日常生活としてのグローバル・コミュニケーション : 時間-空間の再編成のなかのエスニック・アイデンティティ

抄録

This paper considers the relationship between globalization and everyday communication practices in the age of high modernity. Drawing on both sociological works by A. Giddens and ethnographic studies conducted in the U.K. and the U.S., the paper suggests that an understanding of the concept of globalization provides a basis for a more sensitive awareness of the dynamics of time-space redefinition that emerges from the consumption of Japanese media by Japanese female expatriates in the context of their day-to-day life. First, the concept of globalization has a primary importance in the studies of communication and society. This is underscored by the fact that the concept defined by Giddens has temporal and spatial connotations and their rearrangements in global set up. Second, time-space distanciation or the redefinition of time-space should be explored not in an abstract level but by investigating actual communication practices and everyday routines in specific communities. In this sense, recent development of cognitive ethnography serves as an appropriate method for the study. Some examples observed in the communication practices of Japanese housewives living in London and San Diego provide substantial evidence for it. Finally, further considerations of the ethnic identities, as well as the globalizing tendencies of social life, of these Japanese expatriates should be made. It is because these factors have a potential power to reproduce communication practices which are continuously routinized in spite of all the cost resulting from long-distance communication activities.