Translocalization

Copyright © 2012 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution. Translocalization TM techniques include lower blood pressure, decreased anxiety and stress, reduction of cholesterol, and other health benefits. Some debate has been generated over the issue of whether it is the specific TM techniques that lead to positive healthrelated results or if any kind of systematically applied meditation techniques would yield similar outcomes. TM has been involved in other controversies as well, given that it has been grouped with other new religious movements (NRMs) that garnered public attention in the 1960s and 1970s. The Anti-Cult movement (ACM) organizations targeted TM, along with other NRMs, and some ACM spokespersons specifically claimed that TM was a “cult” that was teaching techniques akin to “brainwashing.” This type of claim has been involved in one precedent-setting legal action, Kropinski v. World Plan Executive Council (1988). This case involved a former member suing TM in 1985 for alleged fraud and emotional and physical harm brought on by practicing TM techniques. Kropinski won a judgment at the trial court level for $138,000, but the case was reversed as to psychological harm on appeal, and other claims were settled. This case is important because it was the first time that Margaret Singer’s testimony was found lacking scientific credibility in a federal court. Singer was perhaps the best known of the anticult psychologists who had served as expert witnesses in a similar case brought against TM and other NRMs. TM also has been controversial with its official claim that it is not a religion but a meditation technique; thus, allowing the technique to be used in schools and other governmental agencies would not be violative of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. constitution. The techniques have been integrated into many different settings, including in churches, school, and businesses. However, there was one federal court case, Malnak v. Yogi (1979) that found that certain TM practices did constitute a religion. Controversy has also developed over the high cost of getting initiated into TM techniques, with some scholars and others suggesting that TM is more a business than a technique or a religion. James T. Richardson See also Hinduism; Meditation; New Age Movements; New Religions; Shankar, Sri Sri Ravi 1301 Further Readings Dillbeck, M. C., & Orme-Johnson, D. W. (1987). Physiological differences between Transcendental Meditation and the rest. American Psychologist, 42, 879–881. Johnston, H. (1988). The marketed social movement: A case study of the rapid growth of TM. In J. T. Richardson (Ed.), Money and power in the new religions (pp. 163–184). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Kropinski v. World Plan Executive Council, 853 F2d 948 (D.C. Cir. 1988). Malnak v. Yogi, 592 F2d 197 (1979). Wallace, R. K. (1970). Physiological effects of Transcendental Meditation. Science, 167, 1751–1754. TRANSLOCALIZATION Translocalization is a term used for the process by which cultural forms, symbols, and practices are drawn into circulation through networks that detach them away from their original national and local contexts and may amplify or diverse their meanings. The concept is used within cultural globalization theory and is closely related to the now problematic term of locality and thus to delocalization and relocalization; it is mainly a space metaphor. For some scholars, economic and technological globalization is a homogenization process that produces cultural unified symbols (the McDonaldization of society) at the same time that it delocalizes others from their original contexts, only to be transformed in merchandise. Other positions show how economic globalization translates its course of action in local conditions, grounding symbols and practices in local terms while transforming traditions by circulating them in global flows such as tourism, spectacle, migration, and media exposure. This process is what is generally called translocalization. Other applications to the term have regarded it as the main process of locating the global (Benedict) or as the product of the forces of globalization and localization (Czarniawska). It has also been applied to the new identity formations and connections shaped by the cultural background of migrants in host societies (Kupainien). Copyright © 2012 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution. 1302 Transnational In religious studies, Argyriadis and De la Torre consider it as a movement metaphor, in close relation to delocalization—which is the actual movement of cultural forms. Translocalization processes point to the multilocations that religious identities can reach, as they are no longer necessarily anchored to a single territory, culture, nation, or ethnicity. These identities are practiced in multiple locations such as adhesions to ritual imaginary lineages, in movements with multinational or cosmological levels, and in virtual presences. Alejandra Aguilar Ros See also Detraditionalization and Retraditionalization; Ethics; Global Religion; Globalization; Glocalization; Postmodernism Further Readings Argyriadis, K., & De la Torre, R. (2008). Introduction. In K. Argyriadis, R. De la torre, C. Gutiérrez, & A. Aguilar Ros (Trans.), Roots in movement: Traditional religious practices in translocal contexts (pp. 11–42). Guadalajara, Mexico: ColJal, Jalisco, IRD, CEMCA, CIESAS, ITESO. Beck, U. (1999). What is globalization? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Benedict, K. (1999). International relations in the global village. In Ch. Hermann, H. Jakobson, & A. Moffat (Eds.), Violent conflict in the 21st century: Causes, instruments mitigation (pp. 111–128). Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Czarniawska, B. (2005). Global ideas: How ideas, objects and practices travel in the world economy. Oslo, Norway: Liber/Copenhagen Business School Press. Kupainien, J. (2004). Internet, translocalisation and cultural brokerage in the Pacific. In J. Kupainien, E. Sevännen, & J. A. Stotesbury (Eds.), Cultural identity in transition: Contemporary conditions, practices and policies of a global phenomenon (pp. 344–362). New Delhi, India: Atlantic Publishers. Ritzer, G. (2008). The McDonaldization of society (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Robertson, R. (1992). Social theory and global culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Taylor, J. (2008). Buddhism and postmodern imaginings in Thailand: The religiosity of urban space. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. TRANSNATIONAL The world is increasingly interconnected; an event in a distant place affects those in another. The term transnational refers to both the morphology and optic of these cross-border flows of people, capital, information, and commodities. Though the term transnational seems to presume the nation-state as a coherent entity, a transnational perspective does not naturalize the nation as a primary social and political unit in the modern world. Instead, a transnational optic considers the historical contingency of borders and social fields. Religious institutions are some of the earliest transnational formations, thriving across a great expanse before there were nation-states to traverse. Among religious scholars, the term transnational religion most often refers to the beliefs, practices, and organizations of transmigrant communities, but it also characterizes religious activist and militant networks in global civil society. The first section will consider the theoretical emergence of transnational theory within the framework of transnational civil society, and the second section will consider its placement in the study of immigrant religious communities. Transnational Civil Society As globalization theory took shape in the 1990s, anthropologists and cultural studies theorists began to refer to the global culture. These crossborder flows of capital, information, and people have been characterized as varyingly nonisomorphic “scapes,” network societies, and emerging hybrid cultures that have weakened the centrality of the nation-state in the social imagination. Methodologically, the transnational is often distinguished from the global by the former’s attention to the everyday and the particular or, as one anthropologist put it, the more “humble” aspects of globalization. Given this attention to the translocality of global flows, transnational ethnographies are often multisited, tracking daily life across various borders, in several time zones, and via many networks. The study of transnational cultural forms and communities (and later the religious reverberations of the September 11 attack on the World Trade