At 07:10 PM 1/13/98 -0500, starbird/anzalone wrote, as quoted by Lou Proyect:
>During a heated cold war U.N. debate (I believe the issue was whether or
>not the U.S. should be allowed to dictate policy to a souvereign nation;
>Cuba?) Krushchev spoke/cajoled, yelled and beat his shoe against the table.
>Krushchev, who liked to use stories from his culture to narrate his
>political points made reference to a well known (in the USSR) folktale
>about a widow who sought justice/acknowledgement repeatedly and
>tenatiously, even from beyond the grave.
>
>The U.N. translator, unable to adequately (and expiditiously, translations
>being simultaneous) provide the cultural context for the colloquialism
>Krshchev employed blurted out the phrase you and the rest of U.S.
>subsequently attributed to Krushchev while pumping down the wastebin our
>nation's every available tax dollar for a massive nuclear melt down.
>
>We get more interesting lessons from history when we get the facts
>straight, but we don't get them straight very often in the U.S. despite our
>technologically fancy data bases and infastructure. Isn't that interesting?
My comment (WS):
That is an interesting story indeed. It reminds me of "classical"
anthropological experiments in which subjects from one culture are asked to
re-tell stories from another culture: the effect is a substantial
alteration not only of the structure of the narrative, but also of the
meaning. The question is, however, whether the US story tellers, the media
and the academe, distort other-culture stories more than average alien
observers do?
The media researcher Herbert Gans once concluded that most news stories
told in the US media take the form of the small-town morality play; i.e. a
psycho-drama with "good" and "bad" characters struggling for power, linear
and predictable narrtive in which the good always wins over evil, and the
moral invariably promoting watered-down judeo-christian-bourgeois values.
In that sense, the morality-play narrative is a cognitive filter through
which all foreign information bits are passed.
Furthermore, the same filter is implemented in media targeting diverse
audiences, from the National Enquirer to the NPR's All Things Considered.
These media might differ in cultural content:
outer-space-aliens-Elvis-Presley-bible-prophecies mix in the NE versus
foreign-countries-celebrity-science-mysteries mix in ATC, but they show
high degree of structural equivalence in how they construct their
narratives. These rules can be outlined as follows:
1. Semantics or selection of characters: all characters featuring in a
narrative are allovariants of characters meaninful in the American context;
that is, while their outside appearance my have a local flavor (e.g. a
foreign name, peculiar custom, etc.) it is essentially recognizable as a
character similar to that in the US mythology. For example, characters in
ATC's stories are cast as upper- middle or lower-middle class individual
who adher to essentially the same set of values as their American
counterparts: upward mobility, good job, own home, marriage, 2 and 1/2
kids, and so on and so forth. The bad characters also share the same
characteristics taken from a morality play: obsessive fixation with
ideology/religion, greed, selfishness, etc.
2. Syntax or constructing the narrative. The narrative almost invariably
follows the +-+ pattern: positive state of affairs is being temporarily
disturbed, but in the end the disturbance is overcome or corrected. In a
Hollywood-style narrative, that may take the form of a peaceful family or
community being disturbed by the bad character who temporarily wins, only
to be defeted in the end by the good character. In NPR style narratives,
the disturbance takes the the form of historical or natural forces: a
"Marxist regime" economic backwardness, foreign domination by US enemies
(US and its client states never dominated a sovereign country, only made
'policy mistakes'), corrupt politicians, natural disasters, etc. that are
successfully dealth with by the protagonist. Incidentally, the same
narrative is recommended in personal essays attached with application to
graduate schools (write about your past disadvantage or difficulty you
successfully overcame).
3. Contextualization. The narrative is often placed in the US context that
influences its interpretation. For example, stories broadcast around
Thanksgiving will feature an immigrant theme, stories broadcast around
Christimas will feature a charity theme, etc.
In a word, the American popular mythology is highly repetitive and showing
little variations. It is stale, predictable, provincial and boring,
comparing to similar products in Europe (again, this is based on my
impressionistic accounts rather than a systematic comparison). That
conditioning, in my view, makes Americans highly susceptible to
misinterpretation of foreign narratives, more so than "alien observers"
from other countries who, IMHO, are more aware of possible cognitive
dissonances foreign narratives might create.
That does not mean that non-American observers show a "politicaly correct"
attitude toward a foreign text - they often trash and ridicule it; but they
are more likely to recognize that text's distinctivess rather than fitting
that text into the Procrustean bed of small-town morality play.
wojtek sokolowski
institute for policy studies
johns hopkins university
baltimore, md 21218
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
voice: (410) 516-4056
fax: (410) 516-8233
