Fear and healing in the global city: A cultural-anthropological study of ego-effacement and the city experience in North and South America during the 1990s (New York City).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation is the record of a journey into the global city. This global city is New York. My journey was in a very real sense a hemispheric journey, trying to articulate the new kind of dialectic that seems to be forming itself, in the field of culture and cultural studies, around an extended notion of the Americas.
On this journey, my debt goes to anthropology, and especially those anthropologists who have studied rituals and festivals as situated at the interface of the public and private in traditional societies. From them I took the notion that their thinking could be extended to include the public-private “events” of an urban post-industrial environment, as well as to make my own as a scholar and city-dweller their sensitivity to the problematics of the participant observer.
Where this dissertation tries to break new ground is that I want to both extend the work of Performance Studies and sharpen its focus in one particular direction. This direction is that of the moving image and its cultural and political impact, its global dimensions and ramifications.
The changes of the city, the body and the image in the past decade often been noted in cultural theory as well as sociology and identity-politics. They go under the name of post-colonial theory, globalisation, multiculturalism. None of these seems to me entirely appropriate to my object of study—the shifting relations between the transnational individual/post-industrial subject on the one hand, and the global city of capital and commerce on the other. NYC still functions as a magnet for the peoples all over the world, but now it does so also merely through its images. This too, however, is a story of what it means to be in “the Americas,” of what it means to be an “American,” and perhaps even more importantly, of what it takes to “become” an American in the late 20th and early 21st century. Therefore I take from contemporary performance studies the idea of more mobile identities, and from anthropology the radicalization of the concept of the participant observer, as indicated by such concepts as “mimesis” and “alterity.&rdquo.