the study of religion, but it hardly does justice to the careful scholarly work
being done by people of non-European ancestry that is detailed in many
chapters of this book. Language that plays on emotional loyalties and large-
scale identities is more useful for rallying troops, figuratively or literally, than
for careful analysis.
In dealing with the complexity of global influence and local agency, some
globalization theorists have coined stranger and stranger words. As George
Ritzer (2003, 2004; cf. 1996; Ritzer [ed.] 2002) of ‘McDonaldization’ fame
tells the story, a previously dominant account of globalization talked of Western
modernization overwhelming and obliterating traditional cultures. Many
theorists, among them Arjun Appadurai, Roland Robertson, and John
Tomlinson, found this account unsatisfactory, because it ignored local agency
in shaping the adoption of Western elements. In response, Robertson developed
the notion of ‘glocalization’. As Ritzer (2003: 193–194) explains it:
Glocalization[sic] can be defined as the interpenetration of the global
and the local, resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas.
This view emphasizes global heterogeneity and tends to reject the idea that
forces emanating from the West in general and the United States in
particular... are leading to economic, political, institutional, and—most
importantly—cultural homogeneity.
But according to Ritzer, glocalization itself encapsulates an incomplete
analysis, because it fails to recognize the ways in which ‘nations, corporations,
organizations, and other entities... desire—indeed... need—to impose
themselves on various geographic areas’ (Ritzer 2003: 194). The point is well
taken, but to address it Ritzer coined the word ‘grobalization’, which refers
to ‘the proliferation of nothing’ (Ritzer 2003: 194). Neither the term nor its
reference is immediately intelligible. To emphasize this point, I have left them
unglossed. Moreover, the apparently sweeping reach of ‘the proliferation of
nothing’ simply invites forceful rebuttals of the sort that James Watson and
his collaborators offered in examining the positive contributions of McDonald’s
to East Asia (Watson [ed.] 1997).
Are such neologisms at all helpful in negotiating global hegemony and local
agency in the study of religion? It is doubtful that the academic study of religion
is in the business of proliferating ‘nothing’, by which Ritzer (2003: 195) means
‘a social form that is generally centrally conceived, controlled, and com-
paratively devoid of distinctive substantive content’. This ‘nothing’ may call
to mind real issues in religious studies and other academic fields, such as the
disproportionate weight given elsewhere to publishing in journals or with
presses located in Europe or North America (Sinha 2003: 16–17), but is
centralized control a sufficiently subtle term for issues of this sort? Nor does
the study of religion seem particularly characterized by what Ritzer (1996)
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35
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9
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TOWARD A GLOBAL VISION OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
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