The global, the local, and the hybrid: A native ethnography of glocalization

International communication processes have been alternately understood as part of an overriding world process of globalization, or in terms of a polarity, between local audiences and global media, whose terms are disputed by the cultural imperialism and active audience formations. Departing from an interdisciplinary literature coalescing on cultural hybridity, I argue that hybridity is a pervasive but evasive cultural condition. I then theorize and utilize native ethnography to empirically examine how Maronite youth in Lebanon articulate local practices and global discourses to enact hybridity. Hybridity is construed as a space of oblique signification where power relations are dialogically reinscribed. Demonstrating that hybridity is not the negation of identify but its quotidian and inevitable condition, I advocate native ethnography as an epistemological approach and cultural hybridity as an ontological grounding for the ongoing internationalization of media and cultural studies. Finally, the concept of "glocalization" is proposed as a more inclusive and heuristic alternative to "globalization."