Cultural Imperialism

Cultural imperialism occurs when one community imposes or exports various aspects of its own way of life onto another community. The cultural part of the term refers to local customs, traditions, religion, language, social and moral norms, and so on—features of a way of life that are distinct from, though often closely related to, the economic and political systems that shape a community. The imperialism part of the term indicates that the imposing community forcefully extends the authority of its way of life over another population by either transforming or replacing aspects of the target population’s culture. That is, cultural imperialism does not typically refer to occasions when a population voluntarily appropriates aspects of another culture into its own. Rather, the term usually designates instances ...