Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Global Transmission And Local Consumption: Navajo Resistance To Mainstream American Television, Sam Pack Ph.D.

Journal of International and Global Studies

A common assumption maintains that the global outreach of mass media inevitably leads to deleterious consequences for native communities. Indeed, different scholars have argued that awareness of the outside world from television results in the homogenization of local cultures. However, images viewed through the electronic peephole radically transform not only an understanding of the outside world, but the way indigenes define themselves and their relationship to each other. By presenting subaltern audiences with an idealized other, television compels the emergence of an objectified self. “Who are ‘we’?” would not have been asked—or asked in the same way—were it not for …