When children of the periphery are portrayed in American textbooks many aspects are present in almost every instance. For one the children are wearing addidas shirts, NFL championship jerseys (often of the loosing team), or clothing bearing one of many other western (namely American) cultural exports. It is interesting to relate the idea of clothing as a cultural export to Cosmologies of Capitalism in this sense. While many children in the United States would scoff at the idea of sporting a "Carolina Panthers 2016 Super Bowl Champion" shirt, many misprinted shirts do end up in the periphery to fulfill a need, and simultaneously become a sort of commodity. The "worthlessness" of these shirts here in the states is unique to our culture as children here would be made fun of for wearing a misprinted shirt when in other nations this cultural export and necessity is taken and imported in their own unique way.
In Cosmologies of Capitalism Marshall Salhins argues that the societies of the periphery can choose how to import the cultural exports of globalization. In the example of clothing the misprinted shirts are imported as a symbol of American football and not simply the team specific Carolina Panthers. I think that that enforces his larger argument of the idea of the new world system being just as destructive as globalization in destroying non-western traditional cultures but that the cultures are still unique in that they can choose how to change.
Yay! A post on Marshal Sahlins! This is a great article, though bit difficult to get through because of its density so I commend you for doing so. As you write, the important take away of this article is to get beyond thinking about Western capitalism as the dominant form of capitalism that gets appropriated by other cultures in a sort of passive, mimicking way. Instead, Sahlins provides three examples of other cosmologies of capitalism--worldviews, ways of living that have incorporated certain aspects of capitalism in unique ways that are very different froth way that Western capitalism imagines itself. I would add to this to say that Sahlins is going one step further than Mintz to say that the people at the periphery did not simply react to Western Capitalism. they had their own cultural systems that incorporated capitalism in particular ways. he also puts Western capitalism into the same place as the cosmology of others--as in the example of tea and other "drug foods" as fitting into the cosmology of "being condemned to continuous misery by their satiated body needs" (439).
ReplyDelete