Page 89 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

DAVID C. CHANEY

African or even black, masculinity trades on traditions of exploitation between
white colonial powers and client Third World cultures. In these traditions
natives are less civilized, certainly more traditional, than their colonizers so that,
although one can pay tribute to the strength and autonomy of their culture, in
doing so we are also covertly congratulating ourselves on our superiority. This
type of cultural account can also be described as ideological in that it system-
atically distorts our perception of social relationships, but here we (I am writing
as a white, middle-class academic) are not so much victims as bene ficiaries –
bolstered, rather than threatened, by culture as ideology.
In some respects the case of an Irish pub overlaps with Nigerian masculinity,
particularly for a British customer, as it is impossible to separate perceptions of
Irish culture from a history of colonial exploitation. That said, though, the
international success of these themed environments suggests they are more
usefully seen as instances of ‘McTourism’ (see Ritzer 1997 for his extension of
the McDonaldization thesis to tourism). Carefully packaged and sanitized ver-
sions of other cultures can be employed, as in theme parks, to give an illusion of
difference. Once again I suppose it is a form of ideology except that here the
distortions primarily serve commercial ends.
The point I am making here is that the concept of culture acquires further
layers of meaning as it is used in a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory ways
in mass societies. As we develop and adapt an understanding of culture as
something constitutive of a tribal or communal identity, or as equivalent to a
national identity, then the idea loses its power to interpret social life as a total-
ity. Culture becomes partial or, more accurately, it goes to work at a number of
levels simultaneously. Cultural characteristics have become both how we iden-
tify ourselves and members of other social groups, and how those identities are
replayed or re-presented in media discourse as prejudices rooted in the compet-
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ing interests and socio-structural formations of privilege and disadvantage. I
do not want to be side-tracked here by the associations of the term ‘ideology’
with Marxist traditions to concentrate on the extent to which contemporary
cultural forms work to stabilize and perpetuate capitalist hegemony. Indeed
much of what I am saying about the new social forms of late modernity
implicitly rejects the presumptions made in those traditions about competing
class interests locked in structural conflict. Instead, I want to emphasize the
idea that, in adapting notions of culture to the dramas and entertainment
of a mass-mediated environment, culture has become in e ffect a symbolic
repertoire.
What I mean by this is that the signs, symbols, images, and artifacts through
which the different cultures of late twentieth-century life are recognized and
deployed in mundane interpretations of social life are grouped into genres or
repertoires as particular sorts of performance – that is performances associated
with particular groups or settings or ways of life. A repertoire is then a set of
ways of symbolically representing identity and difference, with implied associ-
ations of characteristic attitudes, values, and norms, that form, if you like, a

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