigured by this process. Furthermore, these changes intersect with a re-evaluation of the meaning of time, a dimension I presently turn to.
The glocalization of time
Time, as space, is a natural process that is organized, measured, and imagined differently in different social settings. Weeks and days are fragmented into ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ time. Religious and secular calendars highlight certain days over others. Life histories are narrated in terms of meaningful events. This time is constructed both at the global and local level. According to Robert Holton, in the accelerated world of globalization, time is imagined as linear and nearly instantaneous (Holton, 2005: 104). At the local level, in contrast, I find that time is defined by three basic codes: Chota’s time is cyclical, free, and marked by a painful history. As was the case with space, these notions of time are being transformed by the entry of global culture.
Chota’s time as cyclical
Choteños do not use the term ‘cyclical time’ but effectively describe it: people work the land as their parents and grandparents had, they hold the same religious festivals, they cook the same food, and they play soccer in the same way. Elisa calls her culture repetitive because it preserves timeless customs. Alberto worries that ‘people still want to live in the past, to stay in the past … If a father was a farmer then he wants his children to be farmers too.’ Some escape this cycle by migrating to the city where ‘there are more opportunities for work, for studying, for a different life.’ Leaving takes people into a world with linear, progressive time, whereas staying in Chota usually means reproducing the past in the present and future.
Chota’s time as free
Still, city time is not considered ideal. Marcos argues that ‘in the city life is much more agitated, it is much harder. Here in the valley life is more laid back. You breathe more peace, more calm, life isn’t as frantic.’ This calmness harks back to the idealized depiction of Chota’s space as healthy and pure. In Chota’s ‘paradise’ space, time is relaxed and peaceful: ‘Here people live their culture. When they have to dance, they dance. When they have to work, they work. When they have to cry, they cry. When they have to play, they play. … Here we have a special kind of freedom.’
Chota’s history as difficult
Although few interviewees were specific about Chota’s history, they all agreed that it has been painful, making reference to slavery and, in a few cases, to exploitative haciendas and sugar-cane plantations. Some believe that this suffering affects Choteños’ attitudes and behavior today. Magali states: ‘there is a rebellion innate to us because a person knows who he is, where he comes from.’ Jacinto adds that ‘the way we work is shaped by that historical suffering, we always want to keep working no matter how bad things get.’ Chota’s past is meaningful, painful and continues to influence the present.
Glocalization, the merging of global and local culture, requires the local time frame to be reconciled with the linear, instantaneous, unpredictable global time. In the next sections, I show that global soccer rides the waves of instantaneous linear time, breaching the temporal framework of Chota valley. The local audience, in turn, reconfigures its imagined time into one that is more scheduled, progressive, and optimistic.
Global media events breach local time
Soccer matches are what Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992) term ‘media events’ or pre-planned media experiences that create festive instances of social reflection, validating or redefining society. These events are breaks in the routine that ‘are characterized by a norm of viewing’ (Dayan and Katz, 1992: 9); everyone comes together in a live, collective ritual. One interviewee argued that it simply ‘isn’t as exciting to watch by yourself, we usually get together among many people, more or less 40, 50 people.’ This is especially true with ‘important’ games, which, we saw above, were games where the local and global intersect. These are the matches that can potentially unite the community in a collective viewing experience.
Scheduled matches breach the local passage of time, forcing local audiences to adapt to the broadcast. José Eduardo explained: ‘I would wake up in the morning and say to myself “the national team plays today!” I would be anxious all day thinking about the time. At what time do I get ready? At what time do I meet my friends? At what time is the game?’ This means that soccer interrupts Chota’s cyclical, free, spontaneous time and inserts a timetable. However, local time is necessarily involved in allowing this breach. Alberto, for instance, says that during a World Cup: ‘I watch the matches every day; I haven’t gone to work since it started!’ Chota’s flexible time allows people to put tasks on hold and drop everything for the enjoyment of soccer.
With the insertion of soccer into the valley’s culture, Chota’s cyclical time is challenged. Dayan and Katz argue that ‘however hegemonically sponsored and however affirmatively read, [media events] invite re-examination of the status quo and are a reminder that reality falls short of society’s norms’ (Dayan and Katz, 1992: 20). Therefore, these events bring the collective together to reflect upon itself and rethink its past in light of an ideal future. Esmero explained that during soccer matches ‘there are no races, no colors, nothing. When the national team plays, everybody is capable of hugging each other, of getting excited … It doesn’t last that long, only that gripping instant, but that is an instant many people like me wait for anxiously to come again.’ Soccer provides an escape, a glimpse into alternative forms of community. It does not solve the problems of the past and it creates an ephemeral unity in the present but it does show how society could be in the future, giving a taste of social harmony. This partitioning of the past, present, and future allows Choteños to reconceptualize time, suggesting that it can now move forward rather than cycling back.
In recent work, both Katz and Dayan have questioned their ideas about media events. Dayan notes that it is increasingly difficult for a single event to gather universal attention, new media are making the viewing experience increasingly private, people no longer watch with ‘a kind of agreed conspiracy … to suspend disbelief’ (Dayan, 2010: 28). Rather, the viewing is cynical and pragmatic, ‘[media events] are an exploited resource within a political economy of collective attention’ (Dayan, 2010: 28). Katz agrees, adding that new technology fills the viewing of events with distractions, providing ‘ready access to disruption’ (Katz and Liebes, 2010: 32). The example of Chota, however, shows that this disenchantment is far from complete. ‘Important’ soccer matches – glocal soccer matches – still demand to be watched collectively with undivided attention, they still generate raw, forthright emotions, they still suspend and reconfigure local time. José Eduardo recalls the last game Ecuador played with a team of Choteño players: ‘We put a big screen in a dance hall where we could all fit, share, and scream together. After that, when Ecuador won there was so much joy, it was so good, we celebrated all night!’ The media event poked a hole into the local routine and inserted an alternative understanding of time, allowing global and local culture to momentarily blend.
Soccer players’ success rewrites history
Another way global culture affects local time is through returning soccer players who have played abroad. These players broke Chota’s cyclical time frame; they took a path that involved progressive, disciplined time. Players’ success stories invite other Choteños to pause and think about how they understand time, the past, present, and future.
When the first generation of successful soccer players was growing up in Chota, time was decidedly cyclical. Alberto remembers that ‘they always used to play, but back then that was only for fun. Ulises [de la Cruz] was the son of a farmer, who wanted him to be a farmer too, but Ulises was different, he didn’t like agriculture.’ Interviewees explain that when they were young, most soccer players did not know that they could make a career in soccer, the game usually represented a pastime, not a job. To indulge in this meant rejecting farm work, disappointing one’s parents, disrupting Chota’s cycle.
Today, a young boy who chooses soccer over agriculture is no longer considered disappointing. Alberto asserts that ‘whenever a baby is born the parent usually says “this one can be Ronaldinho, can be like Ulises de la Cruz.” ’ Personally, Esmero hopes that this trend continues ‘because now we don’t want our children to be farmers like us, we want them to have another future. Even if it isn’t soccer, we now want another future.’ What was once a source of disappointment is now a source of pride, alternative futures are being imagined. Many Choteños now worry that young people are putting too much faith in soccer and overlooking the importance of education. Although this debate cannot be properly addressed in this article’s limited space, it is noteworthy that there is a debate at all, that Choteños want their children to have a better future than their own, be it through studying or sport. Soccer has contributed to the separation and realignment of past, present, and future. Today, the present and future of Choteños are connected to a more recent past: one of global success.
All of this shows that through Chota’s access to global sport, Chota’s social time has been altered. Glocalization is achieved when discrete media events interrupt local time, inviting its reconsideration. These events are in turn read through the lens of Choteño players’ success stories, which present alternative life histories for young boys. The local translation of global culture, therefore, leads actors to reimagine their cultural stage, actively recoding time and space as they adopt a global product.
Conclusion
This article began by asking whether we could understand the meaningful role of time and space in globalization. I answer by showing how global soccer breaches Chota’s symbolic boundaries and leads to a reimagination of space and time. Soccer as a global cultural product enters the local setting where it is read through a local framework and is then embedded in pockets of glocal space. Moreover, this entry occurs through discrete media events and the Choteño players’ success stories, interrupting and challenging local understandings of tradition and history. Hence, global soccer is experienced in Chota as a suspension and reconfiguration of the meanings of time and space.
In describing glocalization in Chota I am not describing glocalization everywhere. Rather, I show how diverse glocalization experiences can be because they depend on local understandings of time and space. In Chota it is fundamentally important that local players have been positively recognized on the global stage, making the familiar and the distant commensurable. However, this does not mean that soccer cannot be meaningful differently in another local site. What this article demonstrates is that in any local context, cultural understandings of place and history will weigh heavily in glocalization processes.
In their seminal book Primitive Classification, Durkheim and Mauss conclude that ‘even ideas so abstract as those of time and space are, at each point in their history, closely connected with the corresponding social organization’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 88). Social organizations across the globe are currently being restructured and reinvented because of intensified and accelerated exchanges of capital, technology, people, and culture. This article explored how these changes bring about new local conceptions of time and space. The case of soccer in Chota valley shows that no matter how standardized and quantifiable time and space become, no matter how much they are separated, accelerated, or compressed, local actors still appropriate and situate these dimensions and continually reshape their meaning.
Footnotes
Appendix 1
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Philip Smith, Ron Eyerman, Julia Adams, and Tim Malacarne for providing the resources and intellectual stimuli that made this project possible, as well as Geovanny Padilla who introduced me to the Chota community.
Funding
This study received funding from Yale University’s Council of Latin American and Iberian Studies. This Council specifically funded the author’s travel expenses.