CHAPTER 19: CULTURAL EXCHANGE AND SURVIVAL
Chapter Overview
This chapter discusses contact between groups, particularly Western and indigenous societies, and the acculturation that results. It focuses on how more powerful groups exert their dominance, and the various ways that oppressed peoples resist such domination. It also examines cultural imperialism, and how popular culture, the mass media, global capitalism, and migration are affecting societies throughout the world.
Chapter Objectives
1. Know how Westernization is a form of cultural domination. You should be aware of the effects that Westernization is having on ethnic and cultural diversity around the world.
2. Understand how and why economic development and environmentalism may threaten indigenous peoples.
3. Understand the relationship between religious and cultural change, and how religion can be used as a means of domination.
4. Understand how groups resist domination. In particular, you should know the difference between public and hidden transcripts, and the various forms that resistance can take.
5. Know what cultural imperialism entails and how the mass media and popular culture have been used to both promote and resist cultural imperialism.
6. Know what postmodernity is and how it relates to the modern world system.
Chapter Outline
I. Acculturation refers to changes that result when groups come into continuous firsthand contact—changes in the cultural patterns of either or both groups.
II. Contact and Domination
A. The term acculturation has most often been applied to cases of Westernization—the influence of Western expansion on native societies.
B. Acculturation may be voluntary or forced.
C. Different degrees of destruction, domination, resistance, survival, adaptation, and modification of native cultures may follow interethnic contact.
1. An initial encounter between an indigenous society and more powerful outsiders often is followed by a “shock phase,” during which the indigenous population may be attacked, exploited, and repressed.
2. As a result, the indigenous group may suffer cultural collapse (ethnocide) or even physical extinction (genocide).
3. Political and economic colonialists (and even some agricultural development projects) have tried to redesign conquered and dependent lands, peoples, and cultures, imposing their cultural standards on others.
D. Development and Environmentalism
1. Today, core-based multinational corporations (rather than the governments of core nations) often are the instigators of economic change in Third World nations.
2. Governments of many peripheral and semiperipheral nations have supported the predatory enterprises of corporations seeking cheap labor and raw materials in their countries.
3. Even well-intentioned interference (e.g., by environmentalists) may be treated as a form of cultural domination by subject populations.
4. Like development projects, conservation efforts must respect cultural variation and autonomy, and build upon native forms, if they are to be successful.
5. Culture clashes related to environmental change may occur when development threatens indigenous peoples and their environments (e.g., the Kayapó of Brazil and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea), or when external regulation threatens indigenous peoples.
a. By declaring certain resources off limits, outsiders may expect local people to give up customary economic and cultural activities without clear substitutes, alternatives, or incentives.
b. Well-meaning conservation efforts can be as insensitive as development schemes that promote radical changes without involving local people in planning and carrying out the policies affecting them.
E. Religious Change
1. Religious proselytizing can promote ethnocide, as native religious beliefs and customs are replaced by ideology and behavior more compatible with Western culture (e.g., the Handsome Lake religion and associated changes in Iroquois society).
2. Today, much religious change is promoted by missionaries and proselytizers representing the major world religions, especially Christianity and Islam.
3. While the political ideology of a nation-state may oppose traditional religion (e.g., in the former Soviet empire), governments may also use their power to advance a religion (e.g., Islam in Iran or Sudan).
III. Resistance and Survival
A. Although oppressed people may seem to accept their own domination, they always resist it in some non-public way.
1. Scott’s analysis of domination and resistance differentiates between public and hidden transcripts.
a. Public transcript refers to the open, public interactions between dominators and the oppressed.
b. Hidden transcript refers to the critique of power that goes on offstage, where the dominators cannot see or hear it.
2. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony refers to a stratified social order in which subordinates comply with domination by internalizing their rulers’ values and accepting the “naturalness” of domination.
3. According to Bourdieu, every social order tries to make its own arbitrariness, including its oppression, seem natural.
4. Resistance may be curbed through hegemony, by convincing subordinates that they will eventually gain power, or by separating or isolating subordinates and supervising them closely.
B. Weapons of the Weak
1. As Scott’s work on Malay peasants suggests, oppressed groups may use subtle, small-scale, non-confrontational methods (“weapons of the weak”) to resist various forms of domination.
2. Subordinates also use various strategies to resist publicly, although in disguised form (e.g., metaphors, euphemisms, and folk tales).
3. Because resistance is most likely to be expressed openly when the oppressed are allowed to assemble, elites discourage public gatherings (e.g., the anti-assembly laws of the antebellum South).
4. Festivals such as Carnival are prime arenas for the expression of antihegemonic discourse (discourse includes talk, speeches, gestures, and actions).
C. Cultural Imperialism
1. Cultural imperialism refers to the spread or advance of one culture at the expense of others, or its imposition on other societies, which it modifies, replaces, or destroys—usually because of differential economic or political influence.
2. While modern technologies, particularly the mass media, act as agents of cultural imperialism by erasing cultural differences, they also allow local groups and cultures to express themselves to national and global audiences (e.g., television in Brazil).
IV. Making and Remaking Culture
A. A text is something that is creatively “read,” interpreted, and assigned meaning by each person who receives it.
1. Any media-borne image, such as Carnival, can be analyzed as a text.
2. The meanings and feelings that “readers” derive from a text may be quite different from what the creators of the text imagined.
3. The hegemonic reading refers to the reading or meaning that the creators of a text intended, or the one that elites consider to be the intended or correct meaning.
4. “Readers” of media messages may resist or oppose the hegemonic meanings of a text, or they may seize on its antihegemonic aspects.
B. Popular Culture
1. According to Fiske, each individual's use of popular culture is a creative act (an original “reading” of a text).
2. Forms and readings of popular culture can express discontent and resistance by groups that are or feel oppressed.
C. Indigenizing Popular Culture
1. People assign their own meanings and value to the texts, messages, and products they receive, based on their cultural backgrounds and experiences.
2. When forces from world centers enter new societies, they are indigenized—modified to fit the local culture (e.g., McDonald’s in Brazil).
D. A World System of Images
1. The electronic mass media can spread, and even help create, national and ethnic identities.
2. Cross-cultural studies show that locally produced television shows are preferred over foreign imports.
3. Mass media play an important role in maintaining ethnic and national identities among people who lead transnational lives.
E. A Transnational Culture of Consumption
1. Contemporary global culture is driven by flows of people, technology, finance, information, and ideology.
2. Business, technology, and the media have increased the craving for commodities and images throughout the world, forcing most nation-states to open to a global culture of consumption.
V. People In Motion
A. Today, people are traveling more than ever.
B. With so much transnational migration and other movement of people, the unit of anthropological study expands from the local community to the diaspora—the offspring of an area who have spread to many lands.
C. Postmodernity describes today’s world, in which traditional standards, contrasts, groups, boundaries, and identities are opening up, reaching out, and breaking down.
1. In its most general sense, postmodern refers to the blurring and breakdown of established canons (rules or standards), categories, distinctions, and boundaries.
2. The word “postmodern” is taken from postmodernism, a style and movement in architecture that, beginning in the 1970s, drew on a diversity of styles from different times and places—including popular, ethnic, and non-Western cultures.
D. New kinds of political and ethnic units are emerging, such as a growing pan-Indian identity and an international Pantribal movement.
VI. The Continuance of Diversity
A. Anthropology has a crucial role to play in promoting a more humanistic vision of social change, one that respects the value of human biological and cultural diversity.
B. The existence of anthropology is itself a tribute to the continuing need to understand similarities and differences among humans throughout the world.
VII. Box: Cultural Diversity Highest in Resource-Rich Areas
A. A results of a recent study indicate that cultural (linguistic) diversity is greatest in equatorial areas, with less diversity near the poles.
B. This pattern appears to be related to resource abundance and distribution.
1. Resource abundance in equatorial regions allows diverse cultural groups to survive.
2. In contrast, in regions were resources are less abundant and more dispersed, people must range widely—resulting in more intergroup contact and, therefore, cultural homogenization.
Lecture Topics
1. Students may be quite unfamiliar with concepts like hegemony, discourse, and resistance. Therefore, you might want to provide them with a brief history of the development of these important ideas, as well as an explanation of their current role in anthropology and other social sciences.
2. Discuss both the past and the current status of Native American groups in the United States. Examine some specific cases of Native American resistance, or attempts to preserve Native American traditions, lands, etc. (e.g., the Ghost Dance, present-day issues such as land claim cases and the public representation of Indians). Pertinent selections from Native American literature or even commercial films (e.g., Powwow Highway, Thunderheart) could be used to supplement the discussion.
3. Discuss the various forms of resistance that oppressed groups may engage in—public vs. hidden, violent vs. peaceful, etc. Illustrate your discussion with specific examples (e.g., you could compare the strategies advocated by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X).
Suggested Films
Cry of the Yurok
1991 58 minutes
This film examines the Yuroks, California’s largest Native American tribe, from their arrival in California to their struggles with whites in the 19th century to their modern existence. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Our Identity, Our Land
1994 60 minutes
This film depicts the struggle of the Kanaka Maoli, an indigenous community on the Big Island of Hawaii, and their attempts to keep their homeland sacred. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
No Place to Hide: The UN’s Peacekeeping Efforts
1995 51 minutes
Hosted by Sir Brian Urquhart, head of UN peacekeeping in the 1970s and 1980s, this film presents the history of the UN’s peacekeeping efforts and discusses the future of these operations. A United Nations production.
TV-TV: The Television Revolution
1995 96 minutes
This program is a collection of video essays on a range of topics related to the role of film and television in society. Hosted by Moses Znaimer, this film includes features by Marshall McLuhan, George Gerbner, Oliver Stone, and Camille Paglia. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Paradise Lost: Traditional Cultures at Risk
53 minutes
This film compares two traditional cultures whose existence is threatened by the spread of Western society: the Nenetsi nomads of the Yamal Peninsula, Siberia, and the Caribou Indian tribe of Canada. The Nenetsi are depicted as faring better both economically and socially than the Caribou Indian tribe, who see the infiltration of Western conveniences as the cause for the deterioration of their traditional culture. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Mass Communication, Part 1: Forging an Identity
1999 38 minutes
This ABC News program anchored by Peter Jennings explores the rise of mass communication between World War I and the onset of the Cold War. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Mass Communication, Part 2: Toward a Global Village
1999 32 minutes
This ABC News program anchored by Peter Jennings explores the relationship between America’s national culture and film and television during the second half of the 20th century. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.