On 3/23/07, ravi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At around 23/3/07 7:34 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
> BEHIND THE NEWS with Doug Henwood
>
> March 1, 2007 Evelyn McDonnell, author of Mamarama, on music and
> motherhood * Omar Lizardo (paper here) on how globalization is not
> homogenizing culture
I have to say... I could take only about 15 minutes of listening to this
guy (Lizardo) before I had to delete the above segment lest I destroy my
computer in anger ;-). I was hoping to post a detailed critique of what
he had to say on my blog, but I haven't yet mustered up the stomach to
give it a second listen. Right at the beginning the guy limits the idea
to what [some] fellow first world'ers have written in the past and
triumphantly announces that the effects on Europe (of globalisation) are
quite the opposite of the dire predictions. As part of his argument he
critiques his predecessors/opponents for not really being there (in
Europe, etc) and witnessing/studying the actual effect of globalisation.
He then extends this argument to other countries. However, I am
extremely sceptical that he spent any time in these countries studying
the effect of the import/imposition of US pop culture.
I got around to taking a look at an article by Omar Lizardo.
According to him, theory of cultural imperialism argues that the more
economically disadvantaged people are in the world economy, the more
Westernized popular culture they consume. Naturally, he finds no
evidence for that.*
But what if that's not the point of the cultural aspect of
imperialism? What if the point is to socialize the top 20% or so of
nations in the South as well as the top 40% or so of nations in the
North -- the power elite, the ruling class, and those who serve them
in administrative, ideological, and other capacities -- into the
tastes, habits, beliefs, etc. that lead them to think that the best
thing they can do for their nations is to integrate them into the
multinational empire led by Washington, even if social costs of doing
so are high? In other words, what if the point is globalization of
the cultural aspects of the class formation described by Kees van der
Pijl in The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984,
<http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/atlanticrulingclass/>)?
* Here are relevant passages where he makes his argument most clearly.
"All of these empirical predictions are in severe disagreement to what
we would expect given the cultural imperialism, and some versions of
the 'national strategies' (Crane 2002) approach, which imply a
positive association between the consumption of Westernized and
'Americanized' global popular culture and a disadvantaged position in
the world economy or the interstate system (because weaker states are
assumed to be more easily bullied and manipulated by global
transnational media industries or are less likely to have the
[political, material, social] resources to implement policies of
'resistance' against global cultural flows)" (Omar Lizardo,
"Globalization and Culture: A Sociological Perspective," 10 Feb 2007,
p. 13).
"However, the media imperialism hypothesis has a hard time accounting
for why $B!= (Bas shown in Figure 2 $B!= (Bthe majority of low income societies
(60%) are below the zero point in the y $B!> (Baxis (that is, they consume
more domestic popular music than international popular music). 3
According to the cultural imperialism thesis (Schiller 1991), these
societies should instead be in thrall of and thus overrun by the
global American popular culture industry" (p. 16).
"If the cultural imperialism account is correct, we should expect to
observe a negative association between levels of economic development
and the degree of foreign penetration by the U.S. film Industry" (p.
22).
"According the cultural imperialism model, the least economically
advantaged societies should be the ones most dependent on cultural
imports such as foreign films, and therefore the direct effect of
socioeconomic development on foreign film imports should be negative"
(p. 25).
--
Yoshie
