Transnationality, Hope and ‘Recombinant Locality’: Knowledge as Capital and Resource

Abstract

This article searches for sustainable methods of handling the stresses of globalising existence and contrasts two strategies of using knowledge as a form of capital or resource in different forms of ‘packaging from above’ and ‘packaging from below’. Taking the examples of appropriation of Vastuvidya in Europe and of Hindu worship of the Hawaiian Healing Stones, it is argued that such methods of re-packaging and the concept of ‘recombinant locality’ are strategically useful tools and devices to understand better how people may preserve glocalised spaces while opposing uniformising globalisation and capitalist domination. The article suggests that, in this way, structurally disadvantaged but hopeful and enterprising transnational individuals and groups may empower themselves to improve their ‘lifeworld’ in diaspora.