Commodification

each. Material culture is a physical component of culture that contributes to real-life expression of the culture. Fast food restaurants and designer clothing are a prominent example of American material culture, demonstrating the fast-pace and commodification of American lifestyle. Symbolic culture is a nonmaterial entity of a culture that still provides clues to the views of the group. Waving as a greeting and the eagle as a sign of patriotism are key examples of American views which might…

(Mitchell 1). The commodification of hip-hop and rap has a significant impact on the globalization of this kind of music as a form of global social change and resistance. For instance, countries such as China and India had for a long time restricted hip-hop shows such as MTV (Osumare 275). Evidently, when citizens of a country are denied access to some genres of music, it may act as an inhibiting factor to the voice of the people who communicate best through music. The commodification of hip-hop…

Reservation Blues, written by Sherman Alexie, portrays the harsh reality of how many modern American Indians live today. Alexie utilizes history, cultural commodification and manhood to tell the story of a band who rose and fell from fame. Also by using these three subjects, Alexie is also able to show how Hollywood has been able to destroy the heritage of the American Indian. The bloody history between white men and the American Indians is based on betrayal and lies. Therefore, Alexie uses…

In today’s capitalist society, those who own the means of production must devise ways to rationalize paying their workers at relatively low wages while still trying to earn a profit for their businesses. In this scenario, I will explain how “Moneybags”, the owner of the means of production, rationalizes paying his workers at a factory that assembles cell phone parts, through a Marxist perspective. According to Marx, every day, the worker’s means of subsistence “must therefore be sufficient to…

The most saddening issue with this part of history is that these enslaved women were forced into these types of sexual labor because of their physical structure. The curves of their bodies deemed them to these helpless positions. Worst of all labor laws manipulated themselves to coerce reproductive and productive labor. So, it was the job of these women to resist and act against the brutality. However, it was very scary for these enslaved to act against the law. And, at the time it was the law…

to have become so societally acceptable. In particular, two main characteristics of Capitalism, commodification and consumerism, have contributed greatly to the rise of the surveillance age. The dynamics that capitalism has set in motion have allowed for economic actors such as corporations to use surveillance as a tool for profit, in order to capture data on both…

of manufacturing jobs. Many jobs are meaningless and have little other purpose than organising peoples time. It shows the shift from capitalism through the creation of jobs to a point where many of these jobs are now redundant but jobs and the commodification of labour are largely the back bone of capitalism and thus bullshit jobs are needed to maintain social order in the capitalist world. Capitalist Relations: is a term discussed by Tania Murray Li in Land’s End. It refers to the way in which…

existing ideas to fulfil their fantasy. In this view, tourism can lead to what is referred to as a “cultural dependency” in which local people economically rely on their ability to cater to tourists. This in turn leads to the commodification of culture. The commodification of culture is the process in which a local culture is turned into a commodity to sell to tourists and therefore is valued primarily as a an tradable good. Many anthropologists argue that when local culture is commodified and…

serves to encourage a re-humanisation of the labourer, where a capitalist structure encourages the opposite: the commodification of human beings, and the…

However, Marxist criticism evolved with the involvement of “Marxist theoreticians,” Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci (226). Lukács focused on “the social meaning of literary form” and Marx’s idea of “reification” (226). Reification refers back to commodification and how it intensifies alienation by diminishing social relations, ideas, and people into things. Lukács pointed out the lack of social representation by modernist, who he thought were instead “writing for form and technique” (226).…