Territorialization of Modern Discourses and De-territorialization of Traditions: Glocalized Cultural Homogenization
Abstract
Abstract This paper will discuss how the discourse of modern education has systematically sidelined traditional value systems because it stands heavily indebted to Enlightenment epistemology. Based on the philosophical hermeneutics by Hans-Georg Gadamer, this paper contends that an insatiable desire for objective knowledge, systematized in the form of global education systems, impairs the interpretive sophistication as well as the epistemic authority of local traditions. With the prism of glocalization, the paper explores the global forces of imposition of homogenized discursive practices which in the name of imposition render nothingness-of-oneself in a way that they present themselves as being uncontested or universal in validity. This twofold process of deterritorialization of local traditions and reterritorialization of global ideologies is being traced especially in the Muslim world where the intellectual responses are divided into modernist, fundamentalist and traditionalist. The paper points to the critical responsibility of the teacher as an agent of change, and a proxy of the global hegemonic paradigms which are gradually governed by the demands of the market economies. It also carefully asks questions on the transformation of education as a space of moral and cultural formation into congruence with technology as a technocratic orientation by transnational bodies. The discussion ends by revealing how this worldwide transformation has brought about ontological and epistemological crisis demanding re-existence to the teacher and maintenance of local intellectual tradition against homogenization of cultures. Keywords: Enlightenment Epistemology, Glocalization, Hermeneutics, Tradition
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