Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2008-9
Seeing Themselves through the Lens of the Other: An Analysis of the Cross-Cultural Production and Negotiation of National Geographies “The Samurai Way” Story
More than any other publication, National Geographic magazine has taught Americans about the world around them. Recently, the magazine's view of the world has become more complex. Since 1995, the magazine has been producing editions published in languages other than English. This raises questions as to how international audiences negotiate these “glocalized” representations. By investigating how the National Geographic “The Samurai Way” story resonates with Japanese individuals, this study first addresses the cross-cultural reception of an American text not simply exported to another country, but an American text repackaged for a local foreign audience. It then returns to the process of production of the story in an effort to identify points of intersection and contradiction in the discourses emerging about the text from multiple positions.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AbramsonH. S. (1987). National Geographic: Behind the America's lens on the world. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.
2.
AllnerM. (2000). Mainstreaming the world at the National Geographic Society: Para-educational images and cultural commodities for the family of members. Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines, 85, 60–70.
3.
AndersonM. W.KingsleyC. (1999). Finding resources for the study of multiculturalism on the Internet. In ProsserM.SitaramK. S., Civic discourse: Intercultural, international and global media (pp. 31–44). Stamford, CT: Ablex.
4.
AngI. (1990). Culture and communication: Towards an ethnographic critique of media consumption in the transnational media system. European Journal of Communication, 5(2–3), 239–260.
5.
AppaduraiA. (1999). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In DuringS., The cultural studies reader (pp. 220–230). New York: Routledge.
BauerD. M. (1995). Personal criticism and the academic personality. In RoofJ.WiegmanR., Who can speak: Authority and critical identity (pp. 56–69). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
8.
BeaudrillardJ. (1988). America. London: Verso.
9.
BennettW. L. (2003). News: The politics of illusion. New York: Longman.
10.
BhabhaH. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge.
11.
BlockB. (1984). Romance and high purpose: The National Geographic. Wilson Library Bulletin, 58(5), 333–337.
12.
BoyleJ. H. (1993). Modern Japan: The American nexus. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College.
13.
BreedW. (1955). Social control in the newsroom: A functional analysis. Social Forces, 33, 326–335.
14.
BurumaI. (1994). Wages of guilt: Memories of war in Germany and Japan. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
15.
ChowR. (1993). Writing Diaspora: Tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
16.
ChuangR. (2000). Dialectics of globalization and localization. In ChenG.-M.StarostaW. J., Communication and global society (pp. 19–33). New York: Peter Lang.
17.
CollinsJ. L.LutzC. A. (1992). Becoming America's lens on the world: National Geographic in the Twentieth century. South Atlantic Quarterly, 91(1), 161–191.
18.
ConditC. M. (1989). The rhetorical limits of polysemy. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6(2), 103–122.
19.
CraneD. (2002). Culture and globalization: Theoretical models and emerging trends. In CraneD.KawashimaN.KawasakiK. i., Global culture: Media, arts, policy, and globalization (pp. 1–25). New York: Routlege.
20.
CroteauD.HoynesW. (1997). Media/society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
21.
CverkovichA.KellnerD. (1997). Articulating the global and the local: Globalization and cultural studies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
22.
DayanD. (1998). Particularistic media and diasporic communication. In LiebesT.CurranJ., Media, ritual and identity (pp. 103–113). London: Routledge.
23.
Darling-WolfF. (2003). Media, class, and Western influence in Japanese women's conceptions of attractiveness. Feminist Media Studies, 3(2), 153–172.
24.
Darling-WolfF. (2004). Sites of attractiveness: Japanese women and Westernized representations of feminine beauty. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(4), pp. 325–345.
25.
DorfmanA.MattelartA. (1971). How to read Donal Duck: Imperialist ideology in the Disney comic. New York: International general.
26.
DowerJ. W. (1993). Peace and democracy in two systems: External policy and internal conflict. In GordonA., Postwar Japan as history (pp. 3–33). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
27.
DuusP. (1998). Modern Japan. Boston: Houghton Mifllin Company.
28.
FeatherstoneM. (1995). Undoing culture: Globalization, postmodernism, and identity. London: Sage.
29.
FishmanM. (1980). Manufacturing the news. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
30.
FrankA. G. (1969). Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press.
31.
FukuyamaF. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: Free press.
32.
GansH. J. (1979). Deciding what's news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Pantheon Books.
33.
García-CancliniN. (1995). Hybrid cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
34.
GarnhamN. (1993). The mass media, cultural identity, and the public sphere in the modern world. Public culture, 5, 251–265.
35.
GoldingP. (1994). The communications paradox: Inequality at the national and international levels. Media development, 4, 7–9.
36.
GoldingP. (1996). World wide wedge: Division and contradiction in the global information infrastructure. Monthly review, 48(3), 70–85.
37.
HallS. (1973). The determinations of news photographs. In CohenS.YoungJ.The manufacture of news: Social problems, deviance and the mass media (pp. 176–190). London: Constable.
38.
HallS. (1993). Encoding, decoding. In DuringS., The Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 90–103). London: Routledge.
39.
HallS. (1997). The local and the global. In KingA., Culture, globalization and the world-system (pp. 41–68). London: Macmillan.
HarveyP. (1998). Nonchan's dream: NHK morning serialized television novels. In MartinezD. P., The worlds of Japanese popular culture: Gender, shifting boundaries and global culture (pp. 133–151). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
44.
HermanE. S.ChomskyN. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. London: Vintage.
45.
HermanE. S.McChesneyR. W. (1997). The global media. London: Cassell.
46.
HunterJ. (1989). The emergence of modern Japan. New York: Longman.
47.
IriyeA. (1967). Across the Pacific: An inner history of American-East Asian relations. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
48.
IvyM. (1993). Formations of mass culture. In GordonA., Postwar Japan as history (pp. 239–258). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
49.
IvyM. (1995). Discourse of the vanishing: Modernity, phantasm, Japan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
50.
IwabuchiK. (1994). Complicit exoticism: Japan and its other. Continuum8, 2, 49–82.
51.
IwabuchiK. (2002). Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
52.
JamesonF. (1991). Postmodernism: Or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
53.
KondoD. (1990). Crafting selves: Power, gender, and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
54.
KraidyM. (2002). Hybridity in cultural globalization. Communication Theory, 12(3), 316–339.
55.
KraidyM. (2005). Hybridity: Or the cultural logic of globalization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
56.
LashS.UrryJ. (1987). The end of organized capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
57.
LiebesT.KatzE. (1990). The export of meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
58.
LullJ. (1995). Media, communication, culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
59.
LutzC. A.CollinsJ. L. (1993). Reading National Geographic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
60.
MattelartA. (1994). Mapping world communication: War, progress, culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
61.
MattelartA. X.MattelartM. (1984). International image markets: In search of an alternative perspective. London: Comedia.
62.
McAnanyE.WilkinsonK. (1992). From cultural imperialists to takeover victims? Questions of Hollywood's buyouts from the critical tradition. Communication Research, 19(6), 724–748.
63.
MendelsonA. L. (2008). The construction of photographic meaning: In JamesFloodBriceHealth ShirleyDianeLapp, Handbook of Literacy Research: Visual, Communicative and Performative Arts, pp. 27–36. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
64.
MendonçaL. F. M. (2002). The Brazilian music industry, local culture, and public policies. In CraneD.KawashimaN.KawasakiK. i., Global culture: Media, arts, policy, and globalization (pp. 105–117). New York: Routlege.
65.
MolotchH.LesterM. (1974). News as purposive behavior. American Sociological Review, 39, 101–112.
66.
NajitaT. (1989/1997). On culture and technology in postmodern Japan. In MiyoshiM.HarootunianH. D., Postmodernism and Japan (pp. 3–20). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
67.
OliveiraO. S. (1993). Brazilian soaps outshine Hollywood: Is cultural imperialism fading out? In NordenstrengK.SchillerH., Beyong national sovereignty: International communication in the 1990's (pp. 116–147). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
68.
ParameswaranR. (1999). Western romance fiction as English language media in postcolonial India. Journal of Communication, 49(2), 84–105.
69.
ParameswaranR. (2002). Local culture in global media: Excavating colonial and material discourses inNational Geographic, Communication Theory, 12(3), 287–315.
70.
PaulyP. J. (1979). The World and All That Is in It: The National Geographic Society, 1888–1918. American Quarterly, 31, 517–32.
71.
PieterseJ. N. (1994). Globalisation as hybridisation. International Sociology, 9, 161–184.
72.
RobertsonR. (1992). Globalization: Social theory and global culture. London: Sage.
73.
RoshcoB. (1975). Newsmaking. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
74.
RubyJ. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
75.
SakaiI. (1989/1997). Modernity and its critique: The problem of universalism and particularlism. In MiyoshiM.HarootunianH. D., Postmodernism and Japan (pp. 93–122). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
76.
SchillerH. (1976). Communication and cultural domination. New York: M. E. Sharpe.
77.
SchillerH. (1985). Electronic information flows: New basis for global domination? In DrummondP.PatersonR., Television in transition (pp. 11–10). London: BFI Publishing.
78.
SchillerH. (1993). The context of our work. In NordenstrengK.SchillerH., Beyond national sovereignty: International communication in the 1990's (pp. 3–32). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
79.
SchultenS. (2000). The making of the National Geographic: Science, culture and expansionism. American Studies, 41(1), 5–29.
80.
SekulaA. (1984). Photography against the grain: Essays and photo works 1973–1983. Halifax, NS: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
81.
ShivelyD. (1971). The Japanization of the middle Meiji. In ShivelyD., Tradition and modernization in Japanese culture (pp. 77–119). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
82.
ShoemakerP. J.ReeseS. D. (1996). Mediating the message: Theories of influences on mass media content. New York: Longman.
83.
SiljA. (1988). East of Dallas. London: British Film Institute.
84.
SinclairJ.JackaE.CunninghamS. (1996). New patterns in global vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
85.
Sreberny-MohammadiA. (1996). Globalization, communication and transnational civil society: Introduction. In BramanS.Sreberny-MohammadiA., Globalization, communication and transnational civil society (pp. 1–19). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
86.
SteetL. (2000). Veils and daggers: A century of National Geographic's representation of the Arab world. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
87.
StrattonJ. (2000). Cyberspace and the globalization of culture. In BellD.KennedyB. M., The cybercultures reader (pp. 721–731). New York: Routledge.
88.
TobinJ. (1992). Domesticating the West. In TobinJ., Re-made in Japan: Everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society (pp. 1–41). New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
89.
TomlinsonJ. (1999). Globalization and culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
90.
TreatJ. W. (1996). Introduction: Japanese studies into cultural studies. In TreatJ. W., Contemporary Japan and popular culture (pp. 1–14). Honolulu: University of Hawaii press.
91.
WeeC. J. (1997). Buying Japan: Singapore, Japan, and an ‘East Asian’ modernity. Journal of Pacific Asia, 4, 21–46.
92.
WuW. (1999). Cyberspace and cultural identity—A case study of cybercommunity of Chinese students in the United States. In ProsserM.SitaramK. S., Civic discourse: Intercultural, international and global media (pp. 75–89). Stamford, CT: Ablex.
