Foreign Reality Research Articles

Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World

Advertising is a central part of the global system of commerce and culture. Every day it exposes consumers around the world to practices associated with the West, urban life, prosperity, and modernity. One consequence of this exposure is that it frees people's imaginations from time and place, and imposes a new and foreign reality. In this book Steven Kemper looks at a parallel trend, arguing that advertising firms in Nairobi, Caracas, and Colombo also domesticate the imagination, insinuating images into people's minds of the traditional as well as the modern, the local as much as the global. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted over thirty years, Kemper examines the Lankan advertising industry to show how executives draw on their skills as folk ethnographers to Sri Lankanize commodities and practices to make them locally desirable, essentially producing new forms of Lankan culture. Addressing many of the most pressing agendas of contemporary anthropology, Buying and Becoming breaks new ground in studies of culture and globalization.

Established Pluralism: US elite media discourse about China policy

In the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era, China has not only lost its strategic alliance with the US against the Soviet Union, but has stepped in to be seen as the US's imagined enemy. The New York Times 's discourse about China policy from 1990 to 2000 consisted of three "ideological packages": containment, engagement, and globalization, which represented different strategic variations on the same ideological theme of peaceful evolution. The elite media discourse is characterized as "established pluralism". First, it represents a plurality of viewpoints within the established policy contour and the official circle. Second, it tends to domesticate foreign realities in the course of constructing Orientalist discourses. Third, this diversity-within-unity is routinized in the institutionalized structure and practice of the elite press.

DEN SIAMESISKE SAMLING I EBELTOFT

Rasmus Havmøller did the Siamese
 Collection during the twenty years he was
 a forester in Siam. In 1940, after returning
 to his native Ebeltoft, Havmøller donated his
 collection to the local museum. The objects
 were displayed according to his wishes
 and remain in much the same arrangement
 today after a recent conservation of all 6-800
 items. The article argues that the collection’s
 musealogical interest is to be found in the
 character of the presentation of the objects. In
 three small rooms, filled to the brim, we meet
 objects gathered by one person according to
 his interests. Hunting trophies, specimens
 in spirits, utensils, ceramics, stone tools
 etc., mostly from Siam. The moment the
 gathered objects left Siam they obtained a
 quality of completion, became a whole, so to
 speak, with no additions possible. This was
 the number of statements or testimonies of
 a foreign reality that chance and personality
 had brought together: A true collection.
 Accordingly, all objects are presented as
 individuals of equal im-portance. Most are
 provided with a factual, very brief text:
 “Gold from Bang Sapan, northern Siam”,
 “536 Gecco. Very common in houses, living
 from insects. This specimen of medium
 size”, “Fruit from the rain forest”. One meets
 the objects as single and free individuals,
 which speak only of themselves. Wider
 contexts like Siam, or the ingenuity of the
 biological world, or the life of an employee
 during colonial times must be perceived
 by the visitors themselves. This way of
 presenting objects stands in great contrast to
 many present day exhibitions. These often
 consist of objects brought together from
 many different sources in order to represent
 an academic category which is common to
 them. Such constructions hold numerous
 rewards perhaps for communicating cultural
 history, but in disregarding the original
 context, setting, and aura of the participating
 exhibits, they leave out important primary
 information and remain useful, but artificial.
 The object and its original background thus
 may become a prisoner of the carefully lit and
 coloured showcase in which it is displayed,
 as well as becoming a hostage of the
 educational, lengthy text that accompanies it.
 To apply the simple, unconsciously adopted
 principles of the 1940-displays in Ebeltoft –
 one object, one text, simple appearance, no
 sermons – to a modern exhibition is possible
 of course, but it may meet with numerous
 difficulties. Major limits are omitting what
 is technically possible, and not narrating all
 that one knows, reserving this knowledge
 for the catalogue. Thus, the exhibit under
 discussion allows the objects to appear as
 they were while found, collected, and still
 around us as parts of a whole, but basically
 as particulars.

When intentions go awry: The bush administration's foreign policy rhetoric

During George Bush's presidency the Cold War drew to a close and his administration triumphed in the Gulf War. Some viewed these events as a harbinger of a new world order. Basking in the success of the Gulf War, Bush's approval ratings soared, and prominent Democrats reconsidered challenging him in 1992. Foreign policy themes might have seemed a natural emphasis in campaign rhetoric. Yet, on the eve of the election, Bush abandoned efforts to rally the public with such appeals. This article identifies primary metaphorical themes employed by Bush to define foreign policy reality. Bush's rhetoric was fundamentally ordered by the orientational metaphor of war. Other themes reinforced central premises of the war metaphor and reflected enduring premises of American exceptional ism. However, critical constraints blunted Bush's rhetorical intentions, and perhaps nullified constraints presidents traditionally have harnessed to define rhetorical situations to fit a preferred world view. A disjuncture between rheto...

Ethnocentricity and the social construction of ‘mass hysteria’

This study provides a critical historical review and analysis of the variety of human expressions which have been erroneously labeled under the grandiose category "mass hysteria". It is argued that Western science reductionist approaches to the classification of "mass hysteria" treat it as an entity to be discovered transculturally, and in their self-fulfilling search for universals systematically exclude what does not fit within the autonomous parameters of its Western-biased culture model, exemplifying what Kleinman (1977) terms a "category fallacy." As a result of objectivist methodologies, the etiology of actions labeled as "mass hysteria" is typically viewed as deviant, irrational or abnormal behavior resulting from a malfunctioning 'proper' social order. However, what constitutes 'the' correct social order is a function of a researcher's historical sociocultural and/or scientific milieu. This study reviews the problem, advocating Geertz's (1973) culturally relativistic approach to understanding various cross-cultural behavior that is sensitive to and tolerant of the unique context and milieu of participants. "Mass" or "epidemic hysteria" is viewed as an invention of Western psychiatry and should be abandoned and replaced with the term collective exaggerated emotions. Instead of attempting to 'discover' a neatly packaged, unitary external disease entity, the focus of a meaning-oriented approach emphasizes the deciphering of foreign realities, semantic networks and symbol systems.

Cross-Cultural Perception and World War II: American Japanists of the 1940s and Their Images of Japan

The decade of the 1940s saw the United States and Japan bitter enemies, reconciled on terms dictated by the United States only after the total subjugation of Japan. The 1940s were also a crucial decade in the development of studies on Japan in the United States. This essay examines that decade's writing on Japan of six Americans—Ruth Benedict, John M. Maki, Edwin O. Reischauer, Charles B. Fahs, John F. Embree, and Helen Mears—and seeks to document the relation between their views of the United States and their views of Japan. The essay suggests that those writers most fully committed at home (to America, to democracy) were those least able to empathize with Japan, and that those somewhat critical of the United States were able to present a less distorted picture of Japan. Thus, the study of writers' domestic commitments emerges as one important guide to the understanding of their views of foreign reality.

Ponge and the Poetry of Self-Knowledge

Much of the most interesting poetry of France in the sixties is an attempt to replace the surrealist perspective with a more coldly rational literature that codifies man's experience while examining its own powers of formulation. The poetry goes beyond the surrealists' abandonment to the dictates of a dark Unconscious, and beyond their optimistic hope of expressing an all-encompassing greater truth; it also exceeds existential anguish with its sense of defeat and alienation before the impossibility of understanding or expressing man's place in a total reality. In giving up the search for a dark truth or foreign reality, it has returned to discover the boundaries of human nature-to analyze and simultaneously embody the image of man, the creator and user of language. The writers discussed here (Francis Ponge, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, and Andr6 Du Bouchet) separately represent one or another aspect of this consciously calculated expression. Ponge is the old master, achieving eminence in the sixties as his careful attention paid to things takes on the role of a mission to prepare a new man . . . the man of the objeu. Bonnefoy, Dupin, and Du Bouchet direct and contribute to the poetry review L'Ephemere: all three share many of Ponge's attitudes but choose their own ways of manipulating language in expressive forms. Finally, these poets-like many other writers in a highly self-conscious literature-appear extremely insular in that they limit themselves to a profound vision of narrow scope. Trying to develop a and completely conscious rhetoric, they turn their focus away from social, political, psychological, or religious appearances to emphasize their

A review of recent books on the formation of foreign policy: Holbert N. Carroll, The House of Representatives and foreign affairs Bernard C. Cohen, The political process and foreign policy Cecil V. Crabb, Jr., Bipartisan foreign policy, myth or reality

A review of recent books on the formation of foreign policy: Holbert N. Carroll, The House of Representatives and foreign affairs Bernard C. Cohen, The political process and foreign policy Cecil V. Crabb, Jr., Bipartisan foreign policy, myth or reality

Book Reviews: Propaganda, Marxism and the Open Mind, What is Justice? Parliamentary Sovereignty and The Commonwealth, Lloyd George's Ambulance Wagon: The Memoirs of W. J. Braithwaite, the Machinery of Local Government, French Electoral Systems and Elections, 1789–1957, Germany's New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century, Islam in Modern History, Party Politics in India: The Development of a

Book Reviews: Propaganda, Marxism and the Open Mind, What is Justice? Parliamentary Sovereignty and The Commonwealth, Lloyd George's Ambulance Wagon: The Memoirs of W. J. Braithwaite, the Machinery of Local Government, French Electoral Systems and Elections, 1789–1957, Germany's New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century, Islam in Modern History, Party Politics in India: The Development of a