AN ONTOLOGICAL TALE OF DISPLACEMENT: THE CULTURAL ANATOMY OF GLOBALIZATION

This study examines the "disenchanting" effect of globalization on local cultures from an anthropological perspective. Although globalization is often presented as a new phenomenon, the process of destabilizing cultural authenticity actually dates back to the efforts of 19th-century ethnologists to define and describe the "other". The fact that anthropologists turned the information they obtained by entering the most private spheres of the societies they studied into a "commodity" for their own academic careers ignited an ethical debate. Today, this situation has evolved beyond an individual academic endeavor into a global systemic problem.

The most prominent result of the globalization process is the radical change in the relationship established with space. The expansion of geography and the permeability of borders have, ironically, diminished the individual's place in the world. As Stuart Hall also noted, a "world of signs" without a center has emerged ; while individuals seem to belong everywhere, they are left with a pain of "homelessness-displacement" brought about by belonging nowhere. Human agency has become ineffective in the face of the speed and intensity offered by the global system, and the individual has ceased to be the subject of their own geography.

Mass media, especially television channels broadcasting via satellites, have made borders mentally meaningless. The privacy of the home has been destroyed, and the outside world (the global center) has penetrated even the most private spaces. While individuals think they are watching the whole world on screen, they are actually consuming a constructed reality presented to them. Humans, stumbling under this "information bombardment," are detached from their own reality and try to forget today by remembering the past. This tight bond between media, power, and ideology paralyzes the individual's capacity to construct their own world.

In societies like Turkey, which construct modernization through the desire to "resemble the white man," this process has given rise to profound unproductivity and loss of identity. While new generations code resembling their own roots (fathers, grandfathers) as "backwardness," they imitate the Western lifestyle only through consumption patterns. This emulation is an external mimicry performed with the ambition of gaining "prestige" rather than a creative synthesis. In Dominique Schapper's terms, this process carried out under the name of "civilization" has resulted in the disparagement of the local and the emergence of a "grey" human typology.

The most concrete indicator of cultural erosion is the impoverishment of language. The ability of a villager living in harmony with nature to define fifteen different shades of green in nature with separate names is proof of their organic bond with that geography. However, the homogenizing global culture has destroyed this linguistic richness and condemned individuals to shallow concepts. The death of words and nuances of color actually means the narrowing of that person's world and intellectual horizon.

Loss of merit and nepotism in the social structure are the institutional reflections of cultural unproductivity. Using networks of belonging instead of rising through merit has brought about an ethical collapse. In the analysis based on Paul Lafargue's work "The Right to Be Lazy," it is emphasized that this right is misunderstood in the context of Turkey. While Lafargue opposes excessive work, in local reality this situation has turned into "unproductive inertia" and the desire to live off the labor of others.

The disenchantment of culture is not an end, but a warning about the individual's loss of control over their own labor and world of meaning. While globalization markets locality as a "color," it destroys its spirit. A real space of cultural existence is only possible with the construction of a local agency that is free from mimicry, capable of thinking with its own concepts, and assumes the moral responsibility of production.