No abstract

Studies of the glocalization of sport usually focus on 'aesthetic glocalization' (how local actors adopt a global sport and create a new hybrid aesthetic). This has led some critics to dismiss glocalization as a superficial 'façade' of diversity hiding global homogeneity. This paper challenges this view by looking at the 'moral glocalization' of sport and at the ways local actors give global sports local moral meanings. Drawing on interviews with Afro-descendants from Chota valley, Ecuador, it shows that in this peripheral community football is seen as: (1) a morally safe emotional outlet; (2) a moral education; (3) a source of national 'communitas'; (4) racial pride; (5) a space for local moral heroes; and (6) a gateway to communal progress. In conclusion, local actors give global football deep moral meaning when they can associate it to local conceptions of the sacred.

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.

This article examines how working children understand the morality of child labor. Drawing on interviews with children in Bolivia and Ecuador, I find that children call child labor moral when it helps them manage their social ties. Working children do not think of themselves as individuals needing care (per international organizations like the International Labor Organization) or as a cultural group needing recognition (per the “working children’s movements”). Rather, children describe themselves as morally upright members of intimate networks. I conclude by introducing the concept of relational dignity.

Many scholars study the global diffusion of culture, looking at how institutions spread culture around the world or at how intermediaries (or “cultural brokers”) adapt foreign culture in the local context. This research can tell us much about brokers’ “cultural-matching” or “congruence-building” strategies. To date, however, few scholars have examined brokers’ interpretive work. In this article, the author argues that globalization research needs to pay more attention to interpretation. Building on translation studies, the author shows that brokers’ work is shaped by (1) how they imagine their dual roles, (2) how they imagine different parts of the world, (3) how they interpret a text’s intertextuality, and (4) how their audience imagines the foreign Other. In this way, the author lays the groundwork for a hermeneutic model of cultural globalization.