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Cultural Imperialism

Cultural ImperialismLane CrothersIllinois State University

Introduction

Even at first glance, the words “cultural imperialism” are striking. The

tension between the two words is strong. “Culture,” after all, speaks to those

aspects of human life that shape and define us. Culture engages our

language, our social practices, our values and our ideals. To be “cultural” is

to be human.

“Imperialism,” by contrast, suggests the destruction of some way of

life by another. It evokes the notion of one group of humans interacting with

another not in cooperation but in conquest. One group or community seeks

to dominate another by destroying the cultural essence that defined the

dominated group. One culture, in effect, dies—or perhaps more accurately, is

destroyed—by another, stronger group.

While the concept of “cultural imperialism” is relatively new, cultural

imperialism has been common across time. History is replete with examples.

The Roman Empire sought to turn the known world “Roman.” China’s

multiple dynasties made a similar effort but with China as the center of the

world. The Roman Catholic Church aided, abetted and assisted the extension

of European colonial power across Asia, Africa and Latin and South America

to advance the cause of creating a global Catholicism. It took Western

Europeans less than 300 years to conquer, replace and very nearly obliterate

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the indigenous persons who had inhabited the Western Hemisphere for

30,000 years. The plain fact of thousands of years of human history is that

various groups and communities have sought to and successfully managed

to destroy and replace others. This may not be seen as right or moral by

contemporary ethical standards, but it is nonetheless true.

The concept of cultural imperialism is not usually employed to describe

the whole of human history, however. Rather, since the 1970s those using

this term have usually focused on the United States as a new kind of global

power potentially capable of dominating not just the world’s economic and

political life, but its cultural life as well. Whether in economic, military or

cultural affairs, analysts and commentators have worried that the United

States’ global reach and appeal is so strong that other societies would see

their distinctive cultures replaced by some Americanized alternative. These

concerns have only multiplied in the context of contemporary globalization, a

period in which the United States’ cultural and economic power has

extended to places previously unreached by its effects. The fear is that as a

consequence of US cultural imperialism, the world might not be a diverse

place with lots of ways of life, but instead could become a version of the

United States in language, economy and social norms.

This chapter explores the development of the concept of cultural

imperialism paying particular attention to why, exactly, persons around the

world have expressed fears about the imperial power of American culture.

The chapter then offers a critique of the cultural imperialism concept

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grounded in the notions of adaptation and hybridity. Finally, the chapter

concludes with a discussion of the long-term prospects for cultural

imperialism in our globalizing world.

A Brief History of the Concept of Cultural Imperialism

The concept of “cultural imperialism,” rather than the practice of cultural

imperialism, is a relatively new one in political history. It first emerged for

wide consideration in Latin and South America in the late 1960s. With the

United States’ allegedly imperial war in Vietnam as background, writers like

Antonio Pasquali and Mario Kaplún drew on analyses from Louis Althusser,

Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School to

assess and evaluate the growing influence of the United States’ economic

and cultural products in what today is often termed the “Global South” Their

insights joined with those of Armand Mattelart, Herbert Schiller and Dallas

Smythe to shape early analyses of cultural imperialism [1].

Echoing Frankfurt School predecessors worried that communications

media could distort and remake persons’ cultures and values in ways that

empowered the elites who controlled those technologies, early analysts of

cultural imperialism worried that the United States would link its military and

economic power to its cultural appeal to establish cultural hegemony on a

global scale. American corporations—especially but not exclusively

audiovisual (AV) industries like movies, music and television—would

overwhelm local industries and firms as they extended their scope across

international boundaries. In such circumstances, global corporations and the

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United States government could interact to compel, through a variety of

economic and other means, weaker societies to transform themselves into

rough copies of American society. Over time, then, local communities unable

to resist the spread of global capitalism would lose their distinctive social

and cultural practices, including their languages, as they were replaced by

norms, values, ideals and behaviors conducive to the spread of and support

for global capitalism. As Schiller put it in 1976:

The concept of cultural imperialism today best describes the sum of

the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world

system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced

and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to,

or even promote, the value and structures of the dominating center of

the system [2].

As Schiller notes, the mechanisms of cultural imperialism are many.

Ideology plays a key role in the process of drawing various communities into

the cultural orbit of the imperial power, for example. As Edward Said most

famously argued, modern imperialism legitimates the act of replacing one

culture with another by constructing a fundamental misapprehension of the

“Other” culture. Said notes that the imperial culture both: 1) fails to

understand and appreciate the complex details and history of the culture it

seeks to dominate, preferring to construct a false image of the “Other” as

barbarians and savages in need of “civilizing”; and 2) uses this false image

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of the cultural Other to justify the Other’s destruction [3]. Cultural

imperialism, then, is more than just a process of replacing one set of social

mores, practices, languages and ways of being with another’s. It is a self-

justifying act of cultural erasure.

Violence can also play a role in cultural imperialism. Political scientists

Samuel Huntington and Benjamin Barber have suggested that violent culture

clash is inevitable in their respective books, The Clash of Civilizations and

Jihad vs McWorld. Huntington argues that one’s civilization is the highest

social order to which one can be reasonably be said to belong. One common

civilizational boundary is that of religion. Thus, for example, Huntington

argues that one is either within the general confines of the Judeo-Christian

religious tradition, or one is not. Huntington predicts violent conflicts in

communities where adherents of the Judeo-Christian tradition literally run

into followers of other traditions, particularly Islam. Importantly, such

civilizational conflict is often zero-sum: one usually ends up Christian or

Muslim (in this example) based on who wins the war of the borderlands [4].

Benjamin Barber, in Jihad vs McWorld, argues that the values,

products, and processes of globalization inevitably provoke what he calls

"jihad," or "bloody holy war on behalf of partisan identity that is

metaphysically defined and fanatically defended” [5]. Jihad is in symbiotic

tension with “McWorld,” which Barber defines as those parts of the world

where ideas and traditions and persons flow freely across borders and

cultures. Jihad can flare up against McWorld either across the kinds of

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political boundaries that Huntington describes or within countries where

some areas are globally integrated while others are not. In such

circumstances, Barber notes that it is common for violence to be deployed in

defense of a particular way of life—or in an effort to destroy it.

The replacing of one culture by another need not be a violent, directly

destructive act, however. As political scientist Joseph Nye has argued, power

has a “soft” as well as a “hard” side. If hard power is direct force, such as the

use of a military to defeat an enemy , soft power is the appeal of a society’s

goods, ideals, values and cultural practices. It is the lure of ways of life that

seem better, richer, more dynamic. This soft appeal, Nye notes, is a profound

power for the United States since American cultural values and products are

broadly admired around the world. Accordingly, Nye argues, it is possible

and even preferable for the United States to seek to shape world politics by

exploiting the soft power of American culture rather than the hard power of

American might [6].

Cultural imperialism, then, is the systematic and fundamental

replacing of one way of life with another, whether through direct overthrow

or gradual displacement. As Downing, Mohammadi and Sreberny-

Mohammadi put it in 1995:

Cultural imperialism signifies the dimensions of the process that go

beyond economic exploitation or military force. In the history of

colonialism, (i.e., the form of imperialism in which the government of the

colony is run by foreigners), the educational and media systems of many

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Third World countries have been set up as replicas of those in Britain,

France, or the United States and carry their values. Western advertising

has made further inroads, as have architectural and fashion styles. Subtly

but powerfully, the message has been insinuated that Western cultures

are superior to the cultures of the Third World [7].

The resulting culture so closely adheres to the imperialist’s that members of

the conquered society may not even notice that “their” culture has been

destroyed. Instead, they will have been integrated into a new, “better”

system—one which is a reflection of the dominant power’s cultural order.

The United States as Cultural Imperialist

Early proponents of cultural imperialism theory paid particular attention to

the products of the American audiovisual industry—an industry whose

components are often collectively summarized with the label “Hollywood.”

The reason for this is clear: while other American products have significant

global presence, American movies, music and television programs have been

globally pervasive for most of the last century.

As of the end of 2011, for example, most of the worldwide top-grossing

films were recognizably American. They had themes and values recognizably

American, were made either by American or American-based studios, were

set in an American context, or starred Americans. Taking this definition of

“American” as a starting point, the list of biggest grossing movies includes

the top-selling film all time, Avatar, which had worldwide ticket sales

exceeding $2 billion, as well as other American blockbusters like Jurassic

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Park, Independence Day, Star Wars (three of its six parts), The Lion King, and

Spider-Man 2 and 3. Of the top fifty movies of all time (by box office), thirty-

three, or sixty-six percent, were American. Notably, not only were these films

recognizably American, in most cases they had greater sales overseas than

in the United States. (Of the remaining eighteen films, fourteen were

segments of three film franchises: Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, and

Pirates of the Caribbean) [8].

Similarly, the most popular music genres across the planet—rock,

country and hip hop—were created in the United States and can be seen to

express American cultural and social values []. A brief review of the top-

selling albums of all time offers one way to assess the dominance of

American music. As of November 2011, for example, there were twenty-

seven albums that were certified to have sold at least 15 million copies

worldwide. Sixteen were created by Americans: The Eagles' Their Greatest

Hits tied with Michael Jackson's Thriller for the number-one selling album of

all time at 29 million sales. Other albums on the list included works by Billy

Joel, Boston, Hootie and the Blowfish, Garth Brooks, and Guns n' Roses.

Notably, the top-selling non-American albums were made by groups

performing in genres created by Americans: rock (Pink Floyd's The Wall; Led

Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV; the Beatles' The Beatles) and country (Canadian

Shania Twain's Come on Over) [10].

Finally, even the newest of the AV industries, television, has an

American global tint. The most popular television programs in the world are

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American, and global television audiences are regularly offered broadcasts of

older American movies. For example, the American television show CSI:

Crime Scene Investigation is now the most popular program in the world

[11], and Four American television shows—The Simpsons (season one), Sex

and the City (complete season one), the HBO series Band of Brothers, and

Seinfeld (seasons one and two) are on Amazon.com’s top twenty-five in DVD

[12]. In 1996, of the 50,000 hours of fiction broadcast in the five major

European markets, only 8.42 percent of programming was produced in

Europe. Most of the rest of those 50,000 hours were filled by American

television programs and broadcasts of American movies [13].

When evaluating the power and appeal of American culture and its

potential power as an imperial force it is important to remember that

American culture’s appeal extends beyond its AV industries. The list of

globally pervasive American cultural products is too large to create, but

consider that American styles of clothing like blue jeans have become

globally ubiquitous. American sports like basketball and baseball have large

global audiences; professional American football is making an effort to join

the ranks of American sports played worldwide. McDonald’s has over 32,000

restaurants worldwide and is expanding rapidly [14]. It is committed to

opening at least one McDonald’s in China every day for the next three to four

years, for example [15]. Coca Cola is globally prominent and has what one

agency has termed the most valuable brand in the world [16]. Apple

Computers has grown from a small garage-based operation to the most

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valuable corporation in the history of capitalism [17]. The devices it builds,

from the iPod through the iPad, iPhone, MacBook laptops and iMac desktop

computers have powered much of the socially networked connectivity

revolution in communications that has come to characterize the modern age.

Finally, more than one billion people worldwide have joined Facebook’s social

network site, and Facebook has become a tool by which global corporations

can market and build brand identity for their products [18]. It has also been

used as a platform for promoting and organizing political revolutions like

those commonly called the “Arab Spring.”

While one might think that things like fast food restaurants, clothing

styles and entertainment media are particularly consequential in shaping

(and reshaping) cultures. it is not difficult to understand why the cultural

effects of one American product—say, McDonald’s—might become

worrisome when connected to the cultural influence of blue jeans and hip

hop and Disney and all the other cultural artifacts that spread from the

United States around the world. After all, American pop culture products are

particularly appealing to younger people. As often happens with new

technologies or practices, it is younger people who are most likely to be first

adopters of the newer entertainment or behavior. When this happens, many

cultural traditionalists fear that this embrace of new ways of living signals an

end to their established cultural way of life. This fear rises because, as is

discussed later in this chapter, when one’s community evolves as people

grow and adapt to circumstances that arise over time, changes appear

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normal and natural. However, when it appears that values and ideas are

imposed on a group by others—outsiders—people tend to resist change. This

is particularly the case when it seems that the most naive, least experienced

persons in a community (e.g., young people) actively and willingly adopt

“alien” principles and practices—like happens when young people flock to

Facebook, become fans of hip hop, obsess over the next Batman movie or

otherwise embrace American products like those made in Hollywood. In such

circumstances it is common for cultural traditionalists to fear and resist the

integration of “alien” cultural products into “their” culture. Thus the appeal

that American cultural products hold among many younger people seems to

older people to portend that their community is at risk of destruction by

American cultural imperialism.

Such fears are grounded in the fact that American cultural norms,

values and practices can be shown to have real effects in other societies. To

take McDonald’s as an example, there is evidence that many Asian countries

have seen changes in their cultural practices resulting from the integration of

McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants into their communities. It was

once rare for Japanese people to eat with their hands, for example, but is

becoming more common as fast food restaurants increase in number in that

country. Whereas Chinese people have no history of lining up single file

waiting to be served, preferring a more free form style of ordering and

getting food, McDonald’s has imposed the single file line on this cultural

norm: when one eats at McDonald’s in China, one waits in line to take one’s

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turn. And where it was once rare for people from Hong Kong to know their

specific birth date, since days mattered only to the degree they figured later

in life for making horoscopes about marriage and other important life

choices, specific birth dates have come to matter there for the simple reason

that parents need to know when to schedule their child’s McDonald’s

birthday party [19].

Such cultural changes can remake more than cultural rituals. Local

business practices and norms might change as well. George Ritzer has

suggested that there might be a “McDonaldization” of various societies as

local businesses are forced to adopt McDonald’s (and the other global

corporations’) business practices to compete won a global stage [20]. All

businesses everywhere can develop a sameness to them that washes away

cultural distinctiveness in favor of an artificial universalism—as anyone who

has visited an international airport has seen.

Just as ways of engaging in economic activities can change as American

culture products and practices come into new societies, so too, can a

community’s environment and ecology change. McDonald’s (to continue the

example) is a hamburger restaurant, after all, and so requires large amounts

of beef to stay in business. Accordingly, whole ecosystems have been

remade to satisfy McDonald’s need for hamburger. But hamburger is only

part of the story. The company’s restaurants need potatoes and chicken and

buns and fry oil and condiments and soda products and packaging materials

to remain open. And that of course, is just McDonald’s: American culture

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comes in jeans and sports and movies and music as well. Combined, such

forces can effect an array of cultural, social and ecological changes that can

in turn have a profoundly transformative effect on a population’s eating,

farming and cultural habits. In time, such changes can reshape the kinds of

common cultural practices that have defined a community for generations.

This brief discussion of the scope and influence of American cultural

products points to their potential to disrupt and remake social and cultural

relations worldwide. Sociologist Todd Gitlin has gone so far as to suggest

that we need to see American popular culture as “the latest in a long

succession of bidders for global unification. It succeeds the Latin imposed by

the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, and Marxist Leninism” [21]. To

the degree that cultural products are carriers of cultural values, then, the

integration of new cultural artifacts into existing cultures can change those

cultures in substantial ways. As French President Francois Mitterand put it in

1993, “creations of the spirit are not just commodities; the elements of

culture are not pure business. What is at stake is the cultural identity of all

our nations—it is the freedom to create and choose our own images. A

society which abandons the means of depicting itself would soon be an

enslaved society” [22]. In such a world, local distinctiveness and cultural

uniqueness would be subsumed into globally available, corporate-controlled

products marketed and managed to maximize corporate profit. A peculiarly

inauthentic American version of “culture” would be left, one which could be

manipulated to the benefit of capitalist interests rather than being the

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expression of a people’s way of life.

Critiquing Cultural Imperialism

As might be expected for any concept as complex and wide-ranging as

cultural imperialism, the idea has been subject to numerous critiques. Some

of these are of the power relationships embedded in the term. Others derive

from the concepts of cultural hybridity and cultural change. A third category

centers on the methods by which the concept has been tested.

The Agency Problem

One group of criticisms of the notion of cultural imperialism is grounded on a

rebuke of the relations of power implicit in the concept. Analysts employing

the concept of cultural imperialism regularly imagine that cultural

imperialism exists when what are seen as weaker cultures are influenced by

the ideas, practices, norms, products and values of stronger cultures. In this

view, so-called “weaker” cultures are passive: they simply receive the

artifacts of hegemonic cultures, which in turn displace the ways of life once-

prevalent in the subject community. Much like a stronger military force

overwhelming a weaker one, the dominant culture rolls over a helpless foe,

leaving cultural devastation in its wake.

What is missing from this account, critics note, is any sense of agency

on the part of the “weaker” culture’s members. After all, actual people have

to adapt and adopt the “stronger” culture’s ways, and they can be expected

to accept new ways of life for any number of reasons [23]. All change is not

necessarily the result of imperial actions.

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When McDonald’s opened a store in Zacatecas, the last state in Mexico

to have one, for example, Harper’s reporter Jake Silverstein traveled to the

region to interview people about how the restaurant might change their

traditional way of life. Fear of cultural imperialism lay at the heart of his

intended story: the reporter imagined that McDonald’s represented or

augured substantial changes in this formerly McDonald’s-free zone. However,

locals in Zacatecas did not see things this way at all. As one respondent put

it, if he wanted to heat up leftovers from last night’s dinner for lunch, he was

free to do so. If he wanted he could go to McDonald’s. The new restaurant

was not seen as a threat to the old way. Instead, it simply added an option to

one’s life [24].

Put another way, the men and women of Zacatecas did not think of

themselves as passive victims of a global mega-corporation. Instead, they

saw themselves as agents, as people capable of making choices. It is true, of

course, that integrating McDonald’s into Zacatecas might well change the

established culture there, but such changes were not perceived solely as the

imposition of an alien, hegemonic way of life onto a helpless culture.

What is true for individuals can be true for societies as well. Numerous

countries and communities have constructed laws to attempt to challenge or

reduce the spread and cultural power of American culture. In 2001, for

example, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization, passed a Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. That

document insisted that cultural diversity is a "common heritage of humanity"

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and was ratified by member states in December 2006; it went into

international effect in March 2007 [25].

International trade agreements have likewise featured language

governing and seeking to protect local cultural products and practices

against American competition. One, the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs

and Trade (GATT), set in motion the economic integration central to so much

of globalization today. GATT contained explicit language that allowed the

European film industry to protect their domestic markets from American

products as a tool to rebuild their economies and reestablish their

communities after the devastation of World War Two. Similar language has

remained in successive GATT treaties, as well as in discussions at the World

Trade Organization (WTO) that succeeded GATT in 1995. Such cultural

exemptions have continued, it should be emphasized, despite the United

States’ consistent efforts to have protections for local cultural products and

producers removed from these agreements [26].

Efforts to protect local culture from alleged American imperialism have

been undertaken at the national level as well. Perhaps the most famous

example is France’s law 94-665, passed in August 1994. Law 94-665 requires

that French "shall be the language of instruction, work, trade and exchanges

and of public services.” The law states: "The use of French shall be

mandatory for the designation, offer, presentation, instructions for use, and

descriptions of the scope and conditions of a warranty of goods, products

and services, as well as bills and receipts. The same provisions apply to any

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written, spoken, radio and television advertisement" [27]. French authorities

have in fact used this law to punish numerous companies and organizations

that have advertised in or used English to promote their work. Affected

institutions have included American pop culture mega-maker, the Walt

Disney Company, as well as British cosmetics company The Body Shop and

Georgia Tech University [28].

France is not alone in its efforts to protect its cultural heritage from

American imperialism. In 2005, for example, Venezuela passed a law

requiring radio stations to play music of Venezuelan origin at least 50% of

the time. The nation also played a key role in derailing negotiations over

CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which Venezuela

alleged would provide the United States too much access to South and

Central American markets. China has worked to keep American culture and

products out of its society: it aggressively censors its internet access to the

wider world, and resisted opening a Disney theme park in Shanghai even

after allowing the opening of one in Hong Kong because, officials explained,

Disney wanted to broadcast its programming on Chinese television to

introduce the Chinese market to Disney’s characters while China did not

want Disney to do this [29].

Clearly then, neither societies nor individuals are simply passive

recipients of hegemonic, usually American, cultural artifacts. They have

agency, and can influence how American culture influences theirs—at least

to some degree. Failure to account for this fact undermines simplistic

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analyses of cultural imperialism.

Cultural Change

The question of agency leads to a second criticism of the cultural imperialism

concept: the fact that cultures change. Whether we recognize it at the time

or not, cultures change continuously. As a consequence it is not always clear

whether a given change is the result of “imperialism” or is the result of what

seem to culture members to have been ordinary, reasonable changes over

time.

Political scientist Harry Eckstein has identified at least three types of

cultural change. One is pattern-maintaining change. Such change occurs

when new technologies, artifacts, ideas and practices enter a society but are

generally understood to reinforce the cultural norms already in place [30].

For example, while cars have replaced horses in the United States, the

underlying practice of people using a technology to go to work, run errands,

or otherwise be more productive than they would be on foot remained a

cultural norm. Automobiles empowered people even as they changed the

cultural landscape. Accordingly, core patterns remained even as cultural

practices changed.

A second type of change Eckstein finds is change towards complexity.

This is the type of change in which a culture develops new roles, ideas and

rituals and integrates them into its practices [31]. Examples can include the

inclusion of women in the paid workforce, or the development of a space

program. Where once a community did not conceptualize a role for women in

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public life, or did not have proverbial rocket scientists in it, it now does.

Accordingly, the culture is significantly more complex than it once was.

The third type of change Eckstein describes is cultural disruption.

Unlike the case with both pattern-maintaining change and change toward

complexity, cultural disruption typically occurs rapidly. A society’s norms,

rituals and practices are overwhelmed and incapable of dealing with the

circumstances facing the community [32]. Disruption is typical, for example,

when one group of people loses a war: the enemy that won the war is in a

position to force the losing side to change or alter its cultural practices. A

similar disruption can occur in the face of natural disaster or disease:

traditional ways of life can collapse when the community can no longer

survive in new contexts. Cultures get disrupted as a consequence.

Cultural imperialism, as a concept, embodies fear of this third type of

change. The concept suggests that cultural imperialism occurs when some

alien force enters a community and undermines its core values in favor of

those of the imperial power. A cultural other is imagined to invade and

occupy a native community and transform local values into those of the

occupier.

But as a practical matter the constancy of cultural change makes it

difficult to unpack just when cultural change is imperialist versus when it is

seen as beneficial, wanted, or worth doing. Change towards complexity can

be culturally disruptive, for example. The integration of women into the paid

workforce is an obvious case of such change: whatever the causes, the

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transition from women working primarily in the home/domestic sphere to

women working outside the home/in the public sphere has remade the

social, political, economic and cultural patterns of numerous societies.

Disruptive effects can result from adaptive processes.

The difficulty in distinguishing disruptive from maintaining or

diversifying cultural change is nicely captured by the concept of cultural

hybridity. Hybridity can be roughly defined as "mixing," or "the ways in

which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with

new forms and new practices” [33]. As a practical matter, all of us live in

cultures that have borrowed and adapted from others. Consequently, what

seem to be core dimensions of unique cultures often turn out, on closer

inspection, to be hybrid forms.

To take one example as illustration, consider the horse cultures of the

Native American tribes of the Great Plains. No indigenous American had ever

seen a horse until Christopher Columbus brought them with him on his

second journey to the Western Hemisphere in 1493. Accordingly, the horses

that became central to the cultures of the Great Plains tribes were not

indigenous to those groups. They were, instead, cultural adaptations to an

alien cultural artifact.

Notably, a case can be made that the integration of horses into Native

American culture was the result of disruptive cultural imperialism: horses

were alien, came from a distant place, and transformed the communities

they entered. Millions of indigenous persons died in the aftermath of

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European contact. Some local cultures flourished while others faded. Whole

ways of life were remade. The horse was a powerful tool of cultural change.

Yet it is hard to imagine members of the great horse cultures

perceiving things quite this way. Horses obviously changed the way their

societies worked compared to the past, but those changes emerged over

time. Transport, travel and hunting might not have followed the old ways

anymore, and fighting would have changed from foot- to horse-borne

conflict. But to members of a horse culture, horses would have seemed as

“normal” as the absence of horses had seemed to Native Americans who had

never seen a horse.

In other words, cultural hybridities that seem normal, appropriate and

deeply embedded in one’s culture today might well have been the result of a

disruptive and transformative cultural conflict in the past. It is simply not

possible to know what elements of a given culture will interact with those of

another, to what end, before such contacts occur. What follows is often, as

Jan Nederveen Pieterse has argued, cultural mélange—a system in which

many new cultural forms emerge in a constantly evolving process [34].

Marwan Kraidy has gone so far as to state that cultural hybridity is the likely

endpoint of globalization [35]. Defining exactly what is and is not cultural

imperialism in a world constantly creating hybrid forms is a difficult process

at best.

Methodology

A final group of objections to the concept of cultural imperialism rests on

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concerns about the methods used to both define and assess the concept. Let

the following discussion stand in for a primer on the difficulty of translating

an apparently powerful and appealing concept—cultural imperialism—into

empirical social science.

The Concept of Imperialism: Imperialism is a complex and multi-

faceted phenomenon. Notably, the concept emerged in a time when the

intersection of local and colonial powers tended to be overtly hostile: one

group moved to a region of the world in which they were not indigenous to

build economic, social and political systems derived from their home

societies, not local ones. Whether for political, military, religious, economic

or other reasons—or for all of them—imperial forces overtly entered another

society and sought to reshape it for the benefit of the imperial power.

Importantly, however, as the discussion of culture change and hybridity

offered earlier in this section suggests, it can be hard to label cultural change

as a product of imperial action: some amount of change is likely with or

without imperialism, and it does not follow that just because change occurs it

is the result of or works to the benefit of imperial forces. It is hard to claim

some change or another is a result of cultural imperialism if it is not clear

what is imperial about the change that is taking place [36].

The Concept of Culture: Culture, to paraphrase Supreme Court

Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment about pornography, is hard to

define but you know it when you see it. Everyone lives an enculturated life:

we have languages and social mores and ways of doing things and rites and

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traditions and rituals that orient ourselves one to the other, creating

distinctive ways of life that seem to unite an “us” and distinguish “us” from

“them.” Yet it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to specifically define what

is “culture” and not nature, or self-interest, or ideology, or some other factor

known to affect human life. Scholars have adopted many different

perspectives to “culture,” and many insist that only one explanation or

definition is true or worth examining [37]. Accordingly, one of the criticisms

leveled at the notion of cultural imperialism is that those who employ the

concept of culture in their research cannot persuasively explain what it is

that is undergoing imperial conquest. One cannot have “cultural”

imperialism if “culture” cannot be shown to exist, its importance affirmed,

and the consequences of changing it demonstrated.

The Locus of Culture: It is hard to determine exactly where

“culture” resides as an operative force in our lives. Some scholars argue that

culture is an inculcated set of traits that serve as filters and frames on our

thinking, meaning that if one wants to assess “culture,” one should

ask/assess culture at the individual level, seeing how it shapes individual

ideas and behaviors. Other scholars argue that culture is an extrinsic

phenomenon, like a force of nature, that shapes behavior and attitudes by

embedding us in webs of rituals and mores that we enact in order to fit in

amongst our group of cultural cohabitators [38]. Scholars interested in the

internal dimension of culture typically use survey research or other

individual-level data to aggregate individual ideas and attitudes into an

23


understanding of a culture’s terms and contents, while those who focus on

the extrinsic components of culture focus on social norms and rituals that

shape human life as they explain social and political phenomena. Debates

about how to define and operationalize culture for empirical study are a

constant feature of culture research of any type and inevitably challenge

assertions that some change or another is a result of “imperialism” as

opposed to resulting from one’s conception of culture.

Conclusion

In many ways, the cultural imperialism thesis has lost much of its initial

punch. The complexity of the underlying concepts and the difficulty in

translating concepts into an actionable empirical research program have

diluted the intensity of the critique of Western, particularly American, culture

embedded in the term. Thus even as the process known as globalization has

promoted a multiplying number of contacts among American culture and

cultural artifacts and the broader world, specific allegations that American

culture is an imperial force remaking the world have abated.

Whatever the terminology used to describe the global effects of

American cultural influence in a globalizing world, however, it is clear that

American culture and its products will be a central component of cultural

interchanges worldwide for the foreseeable future. As was noted earlier in

this chapter, Facebook recently surpassed the one billion member mark

worldwide, and seems positioned to remain a prominent platform for the

promotion of any number of ideas and messages for a long time to come.

24


Similarly, advances in digital technology like mobile phones, tablets and

other handheld devices connected to the internet by cell systems and wifi

provide a rapidly increasing number of platforms through which the content

and style of American culture can reach the broader world. For example,

estimates suggest that the number of internet connected devices will grow

globally from 256,000,000 in 2011 to 1.34 billion by 2016—a growth rate of

56% a year [39]. Only about 700,000,000 people had mobile phones in 2000;

by 2009 at least 3,000,000,000 did. India added 15.6 million cell phones in a

single month alone—March 2009. The number of global mobile phones may

hit 6 billion in 2013 [40]. The world is an increasingly interconnected place,

and American cultural norms and cultural products can be expected to be at

the center of these connections.

Accordingly, at least some attention can reasonably be paid to the

ways that American culture and its artifacts are likely to intersect with and

influence social and political life in the context of globalization. For example,

American products and values can be expected to have a much larger

presence worldwide than global products can be expected to have in the US.

This reality, which Roland Robertson has termed “glocalization,” recognizes

that the megacorporations that create and market so much of what is today

seen as culture have an incentive to being international items into the US

when there is a perceived economic opportunity [41]. Thus a product like

salsa can be brought into the US and enjoyed by lots of people who are not

of Latino/Latina heritage. However, salsa is unlikely to push ketchup and

25


mustard out of American homes in quite the same way McDonald’s might

push local restaurants out of a given community. Moreover, salsa’s status as

a commodity means that salsa is not seen as a cultural product of an alien,

other people. Rather, in the United States it is something enjoyable to eat

largely devoid of cultural significance. Cultural exchanges can occur, but are

usually felt more strongly outside of the US than inside it.

The global spread of American culture is also likely to continue to

promote resistance and fear among groups and peoples facing the United

States’ cultural juggernaut. After all, it is the case that even Americans

sometimes react with uncertainty and fear when new cultural products arise:

both rock and roll and hip hop generated a great deal of pushback from

parents and lawmakers when those musical forms exploded in popularity, for

example. Even in the United States, then, where Americans are quite used to

seeing new products and ideas and whose culture espouses an ethos of

tolerance and freedom, people regularly resist new cultural practices, values

and ideas. Consequently, it does not take substantial effort to imagine why

persons in other communities might react with fear and wonder at the kinds

of American cultural products they and their children are exposed to in our

digitally connected world. Such fears are even more understandable when

we recognize that, from the point of view of people from other cultures,

American products and norms are alien artifacts from a distant place that

arrive in a local community all at once, giving local people little chance to

adapt to them. In such circumstances, conflict seems inevitable regardless of

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what term is used to label it. Thus even if it seems clear that the term

“cultural imperialism” is too vague and too politically charged to provide

much explanatory power to contemporary debates about the globalization of

American culture, the products and artifacts of American culture are going to

be at the heart of the continuing process of globalization around the world.

That is, whether or not one considers American culture to be imperialist, its

products, norms, styles and other artifacts seem likely to be central to how

people around the world experience and react to the globalization of culture.

As the political scientist James Rosenau has thoughtfully explained, it is

a significant irony of the modern age that the very globalizing mechanisms

that make it possible for people to connect across cultural lines also fuel the

fragmentation of older ways of life as well as newly formed social and

political arrangements [42]. American culture, products, values and mores

seem likely to play a key role in this integrating/fragmenting process that

Rosenau called fragmegration, ensuring, as Manfred Steger has put it, that

while the end point of globalization may be globality, "a social condition

characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural, and

environmental interconnections and flows that make many of the currently

existing borders and boundaries irrelevant,” globality itself will never be

achieved [43]. Culture is an elusive, powerful force that seems certain to

remain a point of contestation everywhere human beings greet and meet

each other on our increasingly interconnected planet.

27


Recommended readings

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Barber, Benjamin. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

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Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

Berger, Peter, and Samuel Huntington, eds. Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Chalaby, Jean K. Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005.

Cornell, Grant H., and Eve Walsh Stoddard, eds. Global Multiculturalism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

Cowen, Tyler. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Crothers, Lane. Globalization and American Popular Culture, 3rd. Ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.

Curtin, P.D. Cross Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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Downing, John, Ali Mohammadi and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, eds. Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, 2nd Ed. London: Sage, 1995.

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Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991.

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Discussion questions

1. What is “cultural imperialism”? Why do people fear that the United States is culturally imperialist?

2. What are the major critiques of cultural imperialism as a concept? How do these criticisms affect the notion that the United States is a culturally imperialist power?

3. Does the concept of cultural imperialism add to our understanding and ability to analyze globalization? Or does it detract from such understanding, leading to the conclusion that we should other tools in explaining and assessing the global spread of American and other cultures?

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Notes

1. Colleen Roach, “Cultural Imperialism and Resistance in Media Theory and Literary Theory,” Media, Culture & Society 19 (1997), 47-48.

2. Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination (Armonk, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976), 9.

3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

4. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

5. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996).

6. Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

7. John Downing, Ali Mohammadi and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, eds., Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, 2nd Ed. (London: Sage, 1995), 482.

8. Lane Crothers, Globalization and American Popular Culture, 3rd. Ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 104.

9. Ibid., 85-132.

10. Recording Industry Association of America, "Top 100 Albums," accessed November 23, 2011, http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinum.php?content_selector=top-100-albums.

11. “Most-Watched TV Show In The World Is 'CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,’” accessed October 29, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/14/most-watched-tv-show-in-the-world-csi_n_1597968.html.

12. Chris Boylan, “Amazon.com Announces Top-Selling DVDs of All Time,” accessed November 20, 2011, www.bigpicturebigsound.com/article_535.shtml.

13. “Germany Leads European Production of TV Fiction,” European Audiovisual Laboratory, accessed October 30, 2012, www.obs.coe.int/about/oea/pr/00001138.html.

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14. 2011 Franchise Times, “Top 200 Franchise Systems,” accessed January 26, 2012, www.franchisetimes.com/content/page.php/page=00141.

15. “McDonald’s to Open a Restaurant a Day in China for Four Years,” accessed January 31, 2012, www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-29/mcdonald-s-franchises-to-account-for-up-to-20-of-china-business.html.

16. “2010 Ranking of the Top 100 Brands,” accessed 31 January 2012, www.interbrand.com/en/best-global-brands-2008/best-global-brands-2010.aspx.

17. NASDAQ, “Apple is History’s Richest U.S. Company,” accessed October 5, 2012, http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-is-historys-richest-us-company-20120820-01023#.UG8cZbRNyxo.

18. Geoffrey A. Fowler, “Facebook: One Billion and Counting,” Wall Street Journal Online, accessed October 5, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443635404578036164027386112.html.

19. James L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1-38.

20. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Nature of Contemporary Social Life (London: Sage, 1993).

21. Paul Farhi and Megan Rosenfeld, “American Pop Penetrates Worldwide,” Washington Post (October 25, 1998), A1.

22. Simona Fuma Shapiro, “The Culture Thief,” New Rules Journal (Fall 2000), 10.

23. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991), 90-98.

24. Jake Silverstein, “Grand Opening: Ronald McDonald Conquers New Spain,” Harper’s (January 2005), 67-74.

25. Crothers, Globalization, 190-94.

26. Ibid., 187-190; 194-97.

27. “Law 94-665,” accessed October 12, 2012, www.dglf.culture.gouv.fr/droit/loi-gb.htm.

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28. Crothers, Globalization, 200-01.

29. Ibid., 205-213.

30. Harry Eckstein, “A Culturalist Theory of Cultural Change,” American Political Science Review 82, no. 3 (1988), 789-804.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1991), 231.

34. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 69–71.

35. Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

36. Roach, “Cultural Imperialism,” 47-50; Livingston A. White, “Reconsidering Cultural Imperialism Theory,” Transnational Broadcasting Journal 6 (Spring/Summer 2001), accessed August 22, 2012, www.tbsjournal.com/Archives/Spring01/white.html.

37. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz once pointed out that in an introductory text to the field Clyde Kluckhohn offered eleven definitions of culture in his twenty-seven page chapter on the subject. See Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 4-5.

38. Cf., Gabriel A. Almond, “The Study of Political Culture,” in A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990), 138-156; David J. Elkins and Richard E.B. Simeon, “A Cause in Search of its Effect, or What Does Political Culture Explain,” Comparative Politics 11 (January 1979), 127-145; Marc Howard Ross, “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis,” in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 42-80.

39. Kristina Knight, “Forecast: 56% Increase in Connected Device Shipments by 2016,” Biz Report, January 26, 2012, accessed October 31, 2012, http://www.bizreport.com/2012/01/forecast-56-increase-in-connected-device-shipments-by-2016.html.

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40. “Mobile Marvels,” The Economist, September 24, 2011, accessed December 5, 2011, www.economist.com/node/14483896.

41. Roland Robertson, “Globalisation or Glocalisation?,” Journal of International Communication 1:1 (1994), pp. 33-52.

42. James N. Rosenau, Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond Globalization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

43. Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7–12.

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