Looking around the world

Theme parks, food courts, fashion and film are just a few of the ways we demonstrate our understanding of the world and other people in it. They are, in a sense, maps of what we think our culture means, and what we find most interesting, desirable or confusing about the cultures of others.

This is the idea at the heart of postcolonial and postructualist social critique: that the ways in which we pursue, organize and put to use our knowledge about the world and the other people in it really says more about us than it does about the apparent objects of that knowledge.

Here is a short and lively paper along these lines by critical theorist Louis Marin, with the compelling title "Disneyland as Degenerate Utopia".

Here, on the other hand, is a lesson plan from National Geographic that demonstrates how one culture's ideas of what other cultures are "made of" are passed along. This is how ideas become ideology.


Dan Graham's rooftop installation for the DIA Chelsea in New York, Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube functions as an elequent illustration of the problem of "objective" perception. As you look through its reflective glass panels, your view of the world around you is filtered through your own reflection, which varies in its intensity as the light changes.