Read Artical of Cultural Materialism

A macro-theory in anthropology which holds that most aspects of human culture can be explained in material terms. Its most systematic formulation will be found in the two closing chapters of Marvin Harris's exhaustive survey of the development of anthropological theories of culture (The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 1968). Harris, an American anthropologist, claimed that his purpose in writing the book was ‘to reassert the methodological priority of the search for the laws of history in the science of man’, specifically to prove that ‘the analogue of the Darwinian strategy in the realm of socio-cultural phenomena is the principle of techno-environmental and techno-economic determinism’. This holds that similar technologies applied to similar environments tend to produce similar arrangements for the production and distribution of goods, which in turn tend to support similar sorts of social groupings, who organize and explain their activities in terms of similar systems of beliefs and values. In this fashion, the principle assigns research priority to the study of the material conditions of socio-cultural life, in much the same way (according to Harris) as the principle of natural selection accords priority to the study of differential reproductive success. He claims that this makes the former a ‘statement of a basic research strategy’ rather than a specific ‘law of society’. Critics have observed that, despite Harris's attempts to avoid historicism and to exclude any reference to the Hegelian dialectic, his materialist approach to the study of culture shares the same characteristics as the materialism of Marx and Engels; namely, that as a concrete research strategy it soon falls foul of empirical findings that falsify its basic premiss, and as a pseudo-law of history it must be framed at such an abstract level that it claims everything but says nothing.

Cultural Studies Reading an Artical

A developing area of academic interest, sometimes taught as a distinctive university or college qualification, which lies at the interface between the social sciences (notably sociology) and humanities (most obviously literature). It is principally concerned with the nature of mass culture and the workings of culture industries. Among other things, therefore, it embraces the study of popular culture, communication, consumer society, the mass media, leisure, post-modernism, and aspects of literary and sociological theory which address the construction of identity and ideology. Typical of those whose writings are considered central to the field (although they themselves might deny the applicability of this label to their work) would be Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard.

As a field of interest, cultural studies seems to lack a distinctive or coherent disciplinary core, and over the years it has borrowed both its substantive topics and theoretical orientations increasingly freely from other areas of scholarship. Recently, some critics have claimed that it now exerts a pernicious influence on teaching and research in sociology, political science, and social history, by encouraging practitioners of these subjects both to abandon systematic empirical work in favour of what, at least in extreme cases, is largely ‘data-free’ social science (that is, unsubstantiated speculation intermittently illustrated by only casual empirical observation), and to underestimate the importance of social structure in everyday life. However, proponents argue that cultural studies has revitalized sociology: first, by exposing its obsession with moribund concepts related to the world of production, and deriving from its nineteenth-century origins; and, second, by alerting researchers to the real concerns of ordinary people in the advanced societies of the late twentieth century.

It is clear that British (and to a lesser extent American) sociology took a pronounced ‘cultural turn’ in the early 1990s. However, it remains to be seen whether this reflects a lasting move towards greater individualism in advanced societies, or is merely part of a larger (but temporary) end-of-century mood of introspection in Western civilizations. A good overview of some of the key issues and debates in this arena will be found in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (1993). See also CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF; KNOWLEDGE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

Artical of Cultural relativity and religion

Compared with the social organization of any of the higher primates, human communities are clearly different to a marked degree in the ways in which they organize, protect, and transmit their beliefs, values, social orderings, technologies, expectations, or whatever it is that might belong to a definition of culture. But ‘culture’ not only marks humans off from primates: it marks human communities off from each other. Given that the basic biology and its needs are virtually identical in all humans, what is the status of the differences in culture which can so readily be observed? At one extreme are anthropologists who regard cultural diversity as nothing much more than a change of clothes: the clothes worn are no doubt well-chosen (i.e. well-adapted for the ecological niche which a particular group inhabits), but they cover the same basic human body. At the other extreme are anthropologists (and philosophers) who regard cultural diversity as profound: there is no such thing as ‘human nature’ or ‘the person’; there are only mental and linguistic constructions which create entirely different ways of understanding and interacting with the world. In the succinct statement of E. Sapir (which underlies the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about the way in which different languages create different worlds). ‘The worlds in which different societies live are different worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.’

It is the second of these views which leads to cultural relativity, since if each culture creates and then imposes its own view of what reality is, then there is no neutral ground (no ‘Archimedean point’—as in Archimedes' observation, ‘Give me a place on which to stand and I will move the earth’) on which to stand in order to give a neutral account or evaluation of any society or culture.

Beyond the issue of the incommensurability of different cultures, cultural relativism has raised equal questions for morality and ethics. For if judgements are relative to the context in which they are produced, there cannot be any universal agreement on the good or the beautiful—though oddly, there is more agreement on the true. The intermediate holds that cultures elaborate different worlds in which differences make such a difference that they cannot be understood except on their own terms of reference; but on the other hand, limits are set upon viable worlds by the conditions set in nature—both in the external environment, and also in the human body. Religions can then be understood as consequences of extremely long-running transmissions of somatic exploration and exegesis (i.e. long-running explorations and interpretations of the competence of the human body and its possible experiences).

An Artical of CULTURAL IDENTITY

The classic definition of culture, written in 1871 by Edward Burnett Tylor, states that "culture … is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (Primitive Culture ). In 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn cited 164 definitions of culture, ranging from "learned behavior" to "ideas in the mind." Culture depends upon an ability, possessed by humans alone, called symboling, which consists of "assigning to things and events certain meanings that cannot be grasped with the senses alone." (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1997, p. 847). Language is an example of symboling.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN THE UNITED STATES
For more than two hundred years, the United States has been the most culturally diverse country in the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this diversity grew with the influx of more and more cultures from around the globe. Racial and ethnic minorities have been the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population, making up almost 23 percent of the total population in 1990 and 25 percent of the population in 2000. Non-white children accounted for one-third of all children under nineteen in the United States in the year 2000.

Culture can affect how chronic and disabling conditions are defined and treated. For example, white Americans typically emphasize physical survival and functional capacity, and they therefore tend to battle against chronic conditions and disabilities that they see as being inflicted on them. In contrast, many Asian cultures emphasize living in harmony with nature; a chronic condition is therefore seen as part of the normal cycle of life. A person's culturally based health beliefs and practices determine what problems are recognized as needing traditional Western medical care, and whether someone will follow through with prescribed treatment, change lifestyle behaviors, or reduce exposure to environmental factors associated with an illness. Because of historic inequalities and racism in the health care system, many African Americans delay seeking health care. Beliefs about health and illness also influence community responses to health communication messages designed to promote health and prevent disease. Language and cultural differences often hinder communication between public health professionals and members of minority populations.

To understand cultural identity in the context of public health it is important to focus on the worldviews of the communities and people in need of health services. The meaning of words used to describe disease and adaptive behaviors needed to maintain good health must be examined in the light of a diverse cultural environment. People live their lives as simultaneous members and participants in a multiplicity of social contexts. An individual's cultural identity can be shaped not only by race and ethnicity, but also by age, gender, family configuration, religion, socioeconomic status, education, occupation, sexual orientation, political ideology stage of acculturation, and place of upbringing (rural, urban, or suburban).

Epidemiology enables public health professionals to systematically assess the health status of various populations. However, when morbidity and mortality data is used without an appreciation for the social context, unintended consequences can result. For example, it is not uncommon to use surveillance data to describe populations as "intravenous drug users," "homeless," "high risk," and "hard to reach." While such catergorization enables public health professionals to focus scarce resources where the need is greatest, it also stigmatizes the very people in greatest need of assistance. Ethnic and racial minority populations have historically suffered from the way in which public health data is presented to the policy makers and the general public. A prominent example of this is the figures regarding "crack mothers" and "crack babies" made prevalent by the media in the 1990s.

DISPARITIES IN HEALTH STATUS
The disparity in health status between black and white Americans was not new when it was documented in the Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Black and Minority Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1985). This task force identified the six leading causes of preventable excess death for minority populations as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, infant mortality, chemical dependency, and homicide/unintentional injury. The report developed the descriptive term excess death, which was defined as the difference between number of deaths in minority populations and what would be expected in the majority population; by this standard, blacks experienced 42 percent excess mortality compared to whites. In 1985 these findings led to the creation of the Office of Minority Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton announced a new initiative that set a national goal of eliminating longstanding racial and ethnic disparities in health status by the year 2010. The president announced that the federal government would, for the first time, set high national health goals for all Americans, ending a practice of separate, lower goals for the racial and ethnic minorities. To help reach these ambitious targets, a five-step plan was put in place to mobilize the resources and expertise of the federal government, the private sector, and local communities to eliminate disparities that had long been treated as intractable.

Since culture influences how communities view and take action on disease conditions, public health professionals will increasingly need to understand the cultural context in which disease prevention and health promotion strategies are delivered. The fear and mistrust that shape the behavior and attitudes of many people of color must be addressed if disparities in health care delivery are to be eliminated.

Artical Of CULTURAL APPROPRIATENESS

Sensitivity to other cultures refers to the awareness of how other ethnic, racial, and/or linguistic groups differ from one's own. Sensitivity can be manifested through knowledge of different languages or manners of speech, norms, and mores, religious beliefs and practices, family structures and dynamics, community decision-making patterns, and class consciousness and socioeconomic realities. Cultural appropriateness puts this sensitivity in action through the tailoring of public health interventions to specific cultures or subcultures. Thus, public-and clinical-health services, health behavior change interventions and social marketing, community organization and empowerment, and even environmental and occupational health approaches are adapted according to the target population to which they will be applied.

HISTORY OF IMPLEMENTATION IN PUBLIC HEALTH
Many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina, are almost entirely populated by immigrants and their descendants, which juxtaposed with the surviving indigenous populations make them highly diverse. Since World War II, European nations have become far more heterogeneous as well. Yet dominant groups are highly ambivalent about diversity. This ambivalence may contribute to negative health and social impacts on minority populations.

Concerns about diversity in the United States date from colonial time. As the new nation evolved, the founding fathers saw a need to populate the region with more Europeans (and their African slaves). Hence, the number of immigrants gradually accelerated until the beginning of the Civil War, when over 150,000 newcomers arrived each year. Nevertheless, public health efforts continued to emphasize the needs of the dominant population. Efforts directed toward disadvantaged and diverse groups were based more in controlling the spread of diseases that they might have had rather than in promoting their health itself. In the twenty-first century, immigrants continue to arrive in the United States and other industrialized countries at a record pace. Moreover they are now far more likely to come from Latin America, Asia, or Africa. Together these phenomena make the issues of cultural sensitivity and appropriateness more relevant than ever.

RELATIONSHIP TO HEALTH
Cultural sensitivity (or the inability to achieve it) may impact the health of individuals and populations in many ways. Social isolation—low or poor interaction with the surrounding society—may result in underutilization of health care. Social isolation may stem from a variety of factors such as a lack of transportation or financial resources, fear of being deported due to documentation status, or physical distance from the community. As a whole, social isolation, poverty, and lack of health care coverage may encourage individuals to postpone professional treatment in the hopes that the illness will resolve itself.

Even when care to the disadvantaged population is provided, it may be inadequate. Cultural and linguistic barriers may contribute to inadequate health care by limiting the ability of the provider to understand the patient and his or her symptoms, and result in an inappropriate course of treatment.

When considering various models of health behavior among immigrants, the ethnic context of their origin must be addressed. In most cases, theories of behavior change are normalized on stable, English-speaking middle-class populations. But these models of individuals as relatively autonomous beings who weigh potential personal outcomes, their own "self" efficacy, and their personal readiness to change, while at the same time choosing whether to listen to or ignore pressure from peers, may have little relevance to diverse communities, who often have a strong sense of identification with and attachment to their families, both nuclear and extended. The design of health messages must acknowledge this attachment. Dramatic differences among ethnic and racial minorities in terms of language and literacy, religion and family orientation, acculturation and experience with the dominant culture, and socioeconomic and legal status must also be considered.

Health officials and providers may be ignored as message sources, perceived to be unaware of the patient's culture, or even perceived as siding with hostile law enforcement. Formal health promotion programs typically rely on broadcast and print channels intended for non-English-speaking or immigrant communities. Many of these barriers can be surmounted by the use of community health advisors (CHAs) who come from the communities they serve and yet are sufficiently comfortable with the host culture to be able to understand and redirect health messages to their communities.

Cultural appropriateness is often manifested through attention to the literacy needs of a population. Current health instructional approaches and materials are typically designed for relatively educated individuals highly literate in English. Materials in non-English languages are largely direct translations from English and are often not culturally or even linguistically appropriate. Health communication messages aimed at immigrant or minority communities will often specify the audience's ethnicity in an attempt to render the communication more interesting, attractive, and acceptable to the audience.

Attention to religious beliefs in health communication efforts may be especially important given the central role that these beliefs and related practices may play in the concepts of illness, recovery, and wellness (received characteristics) as well as the potential for using the place of worship as a source for the message itself. Providers must also determine the specific roles of the family members and incorporate this knowledge into any treatment regimen. Adherence to the regimen is unlikely to occur unless the family trusts the provider and thinks that his or her recommendations are valuable and important.

An Artical Of Cultural appropriation

Cultural appropriation, a term used to describe the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or practices by one cultural group from another. It is in general used to describe Western appropriations of non-Western or non-white forms, and carries connotations of exploitation and dominance. The concept has come into literary and visual art criticism by analogy with the acquisition of artefacts (the Elgin marbles, Benin bronzes, Lakota war shirts, etc.) by Western museums.

The term emerged during the last 20 years of the 20th cent. as part of the vocabulary of the post-colonial critique of Western expansionism. One early significant discussion was by Kenneth Coutts-Smith in ‘Some General Observations on the Concept of Cultural Colonialism’ (1976), where he brings together the Marxist notion of ‘class appropriation’ (the dominant class appropriating and defining ‘high culture’) and what he calls ‘cultural colonialism’, though he himself does not combine the two in the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’. The problem had been identified earlier in the century, though not in these terms, by the New Negro and Harlem Renaissance writers in the USA, who were concerned by the caricature of the African-American voice and folk traditions in minstrelsy shows and in such popular successes as J. C. Harris's Brer Rabbit stories. On the other hand, Harlem Renaissance writers such as Alain Locke (1886–1954) welcomed the Modernist enthusiasm for African art. In more recent discussion the Modernist engagement with what were seen as primitive art forms (see primitivism) has been seen as highly problematic. As this suggests, how an artist or writer's use of other cultures should be judged is a matter of interpretation: what one critic might condemn as ‘cultural appropriation’ another would discuss more neutrally as ‘influence’, or even praise as ‘postmodern hybridity’. One of the finest discussions of these issues, although it does not use the term ‘cultural appropriation’, is Michael North's The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994). North is centrally concerned with what has been called ‘voice appropriation’, for example G. Stein's use of an African-American voice in her short story ‘Melanctha’. ‘Voice appropriation’ has also been debated in terms of gender, as in feminist critiques of Joyce's representation of female conciousness in the Molly Bloom sequence.

Artical of CULTURAL FACTORS

Culture encompasses the set of beliefs, moral values, traditions, language, and laws (or rules of behavior) held in common by a nation, a community, or other defined group of people. Culturally determined characteristics include: the language spoken at home; religious observances; customs (including marriage customs that often accompany religious and other beliefs); acceptable gender roles and occupations; dietary practices; intellectual, artistic, and leisure-time pursuits; and other aspects of behavior. In the United States, and in other nations with large immigrant populations, there is a wide range of cultural diversity, religious beliefs, customs, and values, reflecting the scattered origins of the people. The "melting-pot" concept of nationality reduces this diversity with successive generations, but considerable variation remains—distinguishing rural from urban, African American from European, East Asian from South Asian, religious believers from secularists.

Anthropoligists and epidemiologists have identified many associations between culture, customs, and risks to health. Those who, for religious reasons, abstain from tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco have smaller risks of getting cancer of the gastrointestinal or respiratory tract than others of similar social, economic, and residential background. Seventh-day Adventists, who are strict vegetarians and are very health conscious have low death rates from coronary heart disease when compared to neighbors of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Though often called "lifestyle factors," in such cases these differences are culturally determined because the related behaviors are associated with religious beliefs and practices. Jews who practice circumcision have lower incidence and death rates than gentiles from cancer of the male genital tract, perhaps related to sexual hygiene and reduced risk of infection with carcinogenic viruses.

Many cultural characteristics, and the health states related to them, are associated with education, occupation, income, and social status. These factors influence one's awareness of the world, and whether one will seek improvement or accept things as they are. Well-educated white-collar workers may be more aware of the benefits of exercise than those lacking education—they are more likely to play than watch sports, and are more likely to have better-paying jobs that enable them to afford sporting equipment. Values related to these perceptions also shape the relative priority accorded to intellectual versus athletic pursuits, motivating some working-class parents to encourage their children to study and remain in school in hopes of a better life for the children than the parents have had. The clash of competing values between environmental sustainability and economic development also has a cultural component. Appreciation of the fact that health is ultimately dependent on the integrity of the earth's life-supporting ecosystems is part of a value system. Such values may sometimes be over-ridden by short-term priorities such as job security or financial gain.

Much can be learned about the linkages between culture and health by studying migrant populations, whose culture of origin is often very different from the culture into which they migrate. Japanese migrants to California and Hawaii were found to have higher rates of coronary artery disease than their counterparts in Japan. Part of this difference could be attributed to changes in risk factors such as diet, weight, and cholesterol levels. However, loss of a stable, cohesive social environment also appears to have contributed to the rise in prevalence of coronary artery disease in the migrant groups. In another study, blood pressure values among African Americans from the southern United States who migrated to an urban environment were compared with that of urbanborn African Americans. The longer the period of city life, the higher was their blood pressure. Many studies have shown that immigrants have higher rates of mental illness, probably due to the tremendous stresses of living in a new cultural environment. Cultural groups that have a strong group identity and cohesion seem to be somewhat protected against this type of stress.

Culturally shaped illnesses are disorders that reflect the social, political, and moral worlds of the patient. They also often represent ways in which deep cultural messages are transmitted through the medium of the human body. For example, among Latino populations in Central America and the United States, anthropologists describe "ataques de nervios," an illness characterized by symptoms such as shaking, a feeling of heat in the chest, difficulty in moving the limbs, and parasthesias. Among Latino immigrants in the United States, anthropologists have linked the illness to the sense of social and political disempowerment that these people experience. Other culturally shaped illnesses include: "heart distress" in Iran; "semen loss" in South Asia; and "susto" in Latin America. Anthropologists study the symbolic meaning of symptoms within specific cultural contexts in order to understand the cultural messages these illnesses express.

Cultural context can profoundly affect the transmission of disease. A tragic example is the spread of HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), particularly in Africa, where economic necessity shapes choices that are often hazardous to health. The combination of limited education, migratory labor that separates men from their wives and families, and the breakdown of traditional family networks creates a context in which men may seek multiple sexual partners. Women often lack the social power to negotiate condom use, and their need for economic and social survival outweighs the risk that they know they are taking by having unprotected intercourse. In Thailand, where culturally condoned intravenous drug use is widespread among the large population of sex workers, HIV/AIDS and other blood-borne viral diseases became epidemic in the 1990s, creating a national public health emergency.

The health of girls and women is particularly sensitive to cultural influences. In societies where women are able to make decisions for themselves, especially about their education and their reproductive choices, have longer life expectancy, lower fertility rates, and better overall health. When political totalitarianism and religious zealotry flourish, women usually suffer oppression disproportionately compared to men, and this can adversely affect their health and longevity.

Patriachal values can also be harmful to the health of girls and women. Such values have a pervasive influence in many settings, mainly in traditional agricultural societies, but also in some urbanized economies. In some strict Islamic societies where girls and women are segregated and allowed to appear in public only if totally covered from head to toe, deprivation of sunlight can impair the cutaneous synthesis of vitamin D, causing a deficiency of this vitamin and putting the women at risk for rickets or osteomalacia.

Another cultural practice with severe health consequences is female genital mutilation, which is performed on young girls in many African and Middle Eastern nations. In its most extreme form, the procedure can be life threatening. It deprives women of sexual fulfillment and makes childbirth a hazardous process for both mother and infant. While performed in many predominantly Islamic countries, this procedure is not a religious ritual, and is not condoned by any Islamic scripture. Anthropologists have described the complex cultural meanings of ritual purity associated with female genital mutilation that serve to perpetuate this practice despite its serious adverse effects on health. The majority of women and men in cultures that perform genital mutilation support the continuation of the practice which makes change all the more difficult. Both international and national efforts are underway to stop or change this practice, with some of the most promising initiatives coming from within the cultures themselves. Female genital mutilation was banned in the United States in 1995, and is also outlawed in Britain, France, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, and some African countries.

In Western societies the female body is often altered for cultural reasons. Women in the nineteenth century constricted their waists and compressed their breasts with rigid corsets. Many women today wear high heels and tight shoes that deform their feet, with painful consequences in old age. Some undergo painful cosmetic surgery in the quest for an idealized physical form, with reshaped ears, eyes, and nose; facelifts; liposuction; and breast implants. Some girls and women strive to achieve a very low body weight, a modern, culturally shaped notion of beauty that has supplanted the former "ideal"—the plump female form depicted in the paintings of Rubens and Renoir. The pursuit of very low body weight may be associated with the development of anorexia nervosa, an illness that can be fatal. Men in Western society in the late twentieth century also began seeking an "improved" body image by taking muscle-enhancing steroids or having muscle grafts to enlarge pectoral and calf muscles.

In modern industrial societies an adolescent culture has developed. This culture often fosters rebelliousness and defiance of adult authority figures, leading some young people to smoke, take drugs, and expose themselves to dangerous and unhealthy practices. Such actions have, unfortunately, often been encouraged by the tobacco industry and advertisers of beer and other alcoholic drinks. The pervasive influence of the media, especially television, in almost all contemporary societies projects cultural values and behavior that emanate from the American entertainment industry. Many of these messages, such as encouraging the use of mood-altering substances and sexual promiscuity, are potentially harmful to health.

Public health specialists must be aware of these and other cultural trends, and they must endeavor to mobilize beneficial cultural influences while discouraging unhealthy ones. The task of public health professionals is particularly challenging when influential and economically motivated interests glorify aspects of culture that are harmful to health.

Artical of Cultural Pluralism

Cultural Pluralism is both a social reality and a social theory that emphasizes the retention of ethnic culture and customs by the diverse ethnic groups making up American society.Cultural pluralists are typically second‐ or third‐generation offspring of immigrants who feel at home speaking English and are comfortable with American economic life and democratic politics yet still wish to retain their ancestral language, religion, and customs as well as an emotional attachment to their ancestral country. As a theory, cultural pluralism was not systematically formulated, or even given a name, until the twentieth century. America's native‐born Anglo‐Saxon intellectuals generally emphasized the importance of homogeneity, unity, and assimilation, leaving the pluralist position to immigrant leaders. German Americans employed a phrase that summed up the cultural pluralism ideal in commonsense fashion: “Germania meine Mutter, Columbia meine Braut” (Germany my mother, America my bride). Just as individuals do not usually renounce allegiance to their parents and ancestral family when they marry, despite occasional friction and tension, the metaphor suggests, so too with ethnic groups.

Horace Kallen (1882–1974), a German‐Jewish philosopher who taught at New York City's New School for Social Research, first used the term “cultural pluralism” in Culture and Democracy in the United States, 1924. While Kallen continued for nearly half a century to champion the notion of dual cultural loyalties, arguing that this would enrich American culture, not endanger it, he also endowed the concept with a rigidity that was absent in the nineteenth‐century, commonsense notion. He often argued polemically that “people cannot change their grandparents,” thereby confusing ethnic or cultural loyalties with biological, genetic, or racial inheritance. Men and women cannot change their grandparents, but they can and do change their language and cultural values. Extreme assertions of diversity, such as Kallen's, imply a kind of racial or ethnic essentialism and separatism, not merely cultural pluralism.

The theory of cultural pluralism remained a defensive, minority position until the later twentieth century. After the African American civil rights movement and the white ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s, however, pluralism became the mainstream intellectual position in the United States. It still remained controversial, however. Many argued that dual loyalties could distort American foreign policy, since members of an ethnic group may lobby for policies favoring their ancestral country. Others contended that bilingual education—one by‐product of the cultural‐pluralism ideal—retards the economic progress of immigrant children and weakens the American social fabric. Since the United States remains an immigrant‐receiving country, some form of cultural pluralism will likely continue to describe the American reality, even if the theory is modified or falls out of fashion.

Artical of Cultural Imperialism

Jamie Uys's humorous yet moving film The Gods Must Be Crazy narrates the story of what happens when a pilot flying across the Kalahari Desert of Botswana drops a Coca-Cola bottle into the midst of a tribal group. The confused aboriginals explain the object as a gift from the gods. But the bottle challenges and destroys the traditions and social mores of their world. To defy the object's destructive influence, the tribe sends out one of its members to toss the evil thing over the edge of the earth, a distance the clan believes is some twenty days' walk away. Uys's movie was so popular on the international market that its producers created a sequel. The Gods Must Be Crazy offered a conspicuous sample of American consumer imperialism and its victimization of the Third World. Released in 1981, the film struck a vital chord in the middle of what has come to be known as "The Grand Debate": Have Americans become cultural imperialists? Do manufacturers, policymakers, and other interest groups attempt to conquer and corrupt the rest of the world by flooding it with consumer products made in the United States of America?

Since 1945, the study of cultural transfer has formed a powerful tool for the analysis of America's interaction with other nations. But in contrast to other approaches, neither historians nor their peers in neighboring fields have ever devised a clear-cut terminology. Indeed, they have not even employed a single line of argument. Originating in political think tanks after World War II, the investigation of cultural transfer has made its way through academic institutes the world over, until it finally arrived in the public sphere in the 1980s. By far the most popular—or notorious—approach has been termed "cultural imperialism," a notion and an ideology that appealed to a long list of supporters in the 1960s and after, and that—because of its persistence and influence—deserves the attention of all scholars interested in the study of culture and foreign relations. However, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and others have suggested that the notion of "cultural imperialism" should be replaced with a more fluid term that avoids what they regard as the naive active-passive dominator-victim dualism. Alternative terms include, for example, "cultural transmission" and "transcultural interaction." Students of culture and foreign relations should therefore use these terms with great caution and realize that they are based on specific arguments and interpretations.

THREE TRENDS OF CULTURAL TRANSFER
Cultural transfer does not represent a single, static trend or a set of criteria. Most historians of cultural transfer probably would deny that they all belong to one school. The specific meaning of the term is neither timeless nor free of ideological underpinnings. Instead, each meaning is generated out of its various discourses, its use. Since World War II, the study of cultural transfer has developed in cycles. Hence, its significance must be interpreted through historical lenses. First, the cold warriors deplored the absence of an active and forceful cultural diplomacy among U.S. officials. In contrast, their descendants, the critics of cultural imperialism, described the export of American culture as thinly veiled global capitalist exploitation. Finally, a third group of countercritics challenged the concept of cultural imperialism with a variety of different arguments. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a rather heterogeneous group of scholars argued that local resistance either modified or completely stymied imports as part of a global process. Begun as a purely political debate, the discussion has expanded into an increasingly academic dispute over culture as an instrument of power that either "functioned" or "did not function."

Scholars of U.S. cultural transfer are primarily concerned about U.S. cultural influence in the world but also deal with foreign influences in the United States. In contrast to their peers working in the field of political history, they look beyond the level of decision-making processes to figure out how culture, especially the export and osmosis of culture, can be explained as an instrument of political or economic power, a tool of international communication, and a dynamic force on its own. In particular, they seek to find out how governmental and nongovernmental actors exerted power abroad by importing and exporting material goods and ideas as well as by creating international networks and organizations. In this context, culture, and American culture in particular, does not connote a specific meaning but rather a conglomeration of aspirations, emotions, and identities shared by human beings living within a geographically and politically defined area. "Culture," contemplates Akira Iriye (1997), "determines what the ends of a nation are; power proves the means for obtaining them."

Cultural imperialism is based on the assumption that one nation tries to force its culture, ideology, goods, and way of life on another country. In the United States, critics of cultural imperialism as an instrument of diplomacy study the extent to which American culture reached and influenced foreign shores under governmental and private auspices. On one end of the spectrum, historians interested in cultural imperialism argue that postwar U.S. policymakers made a conscious effort to export American culture abroad in order to gain access to raw materials, cheap labor, and new markets for U.S. consumer products. On the other end of the spectrum, scholars have proposed to supplant the notion of cultural imperialism with cultural transmission, which seeks to deemphasize the question of agency and, instead, admits a more fluid concept of interaction.

In the past the idea and study of cultural transfer has appealed to many audiences outside of the academic world. It is this appeal to both scholars and the broader public that distinguishes the significance of cultural imperialism and cultural transmission from most other theoretical concepts discussed among diplomatic historians. Whether they liked it or not, since at least the early days of the Cold War, journalists, politicians, and intellectuals have fretted over the power and meaning of American culture abroad.

Since at least the 1960s, cultural imperialism has proven to be a tremendously popular and enduring concept. It has introduced culture as a variable into the study of foreign relations and thereby has significantly broadened the field. It has built the foundation upon which more than two generations of historians have based their research strategies and arguments. It has penetrated many academic disciplines, including musicology, sports, sociology, and political science. And it has left a long-lasting mark in the public arena; politicians the world over, for example, lament the manipulative influx of U.S. movies. Tiny nations, remote people, and unknown tribes find their way into the headlines of international journals through their outspoken protests against Western cultural imperialism. From Iceland to Latin America, Central Africa to the Philippines, local spokesmen presumably mourn the decease of their indigenous mores and traditions that is coupled with the rise of Anglo-American television and culture.

In harmony with the public debate, several generations of academics have struggled with questions of cultural transfer. Despite the scholars' intergenerational hostility and despite historians' increasing urge to defy old approaches for new configurations, students who desire to labor in the vineyard of cultural transfer need to know these interpretations. Each of the three principal trends still finds its way into early-twenty-first-century historiographical debates—and rightfully so. For despite all the ideological baggage, each trend offers viable methodological insights for research related to the meaning of American culture in the international arena.

In the years following World War II, policy-makers and intellectuals began to believe that cultural diplomacy and cultural images made a difference in global politics. This assumption seemed radical if not revolutionary for most observers at the time. In 1938, when the State Department established the Division for Cultural Relations, many U.S. officials still criticized the use of culture as a diplomatic tool. Their reluctance reflected a consensus that culture belonged to the realm of creativity, public taste, and free enterprise. How and why should one win diplomatic negotiations by invoking art, music, books, and theater performances? On a more basic level, cultural programs were costly and there were no voters abroad to legitimize such investments.

After 1945 the situation changed as both U.S. diplomats and intellectuals began arguing that the United States needed to sell the American way of life abroad. Public figures as well as policymakers, such as the State Department consultant Arthur W. MacMahon, media czar Henry Luce, and Senator William Fulbright, encouraged governmental authorities to make more of an effort to influence foreign nations through culture around the world. In the early Cold War years, consequently, the American government created a number of organizations and programs, such as the United States Information Agency and the Fulbright exchange program, that sought to sell American culture—including literature, music, and art—abroad. The USIA was founded with the specific purpose of developing a cultural propaganda program for audiences abroad and to develop them with a full and fair picture of American life, society, and culture. The Fulbright program was created right after World War II to enable foreign students (notably German students) to study in the United States and become acquainted with the American way of life. Likewise, the program sent (and still sends) U.S. academics abroad to learn about cultural differences but also to act as informal ambassadors of the United States.

Designed in 1950, the "Campaign of Truth" was supposed to represent a psychological counterattack against Soviet indoctrination. Employing books, brochures, exhibitions, and lectures, the campaign was aimed at public opinion leaders and other "multipliers."

One might wonder why policymakers grew so interested in the American way of life. Why did they suddenly seek to impart American culture to others? First, on the ideological level, American culture was dizzily democratic; anything was allowed. American culture also seemed essentially resistant to autocracies on the left or the right, as reflected in the postwar consensus on liberalism manifest in the writings of intellectuals like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Boorstin, and Louis Hartz. Consequently, U.S. policymakers and scholars were convinced that the promotion abroad of an enterprise-based culture would help to spread democracy around the world and contain fascism, communism, and other repellent foreign ideologies.

Second, and on a more practical level, communist regimes, above all in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), made Bildung (knowledge, education) and Kultur (high culture) pivotal points of their own propaganda. The GDR government claimed to be a democratic institution and it attacked American culture as a manifestation of a degenerate democracy. Communist officials knew that Europeans identified strongly with their high culture. Public opinion polls taken between 1945 and 1950 revealed that many Germans dreaded the adaptation of democratic values at the expense of their cultural heritage. Communist propagandists had convinced German audiences that they could be communists and, simultaneously, admirers of high culture, such as the romantic music of the nineteenth-century composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. According to their propaganda, democratic audiences in the Western world, in contrast, supposedly "drugged" their minds with jazz.

Third, in the decade after World War II many Americans felt a deep apprehension over what they saw as their worsening reputation in a world of cultural diversity abroad—new cultures, new nations, and new arms. Shortly after the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik, Franz M. Joseph and Raymond Aron edited a collection of articles under the telling title As Others See Us (1959). In this book, some twenty representatives from all over the world portrayed their countries' impression of American society. The French, Aron asserted, detested America's "big industry, mass production, the lowering of standards in favor of the masses," as well as its race problems, superficiality, "industrial barbarism," and "the intellectual fodder offered to the American masses, from scandal magazines to digests of books." In the end, the book represented a most depressing analysis of America's image abroad. Most people believed that "Americans had done remarkable things in production and they had technical 'know-how,' but America itself was … [a] giant with the head of a lout."

Academic and journalistic investigations of American cultural transfer abroad in the late 1950s and 1960s underlined the prevalent belief that American information and exchange efforts represented a timid reaction to the Soviets' dynamic propaganda. "America is the greatest advertising country in the world," the journalist Peter Grothe complained in 1958. "Yet when it comes to the most important advertising campaign of all—that of advertising ourselves and the democratic way of life—we run a poor second to the Communists." Grothe reproached U.S. policymakers for not having made the most of cultural relations programs after World War II, blaming the small-mindedness and indifference of the president, Congress, and the American public. And sociologists like Princeton University's W. Phillips Davison demanded more effective programs with clear-cut values, detailed purposes, and a rigid selection and training of personnel. They urged policymakers to employ American books, films, and information programs as instruments to acquaint people the world over with U.S. history, politics, and culture. All people, in short, needed more American culture, and it was the government's task to export it abroad.

The men and women who took part in this debate, it should be added, employed a rather unspecific idea of American culture. Historians investigating the United States Information Agency—designed in 1953 to convince people abroad that U.S. goals were in harmony with their hopes for freedom, progress, and peace—have underlined the uncertainty to define the core and the ins and outs of American culture. As Laura Belmonte and others have shown, USIA's programs focused on areas that were regarded as representative of American culture and society, including consumer products, high living standards, and the advantages of a free-market economy. But throughout the 1950s the agency was hampered by conflicts over the content of its agenda and its mission. Michael Krenn has shown that at the World's Fair of 1958, endless debates over how to deal with the United States's "Achilles' heel" of race relations inhibited the entire organization of the U.S. exhibit.

In sum, until the 1960s the debate over the export of American culture remained primarily a political one. Its participants were civil servants, writers, and journalists who viewed the government's developing cultural programs abroad as worthy although insufficient weapons to contain totalitarianism in the world. These men and women did not ask whether foreign audiences would welcome such messages.

THE EMERGENCE OF A CULTURAL IMPERIALISM CRITIQUE
But in the late 1950s and early 1960s concern over the implications of American culture bounced back to Europe, where it inspired a debate that would dominate academia for the next thirty years. Indeed, academics everywhere increasingly internalized the debate on U.S. culture abroad but they also dramatically revised previous assessments. A blooming leftist movement associated capitalism with a host of things characteristic of twentieth-century society, including consumerism, modernity, bureaucratic "soulless" organization, and the conflict between society and the individual. Their findings would lay the groundwork for the study of U.S. cultural imperialism.

Again, the theme—a critical interpretation of American culture in the world—was not entirely new. Since the early 1900s, if not before, European conservatives such as D. H. Lawrence and Adolf Halfeld had criticized American civilization for its lack of soul and education. Americans, these writers argued, scoffed at high culture. Americans' essential national identity and values, such as productivity, efficiency, and rationality, stood in contrast to the most fundamental characteristics of Kultur, including quality work, contemplation, and the creative use of leisure. Many observers, that is, interpreted American civilization not just as plainly different from but as a treacherous threat to European culture.

The critics of the early 1900s found a faithful audience among post–World War II intellectuals. In the 1940s and 1950s, European leftists also began worrying about American influences, such as McCarthyism and consumerism. Horrorstricken at the term "mass," the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers, sociologists, and historians, viewed the United States as a mass society with a mass culture that annihilated liberty, democracy, and individualism. The sociologist Herbert Marcuse stated that Americans represented a prime example of how human existence in advanced industrial societies remained passive, acquiescent, and unaware of its own alienation. In his writings, Marcuse developed the image of the "one-dimensional man" (the title of one of his books), an individual incapable of thinking dialectically and of questioning his society. Instead, humans had willfully subordinated themselves to the domination of technology and the principles of efficiency, productivity, and conformity.

The Frankfurt School was particularly worried about the demise of Kultur. Intellectual leaders such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Leo Lowenthal devised a theory based on Marxism that stressed the subliminal totalitarianism of news agencies, television, and broadcasting. Fostered by the media, American capitalism had turned into an economically and culturally repressive force. High culture no longer represented a foreign, opposing, and transcendental sphere that contrasted with reality. Instead, in the struggle between East and West, Kultur (that is, the individual philosopher, the preservation of theory, art, and high culture) had mutated into a propaganda tool and, thus, to a consumer good. By materializing and mass-producing aspects of high culture, modern humankind had mutilated its original meaning.

The Frankfurt School influenced more than a generation of American thinkers. Disillusionment originating from the Vietnam War and domestic urban and student revolts captivated a culturally influential segment of Americans who came to condemn both the free-market economy and the U.S. government. The promotion of democracy by the United States seemed hypocritical and meaningless in the age of napalm bombs and the Watts riots. Journalists and scholars such as David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, Vance Packard, and William H. Whyte studied the subject of the mass media in the 1940s and 1950s. They believed that the United States was the dominant promoter of capitalism around the globe and concluded from their study of the mass media that it represented a tool of U.S. capitalist ideology, perpetuating U.S. capitalism at home and abroad. To criticize the United States for its military involvement in the Third World, notably Vietnam, implied automatically a critique of American capitalism proper. Capitalism was bad because it threatened human wholeness, true individuality, the sense of community, social bonds, self-realization, and authentic values.

This critical interpretation of the nature of American capitalism profoundly influenced the writing on U.S. foreign relations. Discontent with the "realist" approach of historians such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and others, a new generation of "revisionists" shifted the study of the international system to the impact of domestic ideology as well as economic and social forces on U.S. diplomacy. And as American society grew wealthier, critics turned their attention away from the American working class to suppressed domestic minorities and the Third World, where they found that American capitalism, in search of new markets, raw materials, and cheap labor, acted as a victimizer, brutalizer, and exploiter. The making of American diplomacy had to be seen as part of America's capitalist political economy, argued New Left historians such as William Appleman Williams, because the health and persistence of the domestic economy depended on ever-expanding markets abroad. Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and others stressed the economic motivations of U.S. diplomacy and, thus, turned the investigation of the East-West conflict into a struggle between capitalism and socialism. U.S. policymakers constituted the foremost guilty party in this scheme because their actions were motivated solely by their greed, their quest for new markets that the Soviet Union did not even want.

The historiography of U.S. economic and political imperialism formed the foundation for the study of cultural imperialism. Although the term "cultural imperialism" had appeared in scholarly analyses before, it was only in the 1960s that this critique came to be a catchword as well as a coherent argument. The 1977 edition of the Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought defines cultural imperialism as "the use of political and economic power to exalt and spread the values and habits of a foreign culture at the expense of a native culture." Critics of cultural imperialism were united in their portrayal of Western culture as an expansive, predatory force. They cast their critique in a structuralist framework that associates political ideas with an underlying discourse that, in turn, shapes the entire culture in the context of which such ideas are expressed. Unlike the discussants of the 1950s, who had called for more American culture abroad, the critics of cultural imperialism reproached the U.S. government and the business community for spreading that culture beyond U.S. borders.

FOUR DISCOURSES ON CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
John Tomlinson developed a most insightful critique, on the basis of which we can identify at least four different discourses of cultural imperialism. His categories are the media, national domination, the global dominance of capitalism, and the critique of modernity. Media imperialism is the oldest and by far most widely debated category. Most importantly, it relates to current political issues. The study of media imperialism originated in Latin America among students of communication research. In the 1950s and 1960s, Latin American economists interpreted their countries' economic relations to Europe and the United States by developing a theory of dependency. Chilean communication scholars quickly appropriated that concept when, at the time of the 1970 election that brought Salvador Allende to power, they began to admonish the United States for its involvement in Latin American affairs. One of the most dramatic and widely read essays written by these scholars came from Armand Mattelart, a professor of mass communications and ideology at the University of Chile, and Ariel Dorfman, a literary critic and novelist. In Para leer al pato Donald ("How to Read Donald Duck," 1971), they held that in an effort to protect U.S. economic interests in Chile, the Central Intelligence Agency financed and fostered an arsenal of psychological warfare devices to indoctrinate the minds of the Chilean people, including Disney cartoons and other consumer products. They denounced Hollywood's distorted version of reality and cautioned Latin Americans against U.S. propaganda. The danger of Walt Disney, Mattelart and Dorfman believed, consisted of the manner in which the United States "forces us Latin Americans to see ourselves as they see us." The authors stated that the Chilean people would eventually free their own culture and kick out the Disney duck: "Feathers plucked and well-roasted….Donald, Go Home!" Published shortly before the Chilean revolution, this essay appealed to readers far beyond the borders of Chile; Para leer al pato Donald went through more than fifteen editions and was translated into several languages.

American scholars quickly borrowed the concept of media imperialism. The Watergate scandal propelled suspicions of a conspiracy between the government and the media and of abuses of executive power. In a variety of studies, the communication scientist Herbert I. Schiller retraced a powerful connection between the domestic business, military, and governmental power structure on the one hand and, on the other, the "mind managers"—that is, the leaders of the U.S. communications industry—who in his view had conspired to manipulate minds at home and abroad. As Schiller saw it, nineteenth-century Anglo-American geopolitical imperialism had been replaced in the twentieth century by an aggressive industrial-electronics complex "working to extend the American socioeconomic system spatially and ideologically" across the globe. "What does it matter," Schiller asked in 1976, "if a national movement has struggled for years to achieve liberation if that condition … is undercut by values and aspirations derived from the apparently vanquished dominator?"

A second group of critics understood cultural imperialism as the domination of one country by another. To no small degree, this discourse grew out of the growing concern of the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) with the protection of national cultures, as well as the rising interest in the study of nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, as represented by Benedict Anderson and others. In this interpretation, "culture" suggests a natural and static heritage of traditions that are akin to a certain country. It also serves as a tool of social control as important as controlling material resources. Hence, cultural imperialism implies the efforts of one country to undermine another country's cultural heritage by imposing its own. Frank Ninkovich's analysis of the State Department's efforts to establish an art program between 1938 and 1947 showed that during World War II, policymakers attempted to use artifacts of American culture, notably paintings, to promote "a sense of common values among nations of varied traditions." Just as free trade would have a liberalizing effect by contributing to other nations' economic well-being, art would create a common sense of culture. Simply put, if everyone agreed that American culture qualified artistically and aesthetically and also politically as a universal way of life and taste, it would indeed increase foreign acceptance of American values and American politics.

A third group of scholars interpreted cultural imperialism as the expansion and sometimes global dominance of U.S. consumer capitalism. Historians like Ralph Willet identified imperialist motivations within the American business community and government. Carrying this argument even further, others, such as Emily S. Rosenberg, claimed that in the twentieth century U.S. foreign policymakers had purposely begun to spread American culture, information, and the concept of a free and open economy in order to expand the national market abroad. Here, culture identifies capitalism in its most materialist form, encompassing goods and ideas associated with such goods, both of which foster homogenization. Culture is thus turned into an instrument to fuse different societies into one international economic system. E. Richard Brown (1982) denounced U.S. medical and health education programs sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in pre-1949 China. They were a "Trojan horse," guided "in their conception and development by imperialist objectives." These programs, Brown held, "were more concerned with building an elite professional stratum to carry out cultural and technological transformation than with meeting the health needs of each country." The programs facilitated American control of foreign markets and raw materials.

The most persisting and intellectually challenging criticism of U.S. cultural imperialism, however, originated among a fourth group of scholars who redefined the debate into a critique of modernity. The arguments of Jürgen Habermas, Marshall Berman, and others followed the outline of the Frankfurt School, which had originally launched the postwar investigation of cultural imperialism. Building on the writings of Marcuse and others, they depicted cultural imperialism as the imposition of modernity. They studied how the primary agents of modernity, such as the media, bureaucracy, science, and other social and economic institutions of the West, transferred the "lived culture" of capitalism to non-Western cultures. These scholars admitted that members of a recipient society had choices but that these choices were conditioned and manipulated by the modern capitalist environment in which these societies existed. Culture and modernity thus became a global prison.

In the eyes of Habermas and others, "modernity" represents the "main cultural direction of global development." Culture entails capitalism but also mass culture, urbanism, a "technical-scientific-rationalist dominant ideology," nation-states and a certain one-dimensional self-consciousness. The domination of these all contribute to the core meaning of Western "imperialism."

The critics of modernity were the first group that focused their analyses not on the question of agency but on the process of manipulation itself. They expanded the study from "American" to "Western" cultural imperialism that left out no field, no people, and no culture. While this perspective retained the term "imperialism," it also served as a forerunner for later trends in the debate over cultural transfer by moving the emphasis from the question of guilt to the actual process of cultural imposition. Because of its innovative approach, much of the critique of modernity has remained fashionable after most other critiques of cultural imperialism have ceased to influence the debate.

CRITICS OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM THEORY
Students who are interested in the concept of cultural imperialism should be aware of the unresolved theoretical and methodological problems within the debate. A number of scholars have claimed that the cultural imperialists "have shown remarkable provincialism, forgetting the existence of empires before that of the United States." Since the sixteenth century, European governments have developed a variety of cultural exchange programs, although they may not always have hoped to expand their empire by exporting their culture. The British in India and the Middle East, the Germans in Africa, and the French in Indochina all imposed their own culture abroad as a powerful tool to strengthen trade, commerce, and political influence and recruit intellectual elites for their own purposes. The historian Lewis Pyenson has shown that between 1900 and 1930, "technological imperialism"—the attempt on the part of state officials to employ scientific learning to form an international network of communication and prestige abroad—skillfully complemented German expansion in China, Argentina, and the South Pacific. In addition, new studies on U.S. policies in Asia and Europe have demonstrated that American policymakers did not hesitate to sacrifice economic (and ideological) objectives in order to realize geopolitical interests.

Individual case studies on private interest groups, such as philanthropic foundations, the American Library Association, and the press corps, show that often neither policymakers nor businessmen, but rather nongovernmental American organizations, were among the most active advocates of American culture and values abroad. The State Department as well as Congress were often reluctant to develop a full-fledged policy of cultural diplomacy. Often, these institutions were omitted from the process altogether.

Yet by far the most emphatic attacks against the critics of cultural imperialism came from Tomlinson, Frederick Buell, and others, who reproached authors such as Schiller for falling into the very trap they originally wished to avoid. Tomlinson stated that their rhetoric "repeats the gendering of imperialist rhetoric by continuing to style the First World as male and aggressive and the Third as female and submissive." In doing so, Schiller and others had assumed an imperialist perspective that viewed the Third World as made up of fragile and helpless cultures while at the same time serving the interests of Western modernity. It was said that the critics of cultural imperialism employed a theory suffering from a vague language of domination, colonialism, coercion, and imposition. Thus, ironically, the critics of cultural imperialism were made to seem the worst cultural imperialists.

Cultural imperialism, according to John Tomlinson, consists of the spread of modernity. It is a process of cultural loss and not of cultural expansion. There never were groups of conspirators who attempted to spread any particular culture. Instead, global technological and economic progress and integration reduced the importance of national culture. Therefore, it is misleading to put the blame for a global development on any one culture. The notion of imperialism—that is, purposeful cultural conquest—is irrelevant; instead, all countries, regardless of whether they are located in the northern or southern hemisphere, are victims of a worldwide cultural change.

Since the mid-1980s, scholars have paid closer attention to both global and local aspects of the American and Western cultural transfer. Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have stressed the peculiarity of individual cultures in the context of a nonbipolar world. Under the influence of resurfacing nationalism the world over, one group of scholars has studied the periphery in greater detail, producing analyses of individual communities that came in contact with American (or Western) culture after World War II. Inspired by the growing debate on globalization, a second group has opted for precisely the opposite approach. Instead of unilateral imperialism, it has developed a concept of global modernization.

Scholars of local responses to American culture have investigated individual case studies, weighing resistance against acceptance. Borrowed from both psychology and literary criticism, response theory addresses the preconceptions influencing the reactions of human beings exposed to an external impression such as a text, a sound, or a visual perception. Response theory moves the focus of research from the question of agency to the question of audience and reaction. Instead of looking at broadcasters and producers, these scholars investigate, for example, the audience of television shows like Dynasty.

Inspired by the public debate abroad over the impact of U.S. cultural imperialism, since about the mid-1980s response theory has affected nearly all studies of cultural transfer in history, sociology, and cultural studies. For example, Culture and International Relations (1990), edited by Jongsuk Chay, studies particular aspects of culture such as literature, music, religion, or television programs to calibrate the effects of American culture abroad. The authors' findings vary in their assessment of the impact of American culture, but they agree that indigenous people never simply accepted consumer goods from the United States. Reinhold Wagnleitner, for example, argued that Austrian youth revised the original meanings of jeans, Coca-Cola, and rock and roll into something new that accorded with their own needs; those consumer products offered not only comfort but also freedom from social constraints as well.

A number of scholars delineated a profound appeal of Western culture to non-Western countries, but challenged the assumption that U.S. policymakers and businessmen sought to manipulate certain target groups. Other studies focusing on the effects of cultural imperialism underlined the difference between foreign people and foreign governments. James Ettema, D. Charles Whitney, and others suggested in their studies of the media that audiences make conscious choices concerning what they listen to, read, and watch. Studies of underground movements in China and Eastern Europe in 1989 also demonstrate that in many cases, Western television programs inspired audiences to start a revolution against their own political leaders.

Another group of scholars concluded that audiences not only simply accepted the fruits of Western cultural imperialism but developed a strong resistance to American products and culture. Scholars of Islamic societies have consistently emphasized the stark opposition of orthodox Muslims to Western influences. Individual studies in cinematography, drama, literature, and cultural studies in Latin America, Asia, and Africa demonstrate that, notwithstanding the influence of Western goods, since the mid-1970s local audiences began to reject individual aspects of Western culture.

In many cases, a more detailed analysis of the origins of local resistance shows that peculiar local conditions informed it more than an outright condemnation of American culture. Under the intriguing title Seducing the French (1993), Richard F. Kuisel investigated economic missions, foreign investment, and U.S. consumer products in postwar France. He emphasizes that French opposition to U.S. culture "was (and is) about both America and France," because it intensified French fears of losing their cultural identity. Kuisel concedes that the French underwent a process of Americanization. But at the same time, they succeeded in defending their "Frenchness." French consumers found some American products appealing but they also continued to cherish and idealize French national identity, notably the idea of a superior French high culture.

Likewise, the average German citizen traditionally tended (and tends) to adhere to a more exclusive image of culture than his or her American counterpart. German Kultur traditionally stressed high culture and was closely linked to the enhancement of Bildung. It was ethnically bound, deeply rooted in German history, and—particularly in the case of the arts, music, and performance—dependent on state funding. After World War II, West Germans did not view the intrusion of American popular culture as cultural imperialism. To them, American culture remained always incompatible with Kultur. In other words, adoption of cultural artifacts does not necessarily translate into cultural and political adaptation.

The response theorists concluded that the model of a unilateral attempt to force consumer products and ideas on foreign nations is fundamentally flawed: resistance and cultural identity played a powerful role in the perception of American culture abroad. U.S. officials, in turn, were uncertain of the scope and nature of cultural exports. Their actions, furthermore, were quite comparable to the efforts of cultural diplomats of other countries. As Will Hermes concluded in the periodical Utne Reader, "American pop culture isn't conquering the world." Perhaps, he wondered, American cultural imperialism is "just part of the mix."

Informed by the poststructuralist approach, scholars from a variety of disciplines suggested in the late twentieth century that the term "cultural imperialism" be replaced with another term that seeks to circumvent the simplistic active-passive, dominator-victim dualism. For example, musicologists and anthropologists developed a variety of concepts seeking to broaden our understanding of global music interaction. Their suggestions, including "artistic sharing" and "transculturation," could easily be translated into other fields as well.

"Cultural transmission," for example, became one of the most appealing "post-imperialist" interpretations. The notion stemmed from the vocabulary of psychology, where it alluded to the interaction between cultural and genetic influences on human behavior. One of the most important historical accounts is a collection of essays, Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (1993). The contributors addressed diverse issues such as rock music in Italy and the reception of Disneyland in France. Cultural Transmissions describes the various avenues of acceptance, rejection, and alteration that audiences may choose when confronted with American culture.

Spurred by the vision of a "global village," another group of scholars has advanced a theory of "globalization." That term alludes to the compression of the world as well as to humans' increasing perception of the earth as an organic whole. Many understand this phenomenon simply as an economic development. Yet globalization is multidisciplinary in its causes and its effects. Its vague meaning allows researchers to interpret the term broadly; thus, it includes many features of modernization, including the spread of Western capitalism, technology, and scientific rationality.

Once again, the theme—globalization—was not at all new. Modern ideas on the interconnectedness of the world could be found as early as the writings of turn-of-the-twentieth-century German sociologists. Max Weber, for example, offered various conceptual frameworks of universalism beyond political borders. In "Soziologie des Raumes" (The sociology of space, 1903), philosopher-sociologist Georg Simmel argued that a national border is not a geographical fact with sociological consequences but a sociological fact that then takes a geographical shape.

This theme received renewed attention in the late 1980s when sociologists came to believe that socioeconomic relations everywhere were undergoing a profound change that resembled the Industrial Revolution in scope. No longer could cultures and societies be analyzed in the framework of the nation-state, these scholars believed. They argued that, first, any society is in a constant exchange with other societies; that, second, most countries consist of a multitude of cultures; and that, third, cultures do not necessarily reflect the borders of a nation-state. Sociologist Roland Robertson, one of the most prominent advocates of a global theory, proposed that a new concept replace the prevalent social scientific system of mapping the globe into three different worlds after the end of colonialism in the 1960s. Instead of a tripartite worldview, he outlined a vision of the globe as a more organic, interconnected, single network.

Inspired by this argument, students of cultural transfer moved their research away from its anti-American focus and toward a more global level, with no one identifiable enemy. Scholars replaced the concept of U.S. cultural domination with the study of Western cultural influence, but they disagreed over the relationship between manipulation and globalization. A few, like Orlando Patterson, still maintained that the modern process of worldwide cultural interaction could be interpreted as a clandestine American push for global uniformity. Others, however, like Peter Beyer, believed that globalization comes "quite as much at the 'expense' of" Western as of non-Western cultures, since both are part of a dramatic change.

Scholars such as Karen Fog Olwig employed the global approach to reflect on the tension between local and supranational cultural and political developments. Some of these analyses presented a despairingly bleak picture of the future cultural world order. Samuel Huntington, for example, invoked the specter of a "clash of civilizations," a World War III, where Western and Eastern societies would battle not for political and ideological reasons but as a consequence of cultural conflicts. Huntington argued that in the future people would identify themselves by reference to their faith, food, and local traditions instead of ideas and national political systems.

Charles Bright and Michael Geyer's 1987 account painted a more optimistic picture. They interpret the shift from Westernization to globalization as the fusion of tradition and modernity: "This is not Spengler's Decline of the West, but the beginning of a global reordering in which the West seeks its place in a world order it must now share with radically different societies. It is the beginning of a truly global politics." John Urry and Scott Lasch (1987) even theorized that the globalization of economic, political, and social relationships indicates the "end of organized capitalism." In a completely interconnected global economy, no one country will be able to control the market. Frederick Buell claimed in his book National Culture and the New Global System (1994) that for almost every academic discipline the "world of hybrid cultural production" was becoming the rule.

Interestingly, major critics of U.S. cultural imperialism, too, revised their earlier reproaches along these lines. Herbert I. Schiller, for example, reframed his argument in terms of world-systems theory. In an article published in 1991, he portrayed an expansive, transnational corporate authority that has replaced an autonomous United States in influencing all economic and cultural activity. Literary critic Edward Said, who analyzed the image of Orientalism in Western society, argued in Orientalism (1978) that the West culturally dominated the Orient by creating an artificial cultural vision of the latter "as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience." His later study, Culture and Imperialism (1993), detailed how Western authors and audiences developed a literary perspective on imperial geography distinguishing between "us" (the West) and "them" (the Third World). "Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other," Said summed up, "but even at their worst they are neither monolithic nor deterministic."

It would be misleading to abandon the notion of cultural imperialism and replace it with another, equally exclusive term. Scholars who are interested in the study of cultural transfer need to understand that culture, just like power, may be used to attain any number of objectives and to pursue any number of policies. Therefore, cultural imperialism is as suitable or unsuitable a designation as any other one. In the end, each term provides only one perspective on the chaos of cultural interaction. To understand and partake in the research in this field is to realize that there is no central paradigm. Instead, scholars must borrow insights from all three discourses retraced above. Originally begun as an almost public debate among politicians, journalists, and scholars, the discussion focused on the political advantage of cultural diplomacy and called for the dissemination abroad of more information on the United States and on American cultural artifacts. In the 1960s and 1970s, the topic became part of the nascent discussion of U.S. imperialism, which stressed the economic and psychological implications of culture; there was too much American culture abroad, scholars implied. But under the impact of worldwide resistance against American cultural imperialism and the influence of poststructuralism in the late 1980s, leading scholars in the field reconsidered their findings or developed new approaches. As the twentieth century ended, many no longer viewed the spread of American and Western culture exclusively as unilateral "imperialism" but as an ongoing process of negotiation among regional, ethnic, and national groups.

THE FUTURE OF CULTURAL TRANSFER STUDIES
At least four points of the debate on American cultural transfer abroad and on the question of where students of cultural transfer should turn next merit scholarly attention. First, the Internet revolution represents one of many events pointing to both globalization and multiculturalism, implying that Americans may no longer be able to agree on the substance and meaning of their culture, let alone agree sufficiently to export the idea of an American culture. In a way, this discord echoes the original conviction that Americans have no culture worthy to export.

Second, at the same time, the American public has once again begun to fret over the portrayal of American culture abroad, thus reinventing the discussion of the 1950s. On 8 June 1997, the New York Times Magazine published a special issue titled "How the World Sees Us." International observers reluctantly admitted the preponderance of American power and culture. But they also stressed their respective countries' resistance. "American movies have achieved the impossible," exclaimed playwright Edvard Radzinsky in one article. "Russians are so sick of them that they have started watching films from the days of Socialist Realism." And American commentators concurred. "Some of America's cultural exports are so awful that you begin to suspect that we're using the rest of the world as a vast toxic waste dump," editor Michiko Kakutani said.

Third, the center of the debate is changing rapidly. Until recently, the discussion centered on the nation-state, with a few significant exceptions. After the end of the Cold War, however, scholars paid more attention to the individual entrepreneur. The debate, that is, shifted from a nation-centered critique to the study of the impact of private business. This change of argument not only obliterated national boundaries but, equally important, transferred the object under investigation from politics to capitalism.

Fourth, until the late twentieth century the debate in the United States centered almost exclusively on that century. With only a few exceptions, discussants seemed to agree that the transfer of American culture had no history before the formal establishment of a program and then an agency that was in charge of projecting U.S. culture abroad. Yet sociologists tell us that bureaucratic formations follow rather than outline the way of a political trend or need. By shifting the notion of cultural transfer from formal government programs to nongovernmental encounters, scholars have increasingly realized that cultural transmission has existed everywhere and much earlier in time. Indeed, cultural transmission often preceded formal diplomatic ties. Although their findings were for many years ignored in the debates over cultural transfer, students of American history have for decades been investigating nineteenth-century ambassadors of American culture abroad. They have looked at missionaries in China, soldiers in Cuba, and the encounter between American settlers and Indian nations. They have investigated actors, as in the examination of the exodus and exchange of private groups including political émigrés, businessmen, and artists. They have also studied ideas and products as transmitted, for example, by scientists, poets, tourists, and museum curators. Their findings underline the general point that there was quite a lot of cultural transfer prior to World War I.

You Are Reading CULTURAL NORMS Artical

Passed from one generation to the next, cultural norms are the shared, sanctioned, and integrated systems of beliefs and practices that characterize a cultural group. These norms foster reliable guides for daily living and contribute to the health and well-being of the group. As prescriptions for correct and moral behavior, cultural norms lend meaning and coherence to life, as well as the means to achieve a sense of integrity, safety and belonging. Thus, normative beliefs, together with related values and rituals, confer a sense of order and control upon aspects of life that might otherwise appear chaotic or unpredictable.

Cultural norms are woven into interpretations and expressions of health and illness through dynamic, interactive relationships at all levels of influence—from the gene to the society. Cultural norms often mediate the relationship between ethnicity and health, even effecting gene expression through such practices as marriage rules, lifestyle choices, and environmental exposures. At the individual and group levels, cultural norms have a substantial role in health-related behaviors such as dietary practices, tobacco use, and exercise. Conversely, health can influence cultural norms, as illustrated by Jewish dietary laws governing kashrut (keeping kosher) that were an adaptive response to parasitic diseases centuries ago, yet are still widely practiced today.

Cultural systems, as adaptive tools, change in response to external cues, as evident in the transmutations that occur in norms as diverse groups interact and influence one another. Practices are also adapted to new environments as a response to immigration or technology, such as the genetic engineering of foods that may increase crop resistance to disease or drought and thus alter moral messages of crop failures. Such natural occur-rences may have been interpreted as due to retribution for transgressions against the social religious order of a society. Another instance may be greater size and weight of a group after one or two generations due to an abundance of food sources (e.g., meat, vegetables, and fruit) leading to cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

An individual or group's relationship to the contemporary Western health care system is steeped in cultural norms. Utilization patterns or adherence to treatment protocols may be mediated by a traditional orientation to health and disease, by particular conceptions regarding the authority of clinicians, or by what is considered acceptable communication between patients and practitioners. Cultural differences also affect the responsiveness of the health care system to diverse patient populations. Inequities in access to adequate/optimal health care are a major cause of health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. While the extent is not known, many inequities in health outcomes are due to incompatabilities between the beliefs, values, and cultural norms of the growing minority population segments and the culture of Western biomedicine.

Public health research has yet to fully recognize the importance of such cultural norms for health outcomes or the need to question these relationships on a broad integrated scale. Consequently, the field of public health has little to guide practice in this regard. In fact, recognition of the considerable disparities in health status associated with racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity is relatively recent. One of the first comprehensive accounts of racial and ethnic disparities in health was published in 1986, in the Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Black and Minority Health (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 1986).

Documentation of the extent and nature of health-status differences have improved, and research and interventions targeting ethnic minorities have increased since 1985. Still, public health policies and programs often fail to address cultural and ethnic differences—as distinct from racial differences—that are critical to the delivery of health care and to the promotion of health for many at-risk communities. These persistent disparities, coupled with extraordinary demographic growth in some of the most underserved populations, led to the 1999 President's Initiative on Race which notes the critical role of "culturally-sensitive implementation strategies" (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1999).

One barrier to improved understanding of the role of cultural norms in health is the common failure to distinguish between race, ethnicity, and culture. These concepts are often used interchangeably, implying that racial categories have scientific validity, and that one's membership in these homogeneous racial groupings has an overriding significance to health outcomes. Neither is true. The evidence indicates that variations within cultural, socioeconomic, and political groups have far more relevance to health behavior, risk, and status than differences between groups. Progress has clearly been made, however, since the "first generation" of health promotion studies conducted from the 1960s through the early 1980s. During this time, research focused on reducing health risks through interventions aimed at broad population segments—predominately at the white middle class. Little or no differentiation was made in terms of targeting different cultural populations.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the "second generation" of health promotion studies were immersed in racial and ethnic group differences. These studies mainly focused on descriptive and intervention studies of African-American and Hispanic populations, but they showed little ability to distinguish universal from culturally specific factors, both because of the heterogeneity of these populations and the imprecise use of the concepts of race, ethnicity, and culture.

Current theories used to explain behavior and inform health-promoting interventions, however, continue to be founded on an assumption of universality (commonalities in human behavior across groups). This monocultural view of health behavior is based on Eurocentric cultural values of autonomy and individuality, as noted, for example, in the Patient's Bill of Rights (Annas 1998) and the Belmont Report (USDHEW 1979). This focus on individuality also frames how professionals are educated to provide care and how patients are expected to respond within the system. Yet these values are based upon a particular cultural construction of reality that is antithetical to many other cultures in which the needs of the group supersede the importance of the individual. This focus on individual autonomy is increasingly recognized as too restrictive to be valid or functional to predict behavior or to design effective interventions in cultural groups other than those for whom these theories and models were developed.

The need for a "third generation" of health-promotion studies has been suggested to elucidate similarities and differences through cross-cultural research that distinguishes among more meaningful subgroups based on cultural norms and other relevant shared characteristics. In this way, interventions to improve access to care and promote health could not only be targeted more precisely to those in need, but could be tailored to appropriate cultural norms, thus providing a greater likeli-hood of acceptability, relevance, and success. With increasing clarity in the role and nature of cultural norms as they relate to health, advances will be evident in public health interventions that recognize, respect, and respond to the similarities and differences throughout all segments of American society.

Keep Reading Cultural Relations and Policies

Multiculturalism or cultural pluralism, a term describing the coexistence of many cultures in a locality, without any one culture dominating the region. By making the broadest range of human differences acceptable to the largest number of people, multiculturalism seeks to overcome racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.

Cultural Relations and Policies
Akira Iriye

Cultural relations may be defined as interactions, both direct and indirect, among two or more cultures. Direct interactions include physical encounters with people and objects of another culture. Indirect relations are more subtle, involving such things as a person's ideas and prejudices about another people, or cross-national influences in philosophy, literature, music, art, and fashion. When cultural interactions deal with such matters as officially sponsored exchange programs or dissemination of books and movies, they may be called cultural policies. But not all cultural relations are cultural policies; there are vast areas of cultural interactions that have nothing or little to do with governmental initiatives. This essay, therefore, will deal primarily with broad themes in the history of American cultural relations, mentioning cultural policies only when they play a significant role in determining the nature of the overall cultural relationship with other countries.

The basic assumption here, of course, is that the United States is definable as a culture, as are all other nations in the world. In other words, each country has its own cultural identity in that it is defined by people who share certain traditions, memories, and ways of life. In this sense, all international relations are intercultural relations. The United States's dealings and contacts with, and the American people's attitudes and policies toward, any foreign country are conditioned by the historical and cultural outlooks of the two countries. Insofar as no two nations are completely identical, any discussion of foreign affairs must start with the assumption that we are analyzing two societies of different traditions as well as two entities embodying distinct sets of interests.

This is a different approach to the study of foreign affairs from the usual interpretations that stress military, security, trade, and other issues that affect a country's "interests." In terms of such factors, nations are more or less interchangeable. Balance-of-power considerations, for instance, have a logic of their own irrespective of the cultural identity of a given actor, as do commercial interests or national security arrangements. In a "realist" perspective, international affairs are comprehended in the framework of the interplay of national interests, and while each nation determines its own interests, all countries are similar in that they are all said to be driven by, or to pursue, considerations of their interests.

Cultural relations, in contrast, are both narrower and broader than the interaction of national interests. Instead of power, security, or economic considerations, cultural affairs are products of intangible factors such as a nation's ideas, opinions, moods, and tastes. Symbols, words, and gestures that reflect its people's thought and behavior patterns comprise their cultural vocabulary in terms of which they relate themselves to other peoples. Not so much a realistic ("rational") appraisal of national interests as a "symbolic" definition of a people's identity determines how they may respond to the rest of the world. In this regard, there are as many cultural relations as there are national cultures, and nothing as vague as "national interests" suffices to account for them. At the same time, cultural relations are also broader than the interplay of national interests in that they include cross-national interactions such as emigration and immigration, tourism, educational exchange, missionary and philanthropic activities, and various movements to promote human rights or the protection of the natural environment. These are cultural phenomena in that they cannot be reduced to security or economic considerations and deal with the interrelationships of individuals and groups across national boundaries.

A history of U.S. cultural relations, then, must deal with all those themes that together define a different world from the one consisting of sovereign rights and interests of nations. The bulk of work in international relations still focuses on the latter phenomenon, and historians have only begun to take the former themes seriously as objects of study.

THE EARLY REPUBLIC TO THE CIVIL WAR: DEFINING AN "AMERICAN" CULTURE
From the beginning, Americans were interested in cultural themes in their foreign affairs. For one thing, at the time of the American Revolution the political and intellectual leaders were fond of stressing the multiethnic nature of the new republic. In most instances, to be sure, multiethnicity consisted of diverse European nationalities rather than distinctive racial groups. Compared with western European countries, the United States seemed unique in that no nationality constituted a majority of the nation, even though those of English stock represented nearly half the population. There were Welsh, Irish, Germans, French, Scandinavians, and others whose admixture with, and adoption of the language of, the English-speaking Americans impressed European visitors for decades after the Revolution. This was as much a cultural as a political undertaking; to establish a republic made up of people from many countries who imagined themselves to belong to the same community required some shared memory, a sense of Americanness, to distinguish the new nation from all others. How such a republic could survive in a world consisting of sovereign states, on one hand, and of large empires, on the other, was the key question.

One way for the American people to assure themselves that this could be done was through developing a fairly precise image of themselves. The idea of the "city on a hill," and the idealized self-perception that the Americans had struggled for the "rights of man," not simply the rights of Englishmen, implied the coming into existence of a new kind of nation and assumed that others, too, would look to the United States as a land of freedom and opportunity. Conversely, Americans would carry out their mission to spread the blessings of civilization and liberty to the less fortunate in distant countries. If, as so many writers asserted, America was the most progressive land in the world, it was because it was a country without archaic encumbrances, where men and women from many countries would come and work together to build a new, ideal community. Anybody, theoretically, could join the undertaking. By the same token, what happened here would be of universal applicability. If various races and groups could join together in the United States to realize an earthly paradise, there was no reason why they could not do so elsewhere in the world. It was in this sense that America was called humankind's best hope.

Such universalism implied a view of other peoples that was monolithic and an idea of history that was unilinear. Just as divergent groups who came to the United States would create one unified people, so the rest of the world would ultimately tend to that goal. The American dream would be realized globally, and the American experience would become a world experience. America would cease to be unique only when its ideals and institutions were firmly implanted in all parts of the globe. The entire world would become one great America.

This type of teleological idealism was quite obviously a cultural product and provided one basic framework in which Americans developed their cultural relations with other countries. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, this, the cultural framework, was probably the only way the majority of Americans knew how to relate themselves to others. Cultural relations in that sense were thus a vital aspect of national self-definition.

This can be seen in the ways in which Americans viewed non-European people. Europeans, of course, comprised the bulk of the population of the United States, and cultural ties across the Atlantic were quite important. At the same time, however, it was when Americans dealt, either directly or indirectly, with people outside Western civilization that their cultural self-awareness became most clearly articulated. For instance, they viewed Arabs, Hindus, or Chinese in the framework of their own self-definition. These people, in other words, would be judged in terms of their distance from the American ideals and of their capacity to approximate them—if not immediately, then in the future. It is not surprising that observers of non-European societies frequently argued about whether these societies would ever transform themselves and become more like America. The basic assumption was, of course, that at the moment they lacked most of the ingredients that made the United States so progressive. Native populations in the Middle East, South Asia, or East Asia were almost invariably described as ignorant, indolent, and oppressed by arbitrary despots. They were the exact opposite of the Americans. Joel Barlow, poet and diplomat, described Hassan Pasha, dey of Algiers, as "a man of a most ungovernable temper; passionate, changeable, and unjust to such a degree that there is no calculating his policy from one moment to the next." William Eaton, appointed consul at Tunis by President John Adams, wrote of the "continual altercations, contentions and delays among the Arabs." "Poverty makes them thieves," he reported, "and practice renders them adroit in stealing." Similar expressions can be found at random in American writings on Turks, Chinese, Japanese, and other non-European nationalities throughout the nineteenth century.

A key question, given such an image of non-Europeans, was whether they had some redeeming qualities. On this point American universalism decreed that no people was so inherently depraved as to be totally incapable of attaining a higher level of civilization. The basic credo of American democracy was that any individual had certain abilities that could be developed to their potential if artificial restrictions were removed. Even those suffering under poverty and despotism were not entirely hopeless creatures. Given external stimuli to make them aware of alternative possibilities, and under favorable institutional conditions, they were certain to transform themselves. For, as the Democratic Review put it in 1839, "The same nature is common to all men … they have equal and sacred claims … they have high and holy faculties." It followed that Americans, having developed these faculties and made good their claims to progress, had a unique obligation to the rest of humankind. It was up to them, declared the Knickerbocker in 1840, "whether our fellow men shall reach the elevation whereof they are capable, and … whether or not [we shall] confer on them the most inestimable of all earthly boons, the boon of civilization."

It might be thought that in such a situation, there could be no genuine, equal cultural relations, especially with non-Europeans; Americans would interact with other societies and cultures through the cultural vocabulary of their own. Other peoples would merely be at the receiving end of American civilization without anything to give in return. Such, however, was not always the case. Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, when optimism regarding American values was most notable, appreciation of different cultural standards and achievements was not lacking. One has only to recall the great interest in porcelain, silks, paintings, and other objects brought back from China. Curiosity about other societies coexisted with a disdain for despotic institutions or alien religions. Samuel Goodrich's A History of All Nations, a popular textbook published in 1851, explained that while Asians on the whole were "slavish … superstitious … [and] treacherous," their arts compared favorably with those of Europe. "All the efforts of European art and capital," Goodrich wrote, "have been unequal fully to imitate the carpets of Persia, the muslins of India, the porcelain of China, and the lacquered ware of Japan." When the first Japanese embassy arrived at San Francisco in 1860, a correspondent for the New York Times recorded, "It makes a white man blush to see how much more simple, tasteful and sensible they were in their uniforms than our grandees were in theirs."

Such observations revealed a fascination with the strange and the exotic that appeared lacking in Western civilization. Some went a step further and found positive significance in things Oriental. No group was more interested in them than the Transcendentalists. As they grew dissatisfied with the Christian religion as it was practiced in the 1830s and the 1840s, they turned to Hinduism and Buddhism with a sense of fresh discovery. Their understanding of these Asian religions may have been superficial, but they were the first group of Americans who seriously viewed the non-West not as an object of their mission but as a good in itself, as something that might be relevant to their own life. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, was struck by the pantheism of the Hindu religion, which perceived godliness in all beings and all things. The pervading sense of serenity and the absence of a rigid demarcation between self and nature appealed to one who found modern life increasingly distasteful. As he remarked in his celebrated Harvard Divinity School address of 1838, "moral sentiment" had "dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East … Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses."

Only a handful of Americans went as far as the Transcendentalists in embracing the spirit of another civilization, but the appreciation of distinctive values and ways of life sustaining the Orient seems to have produced in many observers an awareness of cultural pluralism in the world. The East was much more than the negation of the West, an object of the latter's contempt or pity, something whose only hope lay in wholesale transformation. For example, in 1854 the New York Quarterly reported the longing of a traveler for the life, manners, and climate of the Orient, which "all our comfort and all our facilities for travelling by steamers and railroads cannot satisfy or dispel." Three years later, dissatisfaction with the "matter-of-fact, work-a-day age" prompted James P. Walker to publish the Oriental Annual, an anthology of Eastern folklore and poetry.

Such expressions approach cultural relativism, the feeling that each culture has its own autonomous tradition and inherent characteristics that cannot be artificially changed by external stimuli. In nineteenth-century America, thoroughgoing cultural relativism was a rare phenomenon; but to the extent that some thought about the question, it became inexorably linked with the idea of human progress. If a distinct cultural tradition was a product of centuries of history, could it ever be significantly altered from without? Would it ever be possible to change peoples' ways of life? If they lived in abject poverty and suffered from despotic rule, was it not because they were so conditioned by tradition, and by their collective traits? In short, were they not living as they were simply because they were made to be that way?

These questions were of particular interest to Americans because they had obvious implications for the slavery dispute. Just as they debated among themselves whether black men and women were capable of education and progress, and if they would be better off in an industrial than in a plantation economy, Americans discussed colors other than white and black. According to a popular view, humankind was divided into white, black, yellow, brown, and red races, each with distinctive traits that were often considered immutable. Almost invariably, the black people were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy of races. Samuel Morton's Crania Americana (1839) asserted that the Caucasian race was characterized by "the highest intellectual endowments" and that the Mongolian race was "ingenious, imitative, and highly susceptible of cultivation," whereas the "Ethiopian" was "joyous, flexible, and indolent—the lowest grade of humanity." The bulk of humanity, being neither white nor black, thus belonged to the gray area between the highest and the lowest categories. It is not surprising that there were considerable ambiguities in American attitudes toward them. They had unique features, some of which could be readily appreciated by Americans, but this did not mean that they were the equal of Westerners.

United States cultural relations before the Civil War, then, were of particular significance when Americans dealt with cultures and societies outside Western civilization. Their responses combined the prevailing sense of Western superiority with some appreciation of the strange. Confidence in the universality of certain values was coupled with more rigid racialist thinking. The overwhelmingly European-centered cultural framework was undermined by some individuals who looked to the East as a fascinating alternative. On the whole, however, it would seem that non-Western cultures and peoples had not yet made a strong impact on American society. If there were intercultural relations between them, they were not equal but basically unidirectional.

EXPANSION AND THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM
The situation did not change drastically after the Civil War, but there was a greater awareness of different civilizations than there had been earlier. Fundamentally this reflected the technological development of the last decades of the nineteenth century, when steam and electricity, as observers were fond of pointing out, narrowed distances between various parts of the world. One could travel far more easily and speedily than before, and news in one corner of the globe could be transmitted almost overnight to most other regions. Great migrations of people started from Asia to the American continent, and from Europe to Africa and South America. One saw more foreigners in one's lifetime than earlier. The opening of more and more Asian ports to Western trade served to introduce commodities from distant lands into the daily life of average Asians and Westerners. In many areas of the non-Western world, the process of reform and transformation began to remake traditional societies in the image of the modern West. But the very experience of modernization caused some hard rethinking about cultural values. Westernization meant a loss of innocence to many a non-Westerner, while the global character of the modern transformation often suggested to Westerners the dilution of their own identity.

These were extremely interesting phenomena, and most of the crucial questions raised then have persisted to this day. It may be said that toward the end of the nineteenth century, world history entered an age of globalization that had cultural, as well as political and economic, implications. Economically, the phenomenon has been referred to as modernization, a neutral term suggesting that any society with certain endowments may opt for change. Modernized nations would establish global networks of capital, goods, and technology, which in turn would help further modernize their economies and ways of life. Such globalization had obvious implications for international cultural relations. Not only did the more advanced nations become more than ever interdependent economically, but they also came to share a great deal of information and technology. For Americans, this meant a more cosmopolitan outlook, a renewed awareness that they had a great deal in common with Europeans, Canadians, and other "civilized" people. It is not surprising that they took advantage of the new means of transportation and communication to travel, live, and even work in Europe, while the latter also sent its scholars, artists, and musicians to the United States. There was a great deal of cultural exchange across the Atlantic. Against this sort of cosmopolitanism, there were, to be sure, nationalists who insisted on the uniqueness of the American historical experience and worried that modern civilization was making all nations interchangeable. Some even argued that conflict of interest and even war, rather than shared outlooks and ways of life, would preserve the vitality of the nation. This, too, it must be noted, was a cultural question. The often heated debate at the end of the nineteenth century on the character and future direction of the American nation was thus a response to globalization. Cultural relations across the Atlantic were becoming ever closer, as Americans and Europeans came to view themselves as members of the same intellectual, artistic, and technological universe.

In the meantime, Americans joined Europeans in linking other parts of the globe closer together. They were, at one level, helping modernize those regions. Since the capital and technology necessary for modernization were in short supply in almost every non-Western country, Western capital had to be introduced; and this inevitably involved the coming of European and American financiers, engineers, and manufacturers who would employ native labor and middlemen to establish their economic institutions. Americans, even though in the aggregate their country was still a net importer of capital from Europe, were already active. They were instrumental, for instance, in the construction of the first railroad in China, in the 1870s. They invested in coastal shipping in China and Japan, established syndicates for obtaining railway concessions in Asia and the Middle East, and participated in the development of mines in all these regions. This was intercultural relations in a broad sense. Americans were relating themselves to other peoples through the medium of capitalist enterprises.

Although the profit motive was uppermost, an influx of foreign capital and technology invariably had noneconomic as well as economic effects on the targets of Western expansion. Americans in China, for instance, were never in a sufficient number to involve themselves at all levels of mercantile and industrial activities. They needed local personnel as interpreters, clerks, messengers, business assistants, and even associates, and as "compradors" who acted as liaisons between foreigners and officials. Such diverse contacts were bound to affect Chinese manners and ideas. In fact, among the most "Americanized" Chinese were those who lived in the treaty ports and learned modern capitalist practices. Associations such as local chambers of commerce provided a setting where Americans and Chinese met and conducted social affairs as well as business matters.

Politically, the process of globalization was synonymous with what was then called, and has since been called, imperialism. The world was divided into those who established control over distant territories and those who became objects of such control. A handful of imperialist nations appropriated among themselves the vast lands of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean as colonies, semi-colonies, or spheres of influence. This was a military-political process, since control necessitated that a power structure be imposed upon alien peoples. Without such a regime, it was feared that local instability would create a chaotic condition and threaten the interests of a particular imperialist nation or invite the extension of power by its rivals. It seemed impossible and unwise to leave things as they were. Americans, no less than citizens of other advanced countries, were exhorted to reach out to far corners of the globe to join the forces of imperialist expansion.

Imperialism even in such a narrow sense was an important chapter in intercultural relations, for the assertion of power over another people entailed both physical and mental contact. The Spanish-American War, for instance, called forth a fierce debate within the United States on the wisdom of acquiring tropical colonies. Americans had never established territorial control over lands in the tropics, and they had to think hard about the implications of the new action. Since they had not given much thought to Filipinos or Puerto Ricans, they turned to what few books were available on these peoples. They read Andrew Clarke and John Foreman, among others—English authorities on the tropical islands. English colonialism provided an intellectual framework within which Americans discussed the new empire. They turned to Charles Dilke, Joseph Chamberlain, Henry Norman, George Curzon, and others to learn how colonies should be governed. Colonial administration seemed a very different matter from the governing of new territories in the continental United States or of the American Indians. The country would have to establish a new colonial service and train men and women fit for work in the tropics. The numerous magazine articles on these subjects during and immediately after the Spanish-American War attest to the impact of the war upon America's intercultural relations. The American people had to learn from scratch what it meant to be masters over an alien race.

This learning took various forms. At the popular level, war stories and novels were written to familiarize the general reader with conditions in the tropics, and children's adventure books sought to impart a sense of patriotic destiny to the younger generation. Quick reference volumes with revealing titles were also published, such as Thomas C. Copeland's The American Colonial Handbook: A Ready Reference of Facts and Figures, Historical, Geographical, and Commercial, About Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam (1899). Adult education programs such as the Chautauqua Society conducted seminars on the history of the Philippines. As a matter of course the academic community was selected to provide the intellectual leadership needed to deal with imperial problems, and it readily obliged. Universities established courses in colonial administration, imperialism, and tropical geography; and professional organizations such as the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association were engaged in turning out data and ideas that would be useful to the government in administering the new empire. The acquisition of overseas territories broadened the horizon for historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, who would have to redefine the scope of their respective disciplines to take advantage of the new opportunities. For example, the American Anthropologist noted in December 1898 that students of folklore would find "a rich field awaiting them in our territory." Anthropological studies of the Filipinos provided an intellectual underpinning for the establishment of a colonial regime over the islands.

In all this literature there was a feeling of excitement. Imperialism compelled Americans to encounter, mentally if not physically, a host of alien peoples, whereas earlier their experience had been limited to dealing with Indians and blacks. The result was to reaffirm the sense of America's cultural superiority, which was now much more openly linked to Britain than it had been earlier in the century. It was as if imperialism made the United States akin to Great Britain. The two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, it appeared, rediscovered their common heritage and vocabulary. They were both expansionists, many writers pointed out, better fitted than any other nation in the world for the administration of less-developed countries. They were to cooperate so that their respective empires would come to stand for enlightenment and efficiency. Elbridge S. Brooks was echoing a widespread sentiment when he told his young readers in Lawton and Roberts: A Boy's Adventure in the Philippines and the Transvaal (1900) that "the Stars and Stripes in the Philippines, and the Union Jack in South Africa, are advancing the interests of humanity and civilization…. [Untrammeled] liberty to the barbarian is as disastrous a gift as are unquestioning concessions to a republic which has been a republic only in name."

The last sentence reflected self-defensiveness about empire that was just beneath the surface optimism characteristic of the age of imperialism. In extending their control over alien races, Americans could look to the British for experience and guidance; but both of them had to confront the fact that as they advanced to far reaches of the globe, they were causing drastic changes in other societies. The non-Western parts of the world that earlier had been seen as decadent, static, or backward now seemed to be undergoing a period of profound crisis and instability as a result of the impact of Western technology, ideas, and institutions. If the expansionist thrust of the West was an inevitable development of history, then the consequent turmoil, confusion, and even anarchy in many regions of the world would have to be coped with. There were even more serious problems. If non-Western peoples should discard traditional values for new ones, what would happen to their indigenous cultures? Would they ever become thoroughly "Westernized"? What if they were transformed only superficially and remained basically uncivilized even though the superstructures of their societies were modernized? Would they become pro-Western or anti-Western?

These were some of the most interesting questions in America's intercultural relations during the age of imperialism. That was why so much was written toward the end of the nineteenth century about the nature of Western relations with other cultures. The future destiny of American civilization seemed bound up with the larger question of the evolving relationship between West and non-West. For example, in June 1897, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who was soon to become president of the University of California at Berkeley, declared in an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Greece and the Eastern Question" that the real question in the Middle East was "who is to lead, who is to champion, who is to represent Occidentalism in its antithesis between Occidentalism and Orientalism," an idea expressed in earlier decades but that now seemed an urgent question because of the resurgence of the East. Similarly, the naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan discussed the "stirring of the East" and posed the question of "whether Eastern or Western civilization is to dominate throughout the earth and to control its physical terms." Observers like Wheeler and Mahan agreed that the West's hope lay in its spiritual superiority to the East; even if the latter should catch up technologically and economically, and even though non-Westerners vastly outnumbered Westerners, the future of Western civilization was bright because of its unique heritage. Nevertheless, the fear was always present that the East might prove to be a formidable threat precisely because it lacked the West's refinement, humanity, and self-restraint. A modern Orient without the Occident's values might prove to be totally unmanageable. The West should therefore brace itself for what was termed by many "the coming conflict of civilizations" in the twentieth century.

The cultural monism of the earlier decades was thus giving way to self-consciousness and defensiveness in the age of imperialism. Such apprehension, to be sure, was limited to a minority of writers. Most Americans would have agreed with the historian John Fiske's optimism, as he expressed it in an article on the new "manifest destiny" in 1885, that "within another century … all the elements of military predominance on the earth, including that of simple numerical superiority, will have been gathered into the hands not merely of Europeans generally, but more specifically into the hands of the offspring of the Teutonic tribes who conquered Britain in the fifth century." Yet this type of complacency, reflecting a unilinear view of human (Western) progress, could not entirely accommodate some concurrent developments that had enormous implications for intercultural relations. Most notable among them were the growing fascination with non-Western civilizations and the influx of Asian immigrants.

LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENCOUNTERS: ART, RELIGION, AND EVERYDAY LIFE
Americans had always been curious about other peoples and had cherished imports from distant lands. But in the age of globalization there arose serious interest not only in curios and exotica of strange peoples but also in the fine arts, religions, philosophies, and ways of life of other countries, especially in the East. During the 1880s, the United States legation in Constantinople was headed by General Lew Wallace and by Samuel S. Cox, both noted for their favorable views of Oriental cultures. Wallace, the author of the popular novel Ben Hur, wrote of the "bloodthirsty and treacherous, recklessly brave and exceedingly beautiful" cavalry of the Ottoman Empire. "Even among the meanest of them," he wrote, "you will see noble, well-set heads of the finest mould, testifying to unmixed blood of the most perfect of living races." Cox recounted his experiences in the East in Orient Sunbeams. The message he sought to convey to his readers was that they should remove their prejudice toward people of different religions. He wrote of Islam: "Whatever we may think of its founder, however unacceptable may be some of his doctrines … yet as a scheme of religion influencing as many, if not more millions of people than Christianity, is it not worthy of being considered by other peoples?"

This sort of serious interest in what would later be called cultural anthropology was quite visible at the end of the century. The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, held at Chicago to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage, provides a good case in point. Close to 30 million people visited the fair, which was spread over 686 acres of land in south Chicago. Most countries of the world participated, including Japan, which spent millions of dollars to construct buildings specifically for the fair and to present an exhibition of all aspects of traditional and contemporary life. Although this was not the first time that Americans had had an opportunity to examine Japanese artifacts closely—Japan had participated in the 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia—their observations led to awareness that Japanese culture was much more than a phenomenon to be appreciated in isolation from the rest of that people's life. If the Japanese craftsmen at the Columbian Exposition seemed polite, industrious, and capable of producing refined objects, this had to be related to the totality of Japanese history and values. Japanese civilization could not be understood only within the framework of Western moral standards. Indeed, it might be comparable on equal terms with American civilization; and it might be foolish to judge other peoples from the viewpoint of a self-centered value system. "I just made up my mind," says the hero of Carl Western's novel Adventures of Reuben and Cynthy at the World's Fair about the exposition, "that if they [the Japanese] were heathens, there were lots of things we could learn from them."

The Japanese were not the only heathens at Chicago. The Columbian Exposition coincided with the World Parliament of Religions, to which many non-Christian leaders were invited. From India came several prominent figures, including Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu leader noted for his belief that all religions contain truth. His arrival aroused much excitement among Americans. He not only attended the parliament but also traveled extensively in the United States. Americans were fascinated by his stress on religious toleration: "I preach nothing against the Great One of Galilee. I only ask the Christians to take in the Great Ones of India along with the Lord Jesus." To groups of ladies in Salem, Massachusetts, or Streator, Illinois, where he gave talks, it must have seemed quite a revelation that a Hindu monk should have so much to offer to contemporary society. Many were rude; in Chicago, Vivekananda recorded in his diary, "A man from behind pulled at my turban. I looked back and saw that he was a very gentlemanly looking man, neatly dressed. I spoke to him, and when he found that I knew English he became very much abashed." But the Chicago Herald probably expressed the predominant sentiment of those who heard Vivekananda's lectures when it wrote, "Vivekananda is undoubtedly the greatest figure in the Parliament of Religions. After hearing him, we feel how foolish it is to send missionaries to this learned nation." Far more than an object of curiosity, Indian civilization could be considered an important entity, even an alternative to the modern ways of life.

Perhaps the most logical embodiment of the emerging attitude was that of Ernest Fenollosa, a philosopher and art critic from Salem, Massachusetts. As a lecturer at Tokyo University in the 1890s, he was instrumental both in transmitting Western thought to the Japanese and in discovering the aesthetic value of Japanese art for Westerners. He taught the philosophy of Friedrich Hegel to students in Tokyo while establishing a collection of Japanese prints for a museum in Boston. The two activities were, from his point of view, of equal importance. Whereas earlier Americans had assumed their superiority and gone to non-Western parts of the world as missionaries and educators, he was convinced that West and non-West had a great deal to learn from one another. The two civilizations were of equal significance. Each had its distinctive cultural tradition, and together East and West constituted complementary halves of the harmonious whole that was mankind. The two were like the Chinese dichotomy of yin and yang, standing for contrasting pairs such as darkness and light, moon and sun, or female and male. The West, as Fenollosa saw it, represented masculinity, strength, and vigor; but it was never whole in itself. Only through a harmonizing relationship with the East, standing for femininity and refinement, could it sustain its existence. No wonder that Fenollosa's favorite analogy was to marriage. As he said in the preface to East and West (1893): "The synthesis of two continental civilizations, matured apart through fifteen hundred years, will mark this close of our century as an unique dramatic epoch in human affairs. At the end of a great cycle the two halves of the world come together for the final creation of man."

Not all writers were as sanguine as Fenollosa about the peaceful relationship between East and West. It was at the end of the century that Rudyard Kipling's phrase "East is East, and West is West" became popular. Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born American novelist who had long resided in Japan, published his Kokoro, a study of the Japanese mentality, in 1896, and stressed that a Westerner could never hope to comprehend the depth of the Japanese mind. In his words, "The more complex feelings of the Oriental have been composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and individual, which have had no really precise correspondence in Western life, and which we can therefore not fully know. For converse reasons, the Japanese cannot, even though they would, give Europeans their best sympathy." The overwhelming majority of Americans would probably have agreed more with Hearn than with Fenollosa. The popularity of David Belasco's play Madame Butterfly (1900) showed, if nothing else, that there was still a very widespread view that West and non-West might meet on a transient basis, but that their encounter produced tragic consequences because of their inability to understand one another fully.

One additional factor in the development of intercultural relations was the coming of Asians to the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century. Chinese laborers had arrived on the West Coast during the 1840s, but it was after the Civil War that their immigration and residence began to create serious social and political problems. And just when, in the 1880s, their influx was checked through treaty arrangements and congressional enactments, the Japanese began to arrive, first in Hawaii and, after the islands' annexation by the United States, in the western states. The bulk of these people were not exactly embodiments of Chinese or Japanese civilization. They were overwhelmingly poor, illiterate or undereducated, and without more than rudimentary skills. Still, they represented the societies from which they came, and to that extent their experiences in the United States constituted part of America's intercultural relations.

This is best seen in the rhetoric of the Oriental exclusionist movement. The exclusionists on the West Coast and their supporters elsewhere frequently resorted to the argument that the very fabric of American civilization was at stake. Should Asians be allowed to inundate the country, they said, not only would they compete with native labor because of their low wages, but they would also undermine the American way of life. Unlike European immigrants, they brought alien customs and modes of living and, unless checked, would most certainly Orientalize American society. The key to the Chinese immigration dispute, a writer pointed out in 1876, was that the Chinese "never adopts an iota of our civilization…. His civilization displaces exactly so much of our own; it substitutes Mongolianism." Similar expressions would be heard for many decades. The fundamental issue appeared to be the inevitable conflict of civilizations. Americans were called upon to consider whether their country was to remain Occidental or to become Oriental, under Asiatic influence. To those deeply concerned with the problem, it must have seemed axiomatic that East and West could never live together in peace and harmony. Such particularism was a reflection of the growing proximity, physical as well as geographical, of West and non-West in the age of globalization. At this level, then, America's intercultural relations exhibited narrowness and racial prejudice as defensive measures to preserve what were considered unique features of Western civilization.

Not all non-Westerners who came to the United States, however, were poor and illiterate laborers. A small minority of scholars, officials, businessmen, and other members of the elite visited the country, some to stay for a long time. They contributed to America's intercultural relations by associating with their counterparts in the United States and by articulating their views to Americans and to people at home. Some of them came with good classical educations, attracted to an America that was envisioned as a land of the free. For those who were highly educated and politically conscious, but who felt themselves alienated from their own lands for political or cultural reasons, the United States beckoned as a land of freedom, opportunity, and humanism. The image of America as the place to go for education was established in China and Japan by the end of the nineteenth century, as was the image that in the United States one could find a refuge from oppression and persecution in one's own country. Baba Tatsui, a young activist, left Japan for America to pursue his struggle for political rights, and many of his compatriots with socialistic views followed him. Sun Yat-sen engaged in revolutionary activities among Chinese in Hawaii and the United States. Some of China's constitutionalists also visited America, where they founded newspapers and conducted fund-raising campaigns.

What the United States meant to these visiting non-Westerners must be considered an important aspect of the country's intercultural relations. To many of them, this was "the sacred land of liberty," as the Japanese said. But there were others who were shocked by the contrast between that image and the reality. Uchimura Kanzō, the Japanese Christian leader, was repelled by materialistic excesses. Some returned to their homelands to spread certain images of the United States. It can be said that at this time there were non-American as well as American agents of intercultural relations. The United States exerted subtle influences upon other countries not only through its own merchants, travelers, or missionaries but also through foreigners visiting the country. Often it was through America that the latter first encountered Western civilization, and the importance of this is hard to exaggerate. For better or worse, what they saw in the United States epitomized for them the essence of capitalism, constitutionalism, and Christianity. The experiences of a man like Uchimura, who had been introduced to Christianity through American missionaries in Japan but who came to the United States and discovered the gap between what he called Bible Christianity and American Christianity, are fascinating examples of cross-cultural interactions. It was as if America taught him what Christianity was not.

TWENTIETH CENTURY THROUGH WORLD WAR II: AMERICANIZATION AND REACTION
By 1900, then, there were already complex layers of intercultural relations, some subtle new forces and others that were crude echoes of the past, but all constituting parts of the developing trends toward globalization. These layers continued to evolve after the turn of the century. The history of intercultural relations in the twentieth century is extremely difficult to characterize, since it is an ongoing process. It is possible, however, to examine the period before the outbreak of World War II in terms of two contradictory currents: univer salistic and particularistic tendencies. On the one hand, there was every indication that American influence was spreading to other lands; at the same time, there grew self-conscious opposition to American and Western cultural predominance in the world.

By the time of World War I, the United States had established its position as the leading Western power, not only in industrial production, trade, and foreign loans and investments but also in armaments and political influence. While this was not the same thing as cultural hegemony, there is little doubt that the United States came to stand and speak for Western civilization at a time when the European countries were engaged in fratricidal conflicts and disputes. One reason why President Woodrow Wilson wanted to postpone American entry into the war was his fear for the survival of Western civilization. He came to see his country as a guardian of that precious tradition, a sentiment shared by an increasing number of British. But similar views had also been expressed by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, who had come to take for granted the spread of benign American influence to the rest of the world. Civilization, as Taft never tired of saying, was based on an unlimited interchange of goods and capital, which in turn contributed to international peace, harmony, and understanding. Americans would carry their wares throughout the world and promote economic modernization and political awakening. Because of their superiority in technology, organization, and business practices, Americans were bound to emerge as the most influential group in the new world of enlightened international relations. They would be among the foremost agents of change in the twentieth century. Wilson fully accepted such ideas and elevated them to a vision of internationalism in which American values would reign—valid not as American but as universal values. No wonder that he was eager to promote missionary activities and was captivated by the idea of establishing American mandates in various parts of the world.

Because the European countries lost population, productive capacity, morale, and prestige as a result of the war, the United States was able to replace European power and influence in international affairs. American technology, epitomized by the automobile, dominated the postwar world, as did popular American culture such as jazz, radio, and motion pictures. In Europe one talked of the "decline of the West" after Oswald Spengler's book of that title was published in 1918, but somehow the West that was declining did not seem to include the United States. Observers such as the sociologists Thorstein Veblen and Pitirim Sorokin discussed the ramifications of the emerging mass society; but they implied that this was the way of the future, that developments in the United States portended what was to take place elsewhere. To understand modern society one looked at the United States. Whether one liked it or not, it seemed that Americanization was an inevitable phenomenon of the postwar world.

This was also the way American influence was perceived in non-Western countries. In Turkey, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere, the war had caused European prestige to suffer; but the United States appeared more vigorous and resilient than its European cousins. American trade was the most extensive in history, and a growing bulk of it was conducted with non-European countries. Americans appeared in areas where earlier one had seen only Europeans, investing in oil fields and establishing manufacturing plants. John Dewey's instrumentalism became the most popular philosophy in universities throughout Asia, and women in distant societies turned to American women not only for fashions but also for political ideals and social visions, such as women's suffrage and population control. Jazz, baseball, and Charlie Chaplin became just as popular in Japan as in America. "Modern times" was synonymous with American culture for people of the 1920s. Even in the 1930s, it is possible to argue, American influence did not abate; the process of cultural Americanization proceeded unchecked until well into the decade. Visits by American baseball teams were always important news to the Japanese, often overshadowing any feeling of crisis as a result of the latter nation's imperialistic activities on the Asian continent. Charles Lindbergh was as well known across the Pacific as across the Atlantic, and even Japanese martial music had definite traces of American influence. Children and women shed their traditional costumes and started wearing Westernized clothes, and bars and cabarets mushroomed. In many ways Japan on the eve of Pearl Harbor was a society more Americanized than ever before.

While the interwar era, then, was a period of rapid Americanization, it is also true that the 1920s and the 1930s saw self-conscious opposition to, and even rejection of, the West by some non-Western countries. They began to assert their identity, no longer content to remain objects of Western expansion and receptacles of Western influence. This second trend, toward particularism, was already visible at the beginning of the century, when people everywhere noted signs that seemed to indicate the non-West's rise against the West. The Russo-Japanese War, which the Japanese took pains to characterize not as a racial conflict but as one between civilization and barbarism, nevertheless was cheered by non-Westerners from Egypt to China as a victory of a colored nation over a white nation. In the Near East and North Africa, Islam was becoming self-conscious and militant; Islamic spokesmen talked of an Arab renaissance and the coming jihad against the Christian West. Mosques began to be built in American cities.

The Young Turks, the Persian nationalists, and the Armenian revolutionaries felt betrayed by the peace settlements after World War I. Asians became disillusioned by the alleged universalism of Wilsonian internationalism when the Western powers failed to adopt a racial equality clause as part of the League of Nations Covenant. The Chinese were bitter toward the United States and Great Britain for their alleged failure to stop Japanese encroachment on Shantung. The Turks viewed the postwar settlement as an imposition by the Western nations at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. For these varied reasons, the international order after 1919 appeared to be an "Anglo-American peace," as Prince Konoye Fumimaro of Japan said.

Nationalism, which had been inspired by the modern Western example, became a force against the West in many non-Western countries during the interwar years. It took on a culturally particularistic meaning as Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and others asserted their distinctive identity as separate from European or American civilization. In China, for instance, nationalism was not only aimed at recovering rights lost to the imperialists; it also revealed itself in a movement to develop native Christian churches and to replace Westerners in administrative posts at colleges and universities. The fascination the Chinese felt for Marxism and Leninism was in part due to the anti-Western messages, explicit or implicit, that they found in these ideologies. Marxist-Leninist thought gave the Chinese a conceptual tool with which to attack Western capitalism as well as Western civilization. The wholesale transformation of the country after the pattern of the West was no longer seriously advocated. Now there were other models and other choices; some sought a Soviet-type revolution, while others visualized a combination of Chinese tradition with modern technology as the best way to save China.

More or less the same phenomenon of self-conscious reassessment of Western values could be observed in Turkey, India, Japan, and other countries. The trend was no doubt encouraged by the literature of pessimism that Europeans were producing in the decade after the war. Many of these writers expressed doubt that Western civilization could survive, and some turned to the East as a source of salvation. As an article in a February 1925 issue of the Europaische Staats und Wirtschafts Zeitung put it, "Our Western world is weary; not weary of life, but of strife and hatred. Indeed, our peculiar society and civilization have been found wanting…. Men are looking to the East unconsciously, and therefore sincerely….The world of Asia draws us with its promise of something new and something that will liberate." Eastern philosophers like Rabindranath Tagore and Vasudeo Metta were eager to oblige and to offer this "something" for which Westerners seemed to be looking. Unfortunately, very often their thoughts were utilized in Asia for nationalistic upheavals against pervasive Western influence.

The world crisis of the 1930s that culminated in World War II definitely had a cultural dimension; it may be argued that the major difference between the two world wars was the addition of the cultural factor in the second. World War I was mainly a civil war among Western countries, whereas World War II involved peoples of diverse cultural traditions and ideologies. It was in essence intercultural warfare. This was particularly true of the United States and its relations in Asia and the Pacific. Throughout the 1930s, Japan pursued an aggressive foreign policy and gave it an ideological sanction of pan-Asianism. The concept was transparently anti-Western. Asia, according to this view, was to reassert itself against the imperialistic exploitation by the West, which had cultural as well as political and economic aspects. For too long, Japanese nationalists declared, the West had permeated Asian life, subverting traditional values and destroying age-old social customs. Asians had ceased to be Asian; they had either become Westernized or objects of Western influence. They had lost their identities and their souls. If they were to regain these things, they must stand together as Asians and develop a regional system of cultural and economic autonomy. The ideology of Japanese militarism stressed the eradication of Western values from education, mass media, and daily living, and the need to return to the essence of national culture. Apologists for Japanese aggression also viewed pan-Asian regionalism as a viable alternative to both imperialism and particularistic nationalism, two vices that they attributed to the modern West. If Asia were to reject imperialism and yet to avoid repeating the experience of the modern nation-states constantly struggling against one another, it was imperative that Asian countries organize themselves into a regional system.

For the bulk of Americans, these events in distant Asia were of far less importance than their individual struggles for economic survival at home. But there was a genuine cultural dimension in the economic crisis, in that the values of bourgeois mass society seemed less and less relevant to the unemployed, the handicapped, and the racially segregated. Western civilization appeared to be seriously threatened from within, as evidenced by the growth of Italian fascism, German nazism, and Soviet communism. Americans, no longer sure of the eternal validity of middle-class precepts and symbols, often turned to Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin as possible saviors of civilization. At the same time, many of them embraced isolationism, in the belief that by staying out of war in Europe or Asia, the United States would be able to preserve what was left of civilization and help reconstruct Europe after it had been devastated by war. For a man like Charles Lindbergh, it was nothing short of a crime against Western civilization to enter the fray on the side of either Britain or Germany. Only the uncivilized in other lands would benefit from such fratricide.

In such a context, the war between the United States and Japan could be seen in a cultural context. The irony was that the combatants fought with modern weapons, utilizing all the techniques of scientific warfare. As noted earlier, despite its profession of indigenous values and pan-Asianism, Japan in 1941 was more Westernized than ever before. The decision to establish control in the areas of Asia that were rich in natural resources could also be seen as a device to proceed with further industrialization and economic strengthening. The Japanese dream of an autonomous empire was little different from a Western conception. Cultural particularism did not cloak these ambitions.

The United States, on the other hand, regained the sense of cultural identity and confidence when war came. The self-doubt and crisisconsciousness of the 1930s were replaced by a renewed faith in the essential soundness and goodness of Western values. The faith was expressed in the universalistic rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter, the Declaration of the United Nations, and the communiqués issued by the Big Three at the end of their meetings at Teheran (1943) and Yalta (1945). The language reaffirmed the principles of peace, justice, and human rights, which were seen to be as relevant as ever because the Axis powers were pictured as the would-be architects of a world based on diametrically opposed values. It is true that many Americans saw the Pacific war in more parochial ways, stressing the racial aspect. To cite one extreme example from within the government, Captain Harry L. Pence of the U.S. Navy reiterated, at meetings of the State Department Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, that the war involved the question of "which race was to survive." He favored "the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race," saying, "Japan should be bombed so that there was little left of its civilization." Moreover, the Japanese "should not be dealt with as civilized human beings…. Weshould kill them before they kill us." Although representative of a current of opinion in wartime America, such views were not part of postwar planning. On the contrary, officials and opinion leaders continued to stress universalistic principles and to search for a new world order in which Japan, no less than other countries, would participate. Japan's surrender thus implied, at the level of cultural affairs, the recognition that particularism had failed and the acceptance by Japan of American ideas as more applicable to its needs.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE COLD WAR
Intercultural relations after World War II were far more extensive and diverse than earlier. The United States became the virtual inheritor of European civilization, emerging as the strongest and richest country in the world, capable of supporting the arts and financing scholarly and artistic undertakings. European refugees enriched America's cultural life. For the first time it could be said that American art was in the vanguard of modern art, not a pale reflection of European works. The same was true of literature and music. Unlike the period after World War I, however, there was much less self-consciousness about American culture. It was assumed as a matter of course, rather than asserted as a matter of principle, that American artists, novelists, and musicians were engaged in creative work that had relevance to the contemporary world as a whole. Europeans looked to the United States to discern artistic and literary trends. Moreover, American troops stationed in most parts of Europe transmitted American popular culture and lifestyles to the Old World. It became important for European intellectuals to study in the United States if they wished to keep abreast of developments in scholarship.

The impact on the non-Western world was no less great. American influence was transmitted through soldiers, officials, and businessmen who were scattered throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Consciously or unconsciously, they contributed to a deeper cultural involvement of America in other lands. America came to stand for what was fashionable and up-to-date. At the same time, Americans abroad collectively and individually increased their nation's awareness of other cultures and contributed to a greater appreciation of non-Western traditions. Many who were trained during the war as language specialists and intelligence officers retained their interest in foreign countries, and some of them became leaders in the postwar development of "area studies." American colleges began seriously teaching courses in non-Western civilizations and founded institutes to further research in these areas. There was also a flood of non-Europeans to the United States as war brides, students, and visitors. Through them Americans came into contact with non-Western ways of life.

This flowering of cultural relations after World War II was in many ways a culmination of the globalizing trend that had begun in the nineteenth century. Globalization had connected different parts of the world closer together; it had also manifested itself in imperialism. It had often provoked fierce opposition on the part of nations and individuals that wished to preserve their traditional loyalties and ways of life. In many ways the atomic bombs that brought World War II to conclusion also ended such opposition in the sense that war from now on came to be seen as truly global, something that was to be avoided at all cost if civilization were to survive. This meant that military conflict and confrontation would come to constitute a lesser part of international relations than earlier. To be sure, the estrangement among the victorious powers after 1945, known as the Cold War, did become a pervasive phenomenon and defined one facet of world affairs for nearly half a century. But it would be misleading to subordinate all other phenomena to the geopolitical confrontation. For the Cold War failed to prevent another, even more substantive development, globalization, from gaining momentum after World War II. And globalization was fundamentally a nongeopolitical phenomenon. U.S. cultural relations in the second half of the twentieth century may be understood in such a context.

It would appear that the old opposition between globalization, on one hand, and local identities, on the other, gave way to the virtually universal forces of global interdependence and interpenetration after World War II. These forces were economic, social, and cultural. Modernization provided one easily recognizable framework to comprehend this phenomenon. In the wake of a war that had divided the globe, there resurfaced the idea that all the countries in the world were tending toward a more modern phase. Economic development, political democracy, and social justice appeared to be essential ingredients of modernity; and intellectuals discussed how such an outlook could be encouraged in a traditional society. Appreciation of non-Western civilizations often took the form of discovering elements in them that were potentially "modern." In this process, there grew some tolerance for cultural pluralism: not just greater appreciation for Japanese architecture, Chinese food, or Indian philosophy but economic, political, and social changes in those countries. The hope was that through such changes, coupled with the new outlook in postwar America, foreigners and Americans would come to a better understanding of one another. They would develop a common vocabulary of mutual respect as they cooperated to bring about a more modern world. The pace of globalization was being accelerated in a changing world. U.S. cultural relations contributed to globalization and at the same time to an appreciation of diversity. This was a far more significant story than the vicissitudes of the Cold War, for ultimately it was the globalizing world that put an end to the Cold War, not the other way round.

It might be objected that the Cold War did have a globalizing aspect. Not only did it provoke fears of a nuclear conflagration that would annihilate the whole world, but the vocabulary of the geopolitical confrontation often had global connotations. The Soviet Union and its allies spoke of a worldwide people's struggle against the evils of capitalism and imperialism, while the United States and its partners accused the opponents of infringing upon such universal values as freedom and democracy. Moreover, both sides frequently used cultural means to wage Cold War: propaganda, student exchanges, conferences of intellectuals, and the like. Even in the United States, where traditionally cultural pursuits had been considered to belong exclusively to the private sphere, the government did not hesitate to sponsor art exhibits, publications of journals, or meetings of labor leaders abroad in order to try to influence other countries' opinions. A cultural Cold War did exist, as did official cultural policies. But if such policies resulted in a growing interdependence among different parts of the world, it was more by accident than by design. What brought about the dissipation and, ultimately, the end of the Cold War were not these policies but the growing global consciousness, a product of cultural interpenetration, not of the geopolitical confrontation whose fundamental orientation was to divide the globe, not to unite it.

INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS SINCE THE 1970S
That international cultural relations became an increasingly crucial factor in defining the world may be seen in certain remarkable developments during the 1970s. It was then that such broadly cultural agendas as the protection of the natural environment and the promotion of human rights came to be considered vital aspects of international affairs. The United Nations conference on the environment that was held in Stockholm in 1972, for instance, was a landmark in that the protection of the physical universe from pollution, or of wild animals from excessive killing, came to be viewed as a matter of concern to the entire international community so that nations and peoples would have to join forces to achieve these objectives. Likewise, the promotion of human rights, whether of "prisoners of conscience," ethnic minorities, women, the handicapped, or other groups subject to discrimination, was seen as something that required international cooperation to undertake. World conferences began to be held, with or without the sponsorship of the United Nations, that addressed the rights of these diverse groups. Under the circumstances, United States foreign affairs, too, were becoming broader; not just the protection of security and national interests as traditionally understood, but the realization of a more livable world, both for humans and for the ecological system, would become an objective of foreign policy. President Jimmy Carter sensed these changing circumstances when he launched an initiative to seek alternative, cleaner sources of energy and to ensure the protection of human rights worldwide, even in countries that were allied to the United States in the Cold War. Cultural questions, broadly defined, were increasingly attracting the attention of Washington and other capitals.

The 1970s were also a remarkable decade in that it was the time when cultural diversity became a matter of serious concern in international affairs and, at the same time, when the number of nongovernmental organizations mushroomed, to supplement and in some instances even to supplant the work traditionally carried out by states. The two phenomena were interrelated in that both reflected the growth of civil society and, by the same token, the decline of state authority. This was a circumstance that could be observed in the United States as well as in Soviet-bloc nations, among the rich as well as developing countries. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its challenge to the power of both the United States (as in Iran) and the Soviet Union (as in Afghanistan) is but one extreme example of the emergence of religious and cultural diversity as a factor in international relations. And the fact that neither superpower was able to dislodge the religious fundamentalists by force indicated the growing importance of culture as a determinant of foreign affairs. Since the traditional state apparatus was not well equipped or prepared to cope with the crisis, it is not surprising that a host of nongovernmental organizations emerged to respond to the situation. Many of them were engaged in humanitarian activities to alleviate the suffering of people caught in religious strife, while others sought to promote dialogue among different religious and ethnic groups. With respect to environmentalism and human rights, too, nongovernmental organizations grew in number and influence. One cannot discuss U.S. foreign affairs during the 1970s without taking these developments into consideration.

What such developments suggested was the possible emergence of a global civil society, a world defined by cultural forces, groups, and agendas, as opposed to the traditional world consisting of sovereign states. The latter world, of course, still existed and behaved very much as sovereign states had always done, seeking to protect and promote their national interests. But national interests were now more broadly construed than earlier, and soon many in the United States and other countries began speaking of "human security" as a shared agenda for all nations. Not separate national securities and interests, but common interests defined by shared values were coming to be seen as a desirable goal for all nations. But this was not all. Even outside the framework of sovereign entities, the key framework for international affairs as traditionally understood, many nonstate actors, including multinational enterprises and nongovernmental organizations, were coming to play more and more active roles throughout the world. Theirs was an arena for an interplay of economic, technological, and cultural forces that were not necessarily bound by national units or considerations. That arena came to be called an international civil society by students of international relations during the 1970s and the subsequent decades who saw in its formation a fundamental challenge to the traditional state system.

How the challenge would be met, and whether the international civil society would some day come to establish a more viable world order than sovereign states, were questions that fascinated statesmen and citizens alike as the twentieth century drew to a close. During the 1980s and the 1990s, there was much debate in the United States as well as elsewhere about the changing nature of international relations. Did the end of the Cold War presage the coming of an indefinite period of U.S. supremacy in world affairs? Or, on the contrary, were all great powers, even including the United States, destined eventually to decline? Which power would take its place if the United States ever did lose its hegemonic position? Such geopolitically oriented questions, however, were missing the point. They ignored the fact that international relations were increasingly being defined by nongeopolitical forces and by nonstate actors. Many of these forces and actors were cultural, broadly speaking. The globalization of cultural activities, ranging from information technology to the spread of fast food, was continuing with its own momentum, promoted by multinational enterprises, international organizations, and many other nongovernmental entities. Sometimes globalization provoked opposition on the part of forces exemplifying cultural diversity, but this was a dualism that had always existed, as we have seen. What was remarkable as the century gave way to the new millennium was that the dualism was coming more and more to determine the shape of international political and economic, as well as cultural, affairs. Cultural relations were no longer marginal pursuits, if they ever were. For the United States as well as for others, culture was coming to claim center stage as they conducted their foreign affairs.