Cultural Diffusion
- Imagine walking through a city where you see a McDonald's next to a traditional tea house, hear pop music blending with local folk songs, and spot people wearing a mix of Western and traditional clothing.
- This is cultural diffusion in action - the spread and adaptation of cultural traits across the globe.
- This can also reflect the coming of global culture.
What is Cultural Diffusion?
Cultural diffusion
Cultural diffusion is the process through which cultural traits, such as beliefs, norms, practices, ideas, technologies, and items are spread from one place, society or group to another.
Types of Cultural Diffusion
- Expansion Diffusion: When a culture expands its influence to other areas while maintaining its original presence.
- Relocation Diffusion: When people move from one place to another, they bring their cultural practices with them.
Globalization Amplifies Cultural Diffusion
- Globalization provides and enhances vehicles of cultural diffusion including:
- Migration and Tourism: People bring their cultural practices to new regions.
- Trade and TNCs with their Global Brands: Goods and ideas are exchanged between cultures.
- Media, Communication, and Technology: Television, movies, and the internet disseminate cultural content globally.
- Globalization facilitates the spread of ideas, languages, and traditions but also raises concerns about cultural imperialism.
Cultural Imperialism
Cultural Imperialism
Imposing values, beliefs, practices, and products of a dominant culture on other cultures, often leading to the diminishment or erosion of local cultures.
- Means: Cultural imperialism can be driven by economic or political and military power.
- Impact: This can lead to the erosion of local cultures as global brands and media overshadow traditional practices.
Westernization refers to the imposition of a combination of European and North American cultural traits, norms, and values at a global scale that occurred due to:
- European colonization and imperialism.
- Superiority of Western socio-economic system (capitalism) and technologies.
- Promotion of Western values (e.g. human rights), ideologies (e.g. liberalism), and systems of governance (e.g. democracy).
Americanization refers to the global spread of American culture, including:
- Music: Genres like hip-hop and pop dominate global charts.
- Movies: Hollywood films are popular worldwide.
- Food: Chains like McDonald's and Starbucks are found in nearly every major city.
Westernization and Americanization can be considered as effects of both cultural diffusion and cultural imperialism depending on a perspective.
Cultural Diffusion and Cultural Imperialism Lead to Variety of Reactions
- Acceptance (adoption): Culture that is being diffused is accepted in the new place.
- Adaptation: A new culture is accepted, but also adjusted, changed slightly to fit in with existing cultures and ideas.
- Hybridization: When two cultures meet and merge to create a new type of culture consisting of elements of both of the original cultures.
- Rejection: Cultural imperialism (or attempts of cultural imperialism) might be perceived as neocolonialism leading to denial, rejection, or even cultural jihad.
Effects of Cultural Diffusion
- Glocalization: The process of adapting global products or initiatives to fit local cultures and contexts.
Many TNCs adapt their products to fit in local cultures. For example fast food chains like McDonald's offer menu items that cater to local tastes, such as Teriyaki burgers in Japan while keeping the same idea and business model.
- Hybrid Culture: When elements from different cultures blend and create new cultural forms, practices, or identities.
- Spanglish is a linguistic blend of Spanish and English, commonly spoken in regions with significant bilingual populations, particularly in the south of United States and parts of Latin America.
- It encompasses various forms of code-switching, wherein speakers alternate between Spanish and English within sentences, phrases, or even words.
- Homogenization: The process by which diverse elements become more similar or uniform, often resulting in the reduction of cultural and social differences.
- Cultural diffusion transforms physical spaces, creating cultural landscapes that reflect a mix of influences.
- Cities often showcase homogenisation through similar spatial outcomes and urban landscapes containing high-rise office buildings, shopping malls and supermarkets, transportation infrastructure, hotels, gated communities or even - paradoxically - ethnic enclaves.
- All of these elements of urban landscapes and infrastructure can be deprived of distinctive local features melting into homogenised and anonymous spaces.
- Global Culture: A shared sense of belonging at the planetary scale that is demonstrated through common ways of communicating, consuming media, food, and products, dressing or behaving.
- It seems that global culture is rather demonstrated through consumerism and certain lifestyles, not by deeper transformation of our identities.
Global culture consists of Western cultural traits (e.g. fast food, Italian cuisine, US technologies and pop culture, Hollywood movies), as well as non-Western ones (e.g. Thai, Indian, Chinese or Japanese cuisine, Latin American dance, Indian yoga, East Asian martial arts, Japanese or Korean pop culture like Manga or K-pop).
