Globalization As Meta-Axiological Dilemma: The Sociological Implications of Rational Choice Criteria for Local Cultural Deep Structure (Report)

The world has become infinitesimally small. National boundaries and the endemically societies they circumscribe have become increasingly porous. Non-western societies since the 1970s have entered into intensive neo-colonial efforts to incorporate their localized subsistence patterns into an ever reorganizing global economy which at its core is fundamentally changed and functionally unstable. Thus, a weltanschuung of international economic reorganization subordinates national independence and sovereignty for the greater neocolonial good as it moves to integrate what is perceived as socially disruptive and marginal. And second, prescriptive stabilizing policies and structural adjustments strategies order equilibrating contributions to a new global economy, displacing non-market indigenous social institutions with "free market" mechanisms and supporting institutional practices that reproduce non-local patterns of economic agency. This article considers the global displacement of an axiological set indigenous to traditional African societies as a divestiture of a cultural deep structure that undermines local subsistence modalities. This global process of cultural divestiture is argued to disengage a highly intricate local axiological set from subsistence behaviors that are regenerative to local cultural deep structure and its support of uniquely African patterns of social interaction. In this context, globalization (as was colonialism before it) appears to be a process that divests the local of its model for human development, and thus encourages iconoclastic social praxis.