From "Cultural Imperialism" To "Intercultural Communication"
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This essay will analyze two items, which are regarded as two different thoughts in communication:cultural imperialism and Intercultural communication. And the new law of mankind's in the new era will be revealed critically. These two theories of emerged in different backgrounds. The theory cultural imperialism is a kind of criticism with sympathy in post-colonialism era. However, when the process of globalization has been going further and taken into shape gradually, different forms get in touch with each other more frequently, and keep the touch more closely. And they more and more rely on each other, know each other and respect each other. The theory cultural imperialism is bound to be criticized. The theory Intercultural communication is based on the grasp of new realities, emphasizing the different forms should conscientiously take the rational attitude to observe others and introspect themselves, and considering equality and freedom as the mankind's common aim of development.Keywords:
Sympathy
Cultural Imperialism
Communication Theory
Culture theory
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ion may forget that is marginal from one perspective may be central to another. In a wickedly clever and perceptive article, Michelle Lamont has shown how the emergence of Jacques Derrida as a philosopher owes a great deal to his ability to benefit from the capital institutionalized in the power structures of academic discourse.'3 Similarly, Judith Lowder Newton notes the disturbing unwillingness among many European cultural theorists to acknowledge their debt to feminism and to the women's movement which initially raised the issues of subjectivity and representation that now serve as the basis for the more generalized critique of power raised within cultural theory.'4 Indeed, feminists have legitimate reasons to be suspicious of theories that proclaim the death of the at a time when women are finally beginning to emerge within cultural discourse as speaking subjects that celebrate the end of at the precise moment when cultural criticism is beginning to deal more fully with the consequences of historically grounded oppressions. Beyond the problem of internal contradictions within European cultural theory lie larger questions about its reification as a method and its application to the context. Few scholars engaged in any form of cultural studies over the past decade have been able to avoid the acrimonious debates provoked by the rise of European cultural theory. At one extreme, they have seen a resistance to theory, an anti-intellectual dismissal of new methods and approaches (especially of deconstruction and post-structuralism). At the other extreme, This content downloaded from 207.46.13.122 on Wed, May 2016 05:37:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE, THEORY, AND AMERICAN STUDIES 621 they have seen a reification of theory into a magic bullet that can by itself position scholars outside the oppressions and exploitations of history.'5 The tragedy of this debate -as is often the case in such moments of antagonism-is that each side often misses the other has to offer. Sometimes seems like anti-intellectualism on the part of critics of theory is really a justifiable critique of theorists who become (in the words of one of my colleagues) spiritless automatons designing ever more elaborate theoretical machines.1 On the other hand, sometimes seems like self-serving jargon and intellectual-speak to non-theorists is in reality an important effort to create a language capable of interrupting and opposing the dominant ideologies of the past. In my view, Studies would be served best by a theory that refuses hypostatization into a method, that grounds itself in the study of concrete cultural practices, that extends the definition of culture to the broadest possible contexts of cultural production and reception, that recognizes the role played by national histories and traditions in cultural contestation, and that understands that struggles over meaning are inevitably struggles over resources. One of cultural theory's great contributions has been to challenge the division between texts and experience. Literary critic Terry Eagleton especially has taken pains to affirm that the construction of texts is a social process, while at the same time insisting that no social experience exists outside of ideology and textualization. However, Eagleton's healthy warning sometimes has led to an unhealthy result-the fetishizAng of texts through the interpretation of reality as simply one more text. It is one thing to say that discourse, ideology, and textualization are inevitable and necessary parts of social experience, but it is quite another thing to say that they are the totality of social experience. As a quip reported by Jon Wiener phrases it, Tell that to the veterans of foreign texts.'7 Stuart Hall describes the goal of cultural criticism as the reproduction of the concrete in thoughtnot to generate another good theory, but to give a better theorized account of concrete historical reality. 18 Hall's formulation combines high theory and low common sense and is an essential corrective to uses of theory that lose touch with particular historical and social experiences. It prevents the self-reflexivity of contemporary theory from degenerating into solipsism, seeing theoretical work itself as a part of larger social processes. Finally, it enables cultural critiques to evolve into cultural interventions by engaging dominant ideology at the specific sites where it may be articulated and disarticulated. ' Innovations within European cultural theory over the past twenty years This content downloaded from 207.46.13.122 on Wed, May 2016 05:37:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 622 AMERICAN QUARTERLY have raised issues and concerns that seem to threaten the traditional practices of Studies. They bring a specialized language to bear on key questions about the creation and reception of culture in modern societies, and their methodological sophistication seems to render obsolete traditional Studies questions about what is American? On closer inspection, however, contemporary European cultural theory resonates with the categories and questions of Studies traditions; indeed, it is fair to say that the development of Studies itself anticipated many of the cross-disciplinary epistemological and hermeneutic concerns at the heart of contemporary European cultural theory. As Michael Denning has argued, American Studies emerged as both a continuation of and a response to the popular 'discovery' and 'invention' of 'American culture' in the 1930s. '2O Ethnography and folklore studies by New Deal-supported scholars, the cult of the common man pushed by Popular Front Marxism, and the use of American Exceptionalism to stem the country's drift toward involvement in World War II, all combined to focus scholarly attention upon the contours and dimensions of culture. Anti-communism and uncritical nationalism during the early years of the Cold War transformed the study of culture in significant ways, imposing a mythical cultural on previously had been recognized as a history of struggle between insiders and outsiders.2' While the hegemony of the consensus myth in the 1950s and 1960s served conservative political ends, it did not prevent Studies scholars from asking critical questions about the relationship between the social construction of cultural categories and power relations in society. As Giles Gunn so convincingly demonstrates, scholars of the myth-and-symbol school consciously sought to overcome the split between fact and value by explaining how value-laden images influence social life. He points out that the principal project of these scholars revolved around increasing comprehension of the historical potentialities and liabilities of different ways of construing the relationship between consciousness and society.22 Most important, Gunn reminds us that their project was both diagnostic and corrective because they recognized the interpenetration of symbolism and semiotics with power and privilege.23 In their sensitivity to language as a metaphorical construct with ideological implications, the myth-and-symbol scholars anticipated many of the concerns of contemporary cultural theory. In his introduction to the 1970 edition of Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith claimed that perceptions of objects and events are no less a part of consciousness than are This content downloaded from 207.46.13.122 on Wed, May 2016 05:37:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE, THEORY, AND AMERICAN STUDIES 623 our fantasies, and he described myths and symbols as collective representations rather than the work of a single mind.24 Similarly, in his 1965 study of the Brooklyn Bridge, Alan Trachtenberg insisted that surely the conventions of language themselves suggest predispositions among Americans to react in certain ways at certain times.25 Yet for all their attention to the role of language in shaping and reflecting social practice, the mythand-symbol scholars still tended to make sweeping generalizations about society based upon images in relatively few elite literary texts, and they never adequately theorized the relationship between cultural texts and social
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Culture has, during last two decades or so, come to influence historical research in such a way that it is no understatement to speak of the cultural turn, a change in paradigm fully comparable to the social in 1960s. Cultural history, as a concept, has changed over time, from a classic cultural history in first part of twentieth century, where culture is seen as the great arts, to anthropological cultural history from 1960s, where culture is seen as symbols, rituals, traditions etc, an finally to what has been called New Cultural History (NCH), from 1980s and onwards, where culture as a concept has come to be influenced by the linguistic and its focus on semiotics. There is thus today reasonable to speak of two closely interconnected changes in paradigm, the cultural and the linguistic turn, both leading up to what can be seen as an interesting time of change in historiography. The question is: what comes cultural turn? The article discuss increasing interest anthropological cultural history from Swedish working class historians in 1980s and its impact on historical research in working class culture on period from 1840s to 1940s. This research has come to focus on concepts of roughness and orderliness as ideal types of working class culture and what has come to be seen as a disciplinary process from a rough artisans; and early working class culture in 1840s to an orderly working class culture in 1940s. The focus on roughness and orderliness came to be increasingly criticised in early 1990s. As a result of this and overall decline in working class history after 1989 debate and research on working class culture more or less ended. In article argument is that there indeed was reason to criticise research that was done on rough and orderly working class cultures. Not least fact that change from roughness to orderliness seen in this research fit all too neatly into dominating national discourse of modern Swedish history - that of the special case of Sweden, or the Swedish model. This, if nothing else, or so article argues, should be a reason for renewed studies of working class culture. In last years there has been an increasing debate among Swedish historians (and not only working class historians) on impact of working class movement on writing and research of modern Swedish history. The article argues that there is a discourse consensus and orderliness that is dominating this writing and research, and that analysis of (re)construction of this discourse is an interesting subject of research seen from a semiotic concept of culture. The article also argues that cultural history beyond cultural turn would gain from being a history in which both social and cultural aspects are equally important and theoretically interconnected in historical analysis.
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Cultural turn
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When scholars of any nation become so proud of their mastery of alien concepts that they forget or suppress their own cultural identity, they willingly succumb to ‘theoretical imperialism’. The flip side is the arrogant and wholesale imposition by Western scholars of theories created in the crucible of one culture on other cultures, subcultures or historical eras with divergent philosophical foundations. This article introduces several key Japanese critical theories that modify or fuse Japanese and Western psychoanalytic and aesthetic concepts, arguing that they can be fruitfully applied by theatre and performance scholars to works originating either in Japan or elsewhere. The article proposes a ‘both/and’ perspective that respects cultural differences without exoticizing the Other.
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Cultural Imperialism
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The chapter provides a history of the concept of community in cultural criticism in German history with particular emphasis on the most sophisticated expression of it in the work of Heidegger. While it points out the problematic aspects of the concept, it pays equal attention to its value. Given the architectural orientation of the volume, the chapter explores the connection between historical ideas of community and current explorations of space and a sense of place. While cultural criticism in German history had a tendency towards an unrealistic agrarian Romanticism, the goal it tried to achieve is not that dissimilar from current attempts to promote a sense of belonging.
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Value (mathematics)
Romanticism
Sense of Community
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The nativization of Chinese disciplines carries on the issue of relationship between Chinese learning and Western learning since the late Qing dynasty,and faces the anxiety of identity in the context of globalization.Fei Xiaotong's academic orientation and his cultural self-consciousness offer us the logic of getting the narrative initiative of China,and aim at forming the resistance to globalization which dissolves the subject and its tradition.The evolution of value neutrality discourse from Max Weber to Talcott Parsons warns that we need to solve the issue of identity firstly in order to establish our stands,and only in the establishment of world view can the real paradigm revolution achieve.In order to let the Communication discipline of Mainland China gain legitimacy,an idea of break discipline and restudy the history of American communications is illustrated aiming at getting rid of the shackle of western disciplines and college institution.The fundamental problem of western disciplines should be associated with our current experience,and we should return to our own historical circumstance by interpreting western history.
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Much international and intercultural discourse about historiography is influenced by a way of historical thinking deeply rooted in human historical consciousness and that works throughout all cultures and in all times: ethnocentrism. Ethnocentric history conceives of identity in terms of master-narratives that define togetherness and difference as essential for identity in a way that causes tension and struggle. These narratives conceive of history in terms of clashes of and they reinforce the idea that international and intercultural relations are merely struggles for power. The main elements of ethnocentrism are: asymmetrical evaluation, teleological continuity, and centralized perspective. This essay articulates possibilities for overcoming these three elements by replacing asymmetrical evaluation with normative equality; teleological continuity with reconstructive concepts of development that emphasize contingency and discontinuity; and centralized perspectives with multi-perspectivity and polycentric approaches to historical experience. Adopting these possibilities would lead to a new mode of universal history rooted in a concept of humankind that can help solve the problem of ethnocentrism. This idea of humankind conceptualizes the unity of the human species as being manifest in a variety of cultures and historical developments. This is in fact the traditional concept of historicism, which can be further developed towards a historiography that responds to the challenges of globalization and cultural differences. The essay outlines theoretical and methodological means in historical studies that bring this idea of humankind into the work of historians, thus enabling them to contribute to a new culture of The article is based on the assumption that the creation of such a culture is the most important task of scholarly work in the humanities in general, and historical studies in particular, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I. THE DANGER OF ETHNOCENTRISM IN HISTORICAL THINKING TODAY We are living in a world of globalization, which brings different traditions and civilizations into closer and closer contact. This growing density in intercultural 1. A version of this paper was delivered at the conference Chinese and Comparative Historical Thinking in the 21st Century, April 8-10, 2004, Fudan University, Taiwan, organized by the Himalaya Foundation. Reprinted with permission from Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 1:1 (June 2004), published by the Centre for the Study of East Asian Civilisations, National Taiwan University. 2. True liberality is recognition. Maximen und Reflexionen, Goethes Werke, hrsg. im Auftrage der GroBherzogin Sophie v. Sachsen, I. Abteilung, Band 42 (Weimar: Hermann B6hlaus Nachfolger, 1904), 222. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 04:28:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HOW TO OVERCOME ETHNOCENTRISM 119 communication challenges historical thinking. It is history where people formulate, present, and discuss their identity, their belonging to each other, their togetherness, and, at the same time, their differences from others. The globalization process confronts traditional historical identities with an accelerating change of life conditions, which highly problematizes the traditional distinction between the internal realm of the life of one's own people and the external realm of the lives of others. Both become intermixed, and universalistic elements of cultural life, such as the internet and important sectors of the culture industry, require a redefinition of what makes the difference between myself and others in another culture. Only in this way can I know what my identity is. In order to strengthen one's own historical identity vis-a'-vis the challenge of uniforming tendencies in cultural life, one has to sharpen the awareness of differences in the historical presentation of one's own collective identity. Doing so, the already-established and permanently-used cultural strategies of historical identity formation will be set into power again, and can be applied to the changing conditions of present-day life. However, this application of the traditional mode of presenting historical identity in the form of a so-called master narrative causes problems, since the logic of these master narratives is ethnocentric. It works with an unbalanced relationship between the image of oneself and the different image of others in such a way that the necessary self-esteem of a powerful historical identity is brought about at the cost of the otherness of others. A simple example of an ethnocentric concept of historical identity is the distinction between civilization and barbarism. This distinction has been used all over the world: one's own people historically stand for civilization and its achievements, whereas the otherness of others is a deviation from these standards. (Sometimes we find a reversed evaluation. In this case the hopes of bettering one's own life-form are projected into the otherness of others. But this is of secondary importance, and in fact does not essentially change the inequality in the interrelationship between selfness and otherness, togetherness and being different.) This inequality inevitably causes a of since others follow the same logic and thus gain self-esteem at the cost of other others. These tendencies are powerful even in the realm of historical studies. The clash of civilizations is an issue even in academic discourse, although most of the participants aren't aware of it. But if we look at the logical presuppositions of international and intercultural discussions on world civilizations, we can observe ethnocentric attitudes. These attitudes appear in different manifestations: in the traditional one in Western countries, the dominant issues of historical thinking generally are Western themes of history. Non-Western history normally plays a marginal role. History curricula in schools and universities give non-Western cultures little, if any, space. Non-Western history normally becomes a part of the curriculum in the context of Western colonialism and imperialism. The authenticity of non-Western traditions generally is no issue. But this is only a surface observation. More important is the way cultural difference is thematized and approached in historical studies, and the hidden presuppositions of academic historical thinking when different cultures are at stake. The most obvious indication of this presupposition is the way cultural difference This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 04:28:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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New historicism and cultural materialism are engaged in the process of renewing our images of the past, of revisiting the past. They carry out this work to different ends: new historicism aims to show that each era or period has its own conceptual and ideological frameworks, that people of the past did not understand concepts like 'the individual', 'God', 'reality' or 'gender' in the same way that we do now; cultural materialism aims to show that our political and ideological systems manipulate images and texts of the past to serve their own interests, and that these images and texts can be interpreted from alternative and radically different perspectives, often constructed by placing those images or texts in their historical contexts. I want to argue in this chapter that both new historicism and cultural materialism are concerned from the beginning with the concept of 'difference', both historical and cultural difference, and that this concept becomes important in explaining how both critical practices have changed in recent years. In the 1980s both were interested in stressing the extent to which the past differs from contemporary uses of the past, the extent to which the past is alien or 'other' to our own modern epistemé, and, borrowing from Foucault and Geertz, new historicists and cultural materialists were at the same time aware of the structural similarities between this historical difference and the cultural differences being emphasised by postcolonial critics, feminists, gay theorists and race theorists.
Historicism
Materialism
Historical materialism
Cultural Studies
Culture theory
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The resuce literary theory and critic strategy by cultural study have spread their influence into new and strange fields.The current cultural study in China gives greater preference to the culture that is popular in China's market and introduced from the West and pays little attention to classical or Chinese literary.It is acoptable for literary theorists and critics keen on cultural study to shift to other research aspects,but,if not,their motives are under suspicion.In fact,detective novels,science fictions,mininovels,internet literature,efc. are more marketable,vital and adaptable than those voluminous pure literary works.Life poctry and Life culturalism may be the challenges we will meet and the good cultural growth points we can cultivate.We must be on guard against the trend that cultural study may become the mouthpiece of American and European media.
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Cultural Studies
Guard (computer science)
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This paper challenges certain everyday, widespread assumptions about the meaning, evidence and evaluation of `globalization'. Both as a journey and a destination, of late this notion has taken on a life of its own. In this essay, seven myths about globalization— `Big Is Better', `More Is Better', `Time and Space Have Disappeared', `Global Cultural Homogeneity', `Saving Planet Earth', `Democracy for Export via American TV' and `The New World Order'—are critically explored in the context of globalization as a historical process and a normative goal. Using myth as a way of classifying sets of ideas about world history, politics, economics, culture, communication and ecology, the argument is made that they serve ideological as well as explanatory ends.
Cultural Globalization
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