Like many American college students, I spent a semester abroad to fully experience what it's like to be foreign. I wanted to improve my Spanish, and I wanted to get out of Europe, so off to Latin America I went. When I got to Chile in 2005 I was struck by the popularity of sushi among fashionable Santiaguinos. My host mother explained that the sushi craze had begun shortly after "Sex and the City" had started to air in Chile. For me, this is a very concrete example of the dynamic described by Miller and Iwabuchi, whereby contra-flows are at their most dynamic when "relying on the power of Western media" (Iwabuchi, IC READER p. 420). Thus, it would seem that Chileans didn't like sushi because they associated it with Japanese culture, but because they associated it with a "world culture" that looked suspiciously like Euro-American culture.
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As a child, I used to spend a lot of time in airports, shuttling back and forth between France and the US. I would entertain myself by playing "Guess my nationality," a game my brother and I invented. We would scope out the other passengers waiting to board international flights, and attempt to discern which flight they would be boarding and what color passport they would be presenting, based solely on their clothes, personal belongings and body language. We got to be very, very good at this. Now, the game is almost impossible as visible aspects of culture converge more and more, at least for the relatively affluent, cosmopolitan people I stare at in the international departures lounges at Dulles, Charles-de-Gaulle and JFK. The world - or at least the bits of it that I inhabit - has become more similar.
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This semester, I'm facilitating the TALK program through International Student and Scholar Services here at AU. Once a week, my co-facilitator guide a group of international and domestic students, randing in age from 18 to 30ish, through a series of exercises and conversations designed to enhance their awareness of other cultures and cultural sensitivity. It's also a forum where international students can work out their culture shock. When the topic of an emerging "world culture" came up, the group was about evenly divided between those who believed that more similarity was good for world peace, as Levi's and Lady Gaga would give people something common to talk about. Other students argued that the blurring of visible differences would make it easier for people to forget about the deeper, more important differences between cultures, thus making it more likely that conflicts would emerge. Classmates, what do you think?
A couple points I would make on this.
ReplyDeleteThe first relates to the game that you described as I had a hard time understanding your point fully. That is, on what level would you define the "visual aspects of culture converging?" My initial reaction to this is that this presents an increase in economic networks, but not necessarily also an increase in networks that can be connected to a "global culture," at least on the same de-nationalizing level as your sushi example. While the markets of some products may have expanded, there's no reason not to believe that cultural influences play no part in the incorporation of those products. For example, I'd wonder about the general nationality about people who walked around with jeans with holes in the knees.
There's also the prospect that travelers in an airport are also under the influence of trying to acculturate in a foreign setting. One may try to avoid standing out.
As to the second point, I find myself somewhere in the middle of the two student groups you discussed in the third paragraph. I believe that in the face of global culture, differences and uniqueness in a local culture reassert themselves, although not necessarily to the point of conflict. Rather it helps define in a more specific light the values that a particular culture associates itself with, making accommodation of those differences in a conflict or debate easier.