"Cultural Materialism"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that "cultural materialism" is tautological because culture is, by its very nature, a material as well as an ideological construction. The author points out that the term "cultural difference" has been used as a phrase to encompass everything from cultural customs, trends, and beliefs to language; culture is a people's ever-changing and evolving language of practices, history, and present-day economic circumstances. The paper relates that cultural behavior varies by country; Japan is what is known as a high-context culture, where what one means is often not articulated on the language's semantic surface.

From the Paper:

"America was created out a desire for a consumerist and democratic society, where all individuals had and have the same right to prosper and to live their lives in a relatively free and unfettered fashion. Thus American capitalist economics and its cultural assumptions in its business dealings with other nations therefore have evolved in a relatively free and unfettered fashion, with minimal state influences. This form of historical and economic evolution may be starkly contrasted to the more paternalistic forms of state involvement in the material lives of the citizenry today, for instance, in the Scandinavian nations today of Europe, to take only one cultural example, where a higher level of taxation is tolerated by the citizens as a culture, in exchange for a greater level of security and equity in the matters of health care and pensions."

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