The role of the aesthetic-symbolic dimension in the reconstruction of identity in the face of current cultural globalization

The new concept of the "glocal" has come into being as an identity of synthesis by which peoples as diverse as the black communities on both sides of the Atlantic, the Ticuna Indians in the Upper Amazon Basin and the Basque nationalists in Europe assert and reconstruct their self as they deal with the invasion of the global into their lives. The author argues that this synthesis between the global and the local takes place in many cases by means of a dichotomy: whereas the global takes control of the infrastructural, socio-political and ethic-axiological levels of culture and leads societies toward uniformization, the local remains at the formal, aesthetic level of symbols and icons, shaping self-referred, de-socialized differential identities.