Cultural Outsourcing – Made in Brazil, or made in India?
August 2, 2009
The other day I read with interest a news item on Brazilians’ new love affair with soap based on the Indian caste identities. Produced by Rede Globo and based on a novella by Gloria Perez, directed by Brazilian directors, Fred Mayrink, Leonardo Nogueira, Luciano and Roberto Sabino Carminatti et al, the series, Caminho das Indias (A Passage to India) went on air on January 19, 2009 and currently ranks as the top show on Brazilian television!
And yet, this is the biggest piece of news, the Indian show features NOT ONE Indian face in the cast or crew!
What do you make of this trend? “Cultural imperialism” or a gradual, imperceptible movement of one country’s cultural motifs to another that is often an inevitable consequence of globalization?
I would however prefer the term “cultural outsourcing,” wherein; no one is a loser and everyone a gainer, because “culture,” as Denny McAuliffe, former editor at the Washington Post and founder of the online Native student newspaper Reznet once said, “is not static. It is always changing; it is always modernizing. What are the tools of warfare today? It’s the computer, or it’s the college and high-school diploma? These things are there to help us live, help us survive, help our culture.”
That’s why I often become a little impatient with people who feel threatened with this kind of a cultural trade-off.
Western commercial television programming and movies has long been a subject of heated discussion in the third world countries. Writing in Mass Communication and American Empire in 1969 (Boston: Beacon Press), Herbert Schiller once cautioned that, “Everywhere local culture is facing submersion from the mass-produced outpourings of commercial broadcasting in the United States,” cautioning. that “To foster consumerism in the poor world (through American entertainment programming) sets the stage for frustration on a massive scale.”
More recently, Jerry Mander, co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization lamented in a piece for The Nation that global media corporations of Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and other media barons “transmit their Western images and commercial values directly into the brains of 75% of the world’s population. The Globalization of media imagery is surely the most effective means ever for cloning cultures to make them compatible with the Western corporate vision.”
In my opinion these views are far too alarmist. The term “cultural imperialism” suggests that a few nations export mass media to other nations merely to dominate them and that this process is deliberate, directed, and totally unwanted by the recipient society. In other words, the cultural products are being forced on them against their will. It assumes that the receiving culture (say India or Brazil) is powerless and passive to stop the importation of these external cultural productions.
However, in my opinion, it is very difficult to prove such “cultural colonization.” A big body of audience response research suggests that non-Western cultures do not passively accept the values espoused by these programs as a substitute for their own. Evidence also suggests that the import of new media technologies has improved the quality of Indian TV programming. What we get to watch today — sometimes, a straight non-credited, rip-off from the popular formats in the Western media — is far better than what our Mummys and Daddys got to watch in the 60s or 70s. And, if you don’t believe me, just do a snap poll with your Mom and Dad.
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You wrote –
It assumes that the receiving culture (say India or Brazil) is powerless and passive to stop the importation of these external cultural productions.
I know I cant control what I see on tv etc each night, but I do have the power to choose what I watch and when. And if I dont watch it, then can networks effectively use it as an advertising medium. So I doubt any culture is genuinely powerless.