Taking a Turn down Intellectual Avenue

So far my quest to stave off the monotony of the five-day weekend has gone as follows:
runs: 2
summer jobs applied for: 1
Robin Hood books read: 1
clubs joined: 1 (archery - I'm really trying to get into the Robin Hood experience, as I think that it will be beneficial for my dissertation. So far I have really shown the floor who is boss. The target, not so much.)
pub quizzes participated in: 1
movies viewed: 3
So, as you can see, it's an ongoing quest. The good news is that I am now very caught up with my world news, and I attended a free lecture the other day. Adrian Holliday, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Canterbury Christ Church University, gave a talk on "Cultural Understanding in a Globalized, Unequal World." As someone who a) has nothing to do on Thursdays and b) is very interested in other cultures as well as information processing in a globalized and digitalized world, I decided to check it out.
Professor Holliday made some very interesting points. He discussed how, even though we have access to so much information about different parts of the world in this age of digital information, our quest for cross-cultural understanding only addresses the shallow differences between different ways of life: festivals, foods, religious practices, etc. . . We divide people easily into groups based on our definition of culutre, and this can oftentimes mask racism or other prejudices. This tendency is actually stereotyping to the extreme, as we tend to ignore the fact that individuals are not defined by their cultural backgrounds. For instance, the protestors in Egypt are not defined by the regime that they recently succeeded in ousting, and I have spent the past five months trying to convince my flatmates that not all Americans are defined by former President George Bush and his administrative decisions or speeches.
Professor Holliday made the point that Westerners as a whole tend to be especially guilty of generalizing other peoples using a sort of “us versus them” mentality, and that we consider “modernization” and “Westernization” to be synonymous. This means that accepting Western ideals of democracy and fast food industries are factors that make a country “modern.”
After declaring this notion absurd, Professor Holliday said that Westerners have no right of ownership to things such as the English language, Western art, or even McDonald’s, because other people around the globe adopt these as part of a global heritage and “colonize” them for their own use. It makes sense: Americans have colonized English so that the language that I speak at home is very different from what I speak here, which would be very different from what an English-speaker in South Africa would speak. Where I disagree with Professor Holliday is the issue of material exports such as McDonald’s. I have always considered McDonald’s to be a metonymy for Europe’s view of America: supersizes, fake meat and lots of grease. But of course there are McDonald’s and other fast food chains everywhere here, and Professor Holliday seems to believe that this is not the result of Americanization, but of European countries adopting these chains for their own cultures. I’m sorry, you can try to disguise McDonald’s as a cafe, but it is still McDonald’s, and you can still get American fries there, even if they’re called chips. I’m sure that it’s also a lucrative business – a large percentage of travellers are American, and they’re drawn to the familiarity of the golden arches because it’s something that they know and recognize from home. The same holds true for Starbucks – I went into a Starbucks in Edinburgh, Scotland, and 90 percent of my fellow customers were American. It’s like having little American embassies everywhere.
It’s an interesting thought: is there such a thing as Americanization, or, as Professor Holliday believes, do other countries just adopt American or Western practices and colonize them to fit their own ways of life? And if other parts of the world adapt features of our culture, what do we colonize from other peoples? Is it balanced? It’s something to chew over while I avoid Starbucks like the plague in favour of restaurants that I can’t find at home. If I'm ever on the run from British authorities, however, I plan on fleeing to the nearest Starbucks, because they will harbour me as an American citizen.
Because that was a little on the deep side, here's another British cultural export: Mumford and Sons. They're an awesome band, and they just did an awesome performance on the Grammy's last night. Definitely worth checking out!