GEOG 128 - Human Geography: Space, Place and Community - Fall 2023

Most people still think of themselves as belonging to a particular culture. Yet today, many of us who live in affluent societies choose aspects of our lives from a global cultural supermarket, whether in terms of food, the arts or spiritual beliefs. So if roots are becoming simply one more consumer choice, can we still claim to possess a fundamental cultural identity? Global Culture/Individual Identity focuses on three groups for whom the tension between a particular national culture and the global cultural supermarket is especially acute: Japanese artists, American religious seekers and Hong Kong intellectuals after the handover to China. These ethnographic case studies form the basis for a theory of culture which we can all see reflected in our own lives. Gordon Mathews opens up the complex and debated topics of globalization, culture and identity in a clear and lively style.

Globalization stems from many sources, but as Thomas Gould makes clear, advertising is a primary driver of trans-global cultural change. Gould argues that advertising often carries unfiltered and unblocked cultural messages in addition to commercial speech; as such, it not only builds consumer demand to open new markets but also changes consumer expectations and values. At the same time, the evolution of increasingly targeted mobile and social marketing is transforming local and regional cultures into a new mix of global branding and individualized micro-space. Gould examines how advertising professionals negotiate these rocky and quickly-changing cultural terrains. He also explores how advertising--an increasingly global form of communication--is becoming a platform for change at the individual level, and as a direct consequence, at the social and political levels.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In an era before affordable travel, National Geographic not only served as the first glimpse of countless other worlds for its readers, but it helped them confront sweeping historical change. There was a time when its cover, with the unmistakable yellow frame, seemed to be on every coffee table, in every waiting room. In American Iconographic, Stephanie L. Hawkins traces National Geographic's rise to cultural prominence, from its first publication of nude photographs in 1896 to the 1950s, when the magazine's trademark visual and textual motifs found their way into cartoon caricature, popular novels, and film trading on the "romance" of the magazine's distinctive visual fare. National Geographic transformed local color into global culture through its production and circulation of readily identifiable cultural icons. The adventurer-photographer, the exotic woman of color, and the intrepid explorer were part of the magazine's "institutional aesthetic," a visual and textual repertoire that drew upon popular nineteenth-century literary and cultural traditions. This aesthetic encouraged readers to identify themselves as members not only in an elite society but, paradoxically, as both Americans and global citizens. More than a window on the world, National Geographic presented a window on American cultural attitudes and drew forth a variety of complex responses to social and historical changes brought about by immigration, the Great Depression, and world war. Drawing on the National Geographic Society's archive of readers' letters and its founders' correspondence, Hawkins reveals how the magazine's participation in the "culture industry" was not so straightforward as scholars have assumed. Letters from the magazine's earliest readers offer an important intervention in this narrative of passive spectatorship, revealing how readers resisted and revised National Geographic's authority. Its photographs and articles celebrated American self-reliance and imperialist expansion abroad, but its readers were highly aware of these representational strategies, and alert to inconsistencies between the magazine's editorial vision and its photographs and text. Hawkins also illustrates how the magazine actually encouraged readers to question Western values and identify with those beyond the nation's borders. Chapters devoted to the magazine's practice of photographing its photographers on assignment and to its genre of husband-wife adventurers reveal a more enlightened National Geographic invested in a cosmopolitan vision of a global human family. A fascinating narrative of how a cultural institution can influence and embody public attitudes, this book is the definitive account of an iconic magazine's unique place in the American imagination.