Cultural domination shapes working-class perception without fully occupying the mind

Evidence

The aim of all this is not so much to indicate a simple intercultural resemblance or to suggest that Afghanistan resembles the United States of 150 years earlier. Rather, it is to reveal how our perceptions of the Other are always fashioned with the cultural tools we have available to us. In Skelly’s case, these tools include imperial adventure fiction and the cowboy films and serials beloved of mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Edward Said, that most astute critic of the persistence of past ways of seeing, cites Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that “places—be it a problem suburb or ghetto or Chechnya, Kosovo, Iraq or Africa—are phantasms, which feed on emotional experiences stimulated by more or less uncontrolled words and images, such as those conveyed in the tabloids and by political propaganda or rumor.” Afghanistan is another such place. To the regular news reports of war and tribal bloodshed we must here add that deeper and in a way more intangible myth of the primitive, in all its guises, on which Skelly initially draws. The point, however, is not to see this position as the final one but as a starting point from which to move forward, to reach out, to cross another kind of border. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Workers accept dominant economic narratives while acting oppositionally locally; Dominant culture operates as an active process of incorporation, not static ideology; Cultural domination has real effects without being all-powerful or all-inclusive (+13 more)

Related

• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools (similarity 0.89)
• True philology makes a hospitable place in the mind for the foreign Other (similarity 0.81)
• Perceptions of the Other are always filtered through one’s own cultural narrative forms. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools #expands (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351
• Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors #corroborates (0.65)