What is cultural imperialism?
It is the one way flow of international messages or media products, especially news and television flows, from a few metropolises.
According to wikipedia, cultural imperialism is defined as the practice of promoting, distinguishing, separating or artificially injecting the culture or language of one culture into another. It is usually the case that the former belongs to a large, economically or militarily powerful nation and the latter belongs to a smaller less important one.
Before you get bored on definitions, let's look at a very humorous film that illustrates cultural imperialism gorgeously yet very entertaining.
Jamie Uys's humorous yet moving film The Gods Must Be Crazy narrates the story of what happens when a pilot flying across the Kalahari Desert of Botswana drops a Coca-Cola bottle into the midst of a tribal group. The confused aboriginals explain the object as a gift from the gods. But the bottle challenges and destroys the traditions and social mores of their world. To defy the object's destructive influence, the tribe sends out one of its members to toss the evil thing over the edge of the earth, a distance the clan believes is some twenty days' walk away. Uys's movie was so popular on the international market that its producers created a sequel. The Gods Must Be Crazy offered a conspicuous sample of American consumer imperialism and its victimization of the Third World. Released in 1981, the film struck a vital chord in the middle of what has come to be known as "The Grand Debate": Have Americans become cultural imperialists? Do manufacturers, policymakers, and other interest groups attempt to conquer and corrupt the rest of the world by flooding it with consumer products made in the United States of America?
Have Americans become cultural imperialist? What do you think? =)
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5 comments:
certainly that America has been the biggest cultural imperialist. What we wear and what we eat today has been influenced by America and the West. Even fork and spoon are invented by the West. Hence, Asian like us really being influenced by the Western.
Well, nowadays Westerns are learning Chinese to do business in China and to understand the Chinese culture
Interesting topic and also something which may leave us to think about such cultural imperialism. A great view on how these people are influenced.
As our marketing professor told us.... we don't need to follow what the Western way, but we choose to. I think the greatest influence comes from the MEDIA.
Hey Ming Hong, intersting comment! Its true also that the whites are learning chinese too to communicate better with the vast amount of people that can speak chinese. They are cultural imperialist too. But as to whether china or America is a bigger cultural imperialist, I still think that America is a bigger one. yea
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