May I for once be openly cynical?
Christoph Reuss wrote:
>
> On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Keith Hudson wrote:
> > For better or for worse, we recreate society much as it was before whenever
> > we have passed through technological/economic change. OK, we might well
> > lose picturesque customs and metaphors (such as 7 or 70 different names of
> > snow -- and it's important for scholarly reasons that records are kept of
> > these), but we recreate new ones which are equivalent.
[snip]
> The above notion that "picturesque customs" come and go, and always did so,
> ignores what's fundamentally new in the current process of globalization:
> That old local/regional customs are not being replaced by new local/regional
> customs, but by GLOBAL "customs" -- by a McDonalds/Coca-Cola mono-"culture"
> that is the same everywhere. What is being lost isn't just "old customs",
> but the cultural diversity of this planet.
>
[snip]
Here is evidence that the above assertion is empirically false:
When I was in Japan in the mid 1980s, I was struck by the fact
that all the MacDonalds restaurants had an item on their
menu which I had never encountered in MacDonalds in America:
corn soup. Clearly, the new global economic "order" fosters
cultural divesity, not homogenized "monoculture".
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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