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For some countries, America’s popular culture is resistible (Tyler Cowen - The International Herald Tribune)
February 27, 2007 2:53 AM
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
(see the link below for the complete article.)
American movies and music have done very well in some countries, like Sweden, and less well in others, like India. This may sound like a simple difference in human tastes, but choices about culture also have an economic aspect.
Loyalties to cultural goods and services — be it heavy metal music or the opera — are about social networking and choosing an identity and an aspiration. That is, we use culture to connect with other people and to define ourselves; both are, to some extent, economic decisions. The continuing and indeed growing relevance of local economic connections suggests that “cultural imperialism” will not prove to be the dominant trend.
Local culture commands loyalty when people are involved in networks of status and caste, and they pursue religious and communal markers of identity. Those individuals use local cultural products to signal their place in hierarchies.
An Indian Muslim might listen to religious Qawwali music to set himself apart from local Hindus, or a native of Calcutta might favor songs from Bengali cinema. The Indian music market is 96 percent domestic in origin, in part because India is such a large and multifaceted society. Omar Lizardo, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, explains this logic in his recent paper “Globalization and Culture: A Sociological Perspective.”
Today, economic growth is booming in countries where American popular culture does not dominate, namely India and China. Population growth is strong in many Islamic countries, which typically prefer local music and get their news from sources like the satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera.
The combination of these trends means that American entertainment, for largely economic reasons, will lose relative standing in the global marketplace. In fact, Western culture often creates its own rivals by bringing creative technologies like the recording studio or the printing press to foreign lands.
American popular culture tends to be popular when people interact with others from around the world and seek markers of global identity.
My stepdaughter spent last summer studying French in Nice, with students from many other countries. They ate and hung out at McDonald’s, a name and symbol they all share, even though it was not everyone’s favorite meal.
Globalization is most likely to damage local culture in regions like Scandinavia that are lightly populated, not very hierarchical and looking for new global cultural symbols. But the rest of the world’s population is in countries — China and India, of course, but also Brazil, Mexico, Egypt and Indonesia — that do not fit that description.
“American” cultural products rely increasingly on non-American talent and international symbols and settings. “Babel,” which won this year’s Golden Globe award for best drama, has a Mexican director and is set in Morocco, Japan and Mexico, mostly with non-English dialogue.
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