Cultural cringe
Encyclopedia
Cultural cringe, in cultural studies
and social anthropology
, is an internalized inferiority complex
which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. It is closely related, although not identical, to the concept of colonial mentality
, and is often linked with the display of anti-intellectual attitudes
towards thinkers, scientists and artists who originate from a colonial or post-colonial nation. It can also be manifested in individuals in the form of "cultural alienation". In many cases, cultural cringe, or an equivalent term, is an accusation made by a fellow-national, who decries the inferiority complex and asserts the merits of the national culture.
wrote in his preface to his Short Stories in Prose and Verse: "The Australian writer, until he gets a 'London hearing', is only accepted as an imitator of some recognized English or American author; and, as soon as he shows signs of coming to the front, he is labelled 'The Australian Southey', 'The Australian Burns', or 'The Australian Bret Harte', and lately, 'The Australian Kipling'. Thus no matter how original he may be, he is branded, at the very start, as a plagiarist, and by his own country, which thinks, no doubt, that it is paying him a compliment and encouraging him, while it is really doing him a cruel and an almost irreparable injury. But mark! As soon as as the Southern writer goes 'home' and gets some recognition in England, he is 'So-and-So, the well-known Australian author whose work has attracted so much attention in London lately'; and we first hear of him by cable, even though he might have been writing at his best for ten years in Australia." Lawson clearly writes here from bitter experience, evidence enough that the Gestalt of psychological servitude, cultural anxiety and entrenched peer-cruelty which was later to become labelled "the cultural cringe" was pervasive in nineteenth-century Australia, and is thus a fundamental element of Australian self-identity.
The term "cultural cringe" was coined in Australia
after the Second World War by the Melbourne
critic and social commentator A. A. Phillips
, and defined in an influential and highly controversial 1950 essay of the same name. It explored ingrained feelings of inferiority that local intellectuals struggled against, and which were most clearly pronounced in the Australian theatre, music, art and letters. The implications of these insights potentially applied to all former colonial nations, and the essay is now recognised as a cornerstone in the development of post-colonial theory in Australia. In essence, Phillips pointed out that the public widely assumed that anything produced by local dramatists, actors, musicians, artists and writers was necessarily deficient when compared against the works of the British and European counterparts. In the words of the poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe
(quoted by Peter Conrad
), Australia was being made to rhyme with failure. The only ways local arts professionals could build themselves up in public esteem was either to follow overseas fashions, or, more often, to spend a period of time working in Britain.
As Lawson continued in his 1894 preface: "The same paltry spirit tried to dispose of the greatest of modern short-story writers as 'The Californian Dickens', but America wasn't built that way – neither was Bret Harte!" The cultural cringe of Australians and the cultural swagger of Americans reflects deep contrasts between the American and the Australian experiences of extricating themselves from English apron-strings. Dealing specifically with Australia, Phillips pointed out that sport has been the only field in which ordinary people accepted that their nation was able to perform and excel internationally. Indeed, while they prided themselves on the qualities of locally produced athletes and sportsmen, whom they invariably considered first rate, Australians behaved as if in more intellectual pursuits the nation generated only second-rate talent. Some commentators believe that cultural cringe contribute to the perceived anti-intellectualism
that has underpinned public life in Australia.
link alienation with a sense of dislocation or displacement some peoples (especially those from immigrant cultures) will feel when they look to a distant nation for their values. Culturally alienated societies often exhibit a weak sense of cultural self-identity and place little worth on themselves. The most common manifestation of this alienation among peoples from post-colonial nations at present is an appetite for all things American, from television and music, to clothing, slang, even names. Culturally alienated individuals will also exhibit little knowledge or interest in the history of their host society, placing no real value on such matters.
The issue of cultural alienation has led the Australian sociologists Brian Head and James Walter to interpret the cultural cringe as the belief that one's own country occupies a "subordinate cultural place on the periphery", and that "intellectual standards are set and innovations occur elsewhere". As a consequence, a person who holds this belief is inclined to devalue their own country's cultural, academic and artistic life, and to venerate the "superior" culture of another (colonising) country.
A more sophisticated approach to the issues raised by the cultural cringe, as felt by artistic practitioners in former colonies around the world, was developed and advanced by the Australian art historian Terry Smith
in his essay 'The Provincialism Problem'.
In Another Look at the cultural cringe, the Australian academic Leonard John Hume examined the idea of cultural cringe as an oversimplification of the complexities of Australian history and culture. His controversial essay argues that "The cultural cringe ... did not exist, but it was needed, and so it was invented."
The cultural cringe can be expressed in the almost obsessive curiosity of Australians to know what foreigners think of Australia and its culture.
Some commentators claim the cultural cringe particularly affects local television programming in Australia, which is heavily influenced by imported shows, mainly of American origin. The Federal government has legislated to keep a quota of Australian content (Australian Content Standard and Television Program Standard 23).
Some argue that a form of cultural cringe resulted in anti-heritage attitudes which led to the demolition of many world class pre-war buildings in Melbourne
, Brisbane
and Sydney
, destroying some of the world's best examples of Victorian architecture
. Modernism was promoted to many Australians as casting off imperial Europe to rebuild a new independent identity, and the existing pre-war architecture, which was a feature of Australian cities, was denigrated. This resulted in many calls to demolish the Royal Exhibition Building
, labelled the derogatory term "white elephant
". It was not until Queen Elizabeth II granted the building Royal status that Australians began to recognise its value. The building became the first in Australia to be given World Heritage status. This reaction against the cultural cringe continues in some fields such as architecture, where local architects are shunned for using introduced styles.
It has also been claimed that cultural cringe has led to federal government information technology
contracts going to large foreign multinationals, rather than domestic IT companies.
Another manifestation of cultural cringe is the "Convict Stain". Many Australians felt a sense of shame about the existence of British Convicts in what is now Australia, and many did not even attempt to investigate their families' origins, for fear that they could be descended from criminals. This was known as the Convict Stain, and it made research all the more difficult. It was most evident in sport, where people with known convict heritage were sometimes banned from sporting clubs. For example, in cricket
, the Melbourne Cricket Club
has a well known Convict Stain policy, making exception for very few, most notably Tom Wills
the inventor of Australian rules football. The effect can be reinforced in Britain, where Australian tourists have been asked in jest if they are "returning to the scene of the crime". In recent decades community attitudes have changed, and many Australians with convict ancestors are now more comfortable investigating and discussing their past.
.
Prior to the 1970s, Canadian radio stations gave almost no airtime to Canadian music, and apart from CBC Television
, Canadian television stations spent very little money on Canadian-produced programming. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) adopted Canadian content
regulations to resolve this, although even today such regulation is still criticized by some Canadians as representing inappropriate government interference in the right of Canadians to choose international content.
or Gachupines, were privileged with access to the best positions of authority and commerce while Mexican born Spaniards, even if they were 100% European with no indigenous admixture, were barred from such privileges. This led to the suppression of Mexican developments in favor of importing everything from Europe such as: machinery, lawyers, governors, culture, art, science and the common world view among the colonists which was a facsimile of that of Europe.
Today cultural cringe is still prevalent throughout Mexico where foreign cultures, attitudes, technologies, arts, and academics are seen much more favorably than Mexico's own indigenous scholars, technologies and artists. The result of this has been brain drain
as competent and talented Mexicans choose to move abroad, mostly to the United States, where they can develop their skills and practice their talents. In the Mexican popular media, news anchors and variety show hosts, Telenovela
actors and actresses are distinctly white despite the fact that most of the Mexican population is Mestizo
or Indian. This phenomenon still resonates with the old colonial attitude of the caste system
which favored the European image, culture and aesthetics over Mexican development which it perceives as inferior or substandard.
This attitude is commonly known as malinchismo and its bearers as malinchistas in reference to La Malinche
.
accent is said to have been influenced by a cultural cringe since the 1900s but it too is lessening in recent years.
claimed about a perceived "Scottish cringe
" in relation to Scotland
's disdain for free enterprise.
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
and social anthropology
Social anthropology
Social Anthropology is one of the four or five branches of anthropology that studies how contemporary human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular person: customs,...
, is an internalized inferiority complex
Inferiority complex
An inferiority complex, in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, is a feeling that one is inferior to others in some way. Such feelings can arise from an imagined or actual inferiority in the afflicted person...
which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. It is closely related, although not identical, to the concept of colonial mentality
Colonial mentality
Colonial mentality is an area of study and a conceptual theory in Cultural anthropology that refers to institutionalized or systemic feelings of inferiority within some societies or people who have been subjected to colonialism, relative to the values of the foreign powers which had previously...
, and is often linked with the display of anti-intellectual attitudes
Anti-intellectualism
Anti-intellectualism is hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science, as impractical and contemptible...
towards thinkers, scientists and artists who originate from a colonial or post-colonial nation. It can also be manifested in individuals in the form of "cultural alienation". In many cases, cultural cringe, or an equivalent term, is an accusation made by a fellow-national, who decries the inferiority complex and asserts the merits of the national culture.
Origin
In 1894, Henry LawsonHenry Lawson
Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest writer"...
wrote in his preface to his Short Stories in Prose and Verse: "The Australian writer, until he gets a 'London hearing', is only accepted as an imitator of some recognized English or American author; and, as soon as he shows signs of coming to the front, he is labelled 'The Australian Southey', 'The Australian Burns', or 'The Australian Bret Harte', and lately, 'The Australian Kipling'. Thus no matter how original he may be, he is branded, at the very start, as a plagiarist, and by his own country, which thinks, no doubt, that it is paying him a compliment and encouraging him, while it is really doing him a cruel and an almost irreparable injury. But mark! As soon as as the Southern writer goes 'home' and gets some recognition in England, he is 'So-and-So, the well-known Australian author whose work has attracted so much attention in London lately'; and we first hear of him by cable, even though he might have been writing at his best for ten years in Australia." Lawson clearly writes here from bitter experience, evidence enough that the Gestalt of psychological servitude, cultural anxiety and entrenched peer-cruelty which was later to become labelled "the cultural cringe" was pervasive in nineteenth-century Australia, and is thus a fundamental element of Australian self-identity.
The term "cultural cringe" was coined in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
after the Second World War by the Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
critic and social commentator A. A. Phillips
A. A. Phillips
Arthur Angel Phillips , generally known as A. A. Phillips, was an Australian writer, critic and teacher, best known for coining the term "Cultural Cringe" in his pioneering essay The Cultural Cringe, which set the early terms for post-colonial theory in Australia...
, and defined in an influential and highly controversial 1950 essay of the same name. It explored ingrained feelings of inferiority that local intellectuals struggled against, and which were most clearly pronounced in the Australian theatre, music, art and letters. The implications of these insights potentially applied to all former colonial nations, and the essay is now recognised as a cornerstone in the development of post-colonial theory in Australia. In essence, Phillips pointed out that the public widely assumed that anything produced by local dramatists, actors, musicians, artists and writers was necessarily deficient when compared against the works of the British and European counterparts. In the words of the poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Chris Wallace-Crabbe AO is an Australian poet and Emeritus Professor in The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.-Biography:...
(quoted by Peter Conrad
Peter Conrad
Peter Conrad may refer to:* Pete Conrad , United States astronaut* Peter Conrad , Australian academic long resident in the United Kingdom...
), Australia was being made to rhyme with failure. The only ways local arts professionals could build themselves up in public esteem was either to follow overseas fashions, or, more often, to spend a period of time working in Britain.
As Lawson continued in his 1894 preface: "The same paltry spirit tried to dispose of the greatest of modern short-story writers as 'The Californian Dickens', but America wasn't built that way – neither was Bret Harte!" The cultural cringe of Australians and the cultural swagger of Americans reflects deep contrasts between the American and the Australian experiences of extricating themselves from English apron-strings. Dealing specifically with Australia, Phillips pointed out that sport has been the only field in which ordinary people accepted that their nation was able to perform and excel internationally. Indeed, while they prided themselves on the qualities of locally produced athletes and sportsmen, whom they invariably considered first rate, Australians behaved as if in more intellectual pursuits the nation generated only second-rate talent. Some commentators believe that cultural cringe contribute to the perceived anti-intellectualism
Anti-intellectualism
Anti-intellectualism is hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science, as impractical and contemptible...
that has underpinned public life in Australia.
Connection with cultural alienation
The cultural cringe is tightly connected with "cultural alienation", that is, the process of devaluing or abandoning one's own culture or cultural background. A person who is culturally alienated places little value on their own or host culture, and instead hungers for that of a — sometimes imposed — colonising nation. The post-colonial theorists Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen TiffinHelen Tiffin
Helen M. Tiffin is Professor of English at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and an influential writer in post-colonial theory and literary studies....
link alienation with a sense of dislocation or displacement some peoples (especially those from immigrant cultures) will feel when they look to a distant nation for their values. Culturally alienated societies often exhibit a weak sense of cultural self-identity and place little worth on themselves. The most common manifestation of this alienation among peoples from post-colonial nations at present is an appetite for all things American, from television and music, to clothing, slang, even names. Culturally alienated individuals will also exhibit little knowledge or interest in the history of their host society, placing no real value on such matters.
The issue of cultural alienation has led the Australian sociologists Brian Head and James Walter to interpret the cultural cringe as the belief that one's own country occupies a "subordinate cultural place on the periphery", and that "intellectual standards are set and innovations occur elsewhere". As a consequence, a person who holds this belief is inclined to devalue their own country's cultural, academic and artistic life, and to venerate the "superior" culture of another (colonising) country.
A more sophisticated approach to the issues raised by the cultural cringe, as felt by artistic practitioners in former colonies around the world, was developed and advanced by the Australian art historian Terry Smith
Terry Smith (art historian)
Terry Smith is an Australian art historian, art critic and artist who currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, New York and Sydney....
in his essay 'The Provincialism Problem'.
Australia
The term cultural cringe is most commonly used in Australia, where it is believed by some to be a fact of Australian cultural life.In Another Look at the cultural cringe, the Australian academic Leonard John Hume examined the idea of cultural cringe as an oversimplification of the complexities of Australian history and culture. His controversial essay argues that "The cultural cringe ... did not exist, but it was needed, and so it was invented."
The cultural cringe can be expressed in the almost obsessive curiosity of Australians to know what foreigners think of Australia and its culture.
Some commentators claim the cultural cringe particularly affects local television programming in Australia, which is heavily influenced by imported shows, mainly of American origin. The Federal government has legislated to keep a quota of Australian content (Australian Content Standard and Television Program Standard 23).
Some argue that a form of cultural cringe resulted in anti-heritage attitudes which led to the demolition of many world class pre-war buildings in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
, Brisbane
Brisbane
Brisbane is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia. Brisbane's metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million, and the South East Queensland urban conurbation, centred around Brisbane, encompasses a population of...
and Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, destroying some of the world's best examples of Victorian architecture
Victorian architecture
The term Victorian architecture refers collectively to several architectural styles employed predominantly during the middle and late 19th century. The period that it indicates may slightly overlap the actual reign, 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901, of Queen Victoria. This represents the British and...
. Modernism was promoted to many Australians as casting off imperial Europe to rebuild a new independent identity, and the existing pre-war architecture, which was a feature of Australian cities, was denigrated. This resulted in many calls to demolish the Royal Exhibition Building
Royal Exhibition Building
The Royal Exhibition Building is a World Heritage Site-listed building in Melbourne, Australia, completed in 1880. It is located at 9 Nicholson Street in the Carlton Gardens, flanked by Victoria, Nicholson, Carlton and Rathdowne Streets, at the north-eastern edge of the central business district...
, labelled the derogatory term "white elephant
White elephant
A white elephant is an idiom for a valuable but burdensome possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth...
". It was not until Queen Elizabeth II granted the building Royal status that Australians began to recognise its value. The building became the first in Australia to be given World Heritage status. This reaction against the cultural cringe continues in some fields such as architecture, where local architects are shunned for using introduced styles.
It has also been claimed that cultural cringe has led to federal government information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
contracts going to large foreign multinationals, rather than domestic IT companies.
Another manifestation of cultural cringe is the "Convict Stain". Many Australians felt a sense of shame about the existence of British Convicts in what is now Australia, and many did not even attempt to investigate their families' origins, for fear that they could be descended from criminals. This was known as the Convict Stain, and it made research all the more difficult. It was most evident in sport, where people with known convict heritage were sometimes banned from sporting clubs. For example, in cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...
, the Melbourne Cricket Club
Melbourne Cricket Club
The Melbourne Cricket Club is a sporting club based in Melbourne, Australia. It was founded in 1838 and is regarded as the oldest sporting club in Australia....
has a well known Convict Stain policy, making exception for very few, most notably Tom Wills
Tom Wills
Thomas Wentworth "Tom" Wills was an Australian all-round sportsman, umpire, coach and administrator who is credited with being a catalyst towards the invention of Australian rules football....
the inventor of Australian rules football. The effect can be reinforced in Britain, where Australian tourists have been asked in jest if they are "returning to the scene of the crime". In recent decades community attitudes have changed, and many Australians with convict ancestors are now more comfortable investigating and discussing their past.
Canada
Many cultural commentators in Canada have also suggested that a similar process operates in that country as well. The specific phrase "cultural cringe" is not widely used to label the phenomenon in Canada, although it has been used in isolated instances; more typically, Canadian cultural commentators speak of a "Canadian inferiority complex", or label specific instances of the phenomenon with satirical terms such as beaver hourBeaver hour
The beaver hour, or beaver bin, is a satirical nickname for a programming philosophy used by some Canadian radio stations, which was prominent especially, but not exclusively, in the 1970s....
.
Prior to the 1970s, Canadian radio stations gave almost no airtime to Canadian music, and apart from CBC Television
CBC Television
CBC Television is a Canadian television network owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the national public broadcaster.Although the CBC is supported by public funding, the television network supplements this funding with commercial advertising revenue, in contrast to CBC Radio which are...
, Canadian television stations spent very little money on Canadian-produced programming. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) adopted Canadian content
Canadian content
Canadian content refers to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission requirements that radio and television broadcasters must air a certain percentage of content that was at least partly written, produced, presented, or otherwise contributed to by persons from...
regulations to resolve this, although even today such regulation is still criticized by some Canadians as representing inappropriate government interference in the right of Canadians to choose international content.
Mexico
Mexico has experienced sustained cultural cringe dating back to the colonial period where European born people called PeninsularesPeninsulares
In the colonial caste system of Spanish America, a peninsular was a Spanish-born Spaniard or mainland Spaniard residing in the New World, as opposed to a person of full Spanish descent born in the Americas or Philippines...
or Gachupines, were privileged with access to the best positions of authority and commerce while Mexican born Spaniards, even if they were 100% European with no indigenous admixture, were barred from such privileges. This led to the suppression of Mexican developments in favor of importing everything from Europe such as: machinery, lawyers, governors, culture, art, science and the common world view among the colonists which was a facsimile of that of Europe.
Today cultural cringe is still prevalent throughout Mexico where foreign cultures, attitudes, technologies, arts, and academics are seen much more favorably than Mexico's own indigenous scholars, technologies and artists. The result of this has been brain drain
Brain drain
Human capital flight, more commonly referred to as "brain drain", is the large-scale emigration of a large group of individuals with technical skills or knowledge. The reasons usually include two aspects which respectively come from countries and individuals...
as competent and talented Mexicans choose to move abroad, mostly to the United States, where they can develop their skills and practice their talents. In the Mexican popular media, news anchors and variety show hosts, Telenovela
Telenovela
A telenovela is a limited-run serial dramatic programming popular in Latin American, Portuguese, and Spanish television programming. The word combines tele, short for televisión or televisão , and novela, a Spanish or Portuguese word for "novel"...
actors and actresses are distinctly white despite the fact that most of the Mexican population is Mestizo
Mestizo
Mestizo is a term traditionally used in Latin America, Philippines and Spain for people of mixed European and Native American heritage or descent...
or Indian. This phenomenon still resonates with the old colonial attitude of the caste system
Casta
Casta is a Portuguese and Spanish term used in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly in Spanish America to describe as a whole the mixed-race people which appeared in the post-Conquest period...
which favored the European image, culture and aesthetics over Mexican development which it perceives as inferior or substandard.
This attitude is commonly known as malinchismo and its bearers as malinchistas in reference to La Malinche
La Malinche
La Malinche , known also as Malintzin, Malinalli or Doña Marina, was a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, who played a role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, acting as interpreter, advisor, lover and intermediary for Hernán Cortés...
.
New Zealand
New Zealanders are said to suffer from a cultural cringe, which has been wearing off in recent years. The New Zealand EnglishNew Zealand English
New Zealand English is the dialect of the English language used in New Zealand.The English language was established in New Zealand by colonists during the 19th century. It is one of "the newest native-speaker variet[ies] of the English language in existence, a variety which has developed and...
accent is said to have been influenced by a cultural cringe since the 1900s but it too is lessening in recent years.
Scotland
Scottish First Minister Jack McConnellJack McConnell
Jack Wilson McConnell, Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale is a British Labour life peer in the House of Lords. He was third First Minister of Scotland from 2001 to 2007, making him the longest serving First Minister in the history of the Scottish Parliament...
claimed about a perceived "Scottish cringe
Scottish cringe
The Scottish cringe is a cultural cringe relating to Scotland, and claimed to exist by politicians and commentators.These Scottish cultural commentators claim that a sense of cultural inferiority is felt by many Scots, particularly in relation to a perceived dominance of English culture, partly due...
" in relation to Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
's disdain for free enterprise.
See also
- Self-hatredSelf-hatredSelf-hatred refers to an extreme dislike and hatred of oneself, or being angry at or even prejudiced towards oneself. The term is also used to designate a dislike or hatred of a group, family, social class, mental illness, or stereotype to which one belongs and/or has...
- Tall poppy syndromeTall poppy syndromeTall poppy syndrome is a pejorative term primarily used in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other Anglosphere nations to describe a social phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticised because their talents or achievements elevate them above...
- Australian culture
- Post-colonialism
- NationalismNationalismNationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
- GlobalizationGlobalizationGlobalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
- XenocentrismXenocentrismXenocentrism is a political neologism, coined as the antonym of ethnocentrism. Xenocentrism is the preference for the products, styles, or ideas of someone else's culture rather than of one's own...
Further reading
- A.A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition : Studies in Colonial Culture, Melbourne, Cheshire, 1958