228
PARTISAN REVIEW
an introspective Castile, and her Spanish-speaking world, always disdain–
ful towards exotica, and the English-speaking world, which at least since
the eighteenth century has shown its elf amiable towards exotica. Here
we have another dimension of the problem. The English-speaking peo–
ples are consumers of French wines, Itali an opera, German motorcars,
Japanese cameras, Chilean fruit, Chinese table napkins, and all kinds of
products of the most diverse origin imaginable, but the rest of the world
is overwhelmingly, almost uniquely, a consumer of the popular and eco–
nomic culture of the English-speaking world.
It could be added that in Latin America, at least the working class is
also becoming a consumer of the religious cu lture of the north. This
kind of imbalance is not novel. In the time of Alexander, the Egyptians
had a manner of going about burying their dead with which we are all
very familiar. Any child can tell an Egyptian mummy from anything else
even remotely similar. But under the Hellenistic Ptolemaics, these mum–
mies acquired Greek faces, which they kept for the next three centuries,
confirming the pervasive Hellenization of the Mediterranean world. No
doubt the Hellenes were familiar with some cultural traits of Egyptian
origin, but what gives the age its name was the reverse process, also re–
sponsible for placing Greek faces on Egyptian mummies.
Peter Berger:
But this is a very interesting question. You understimate
ideologies. What is the difference between an American eating tacos and
a Mexican eating hamburgers? The American can eat as many as he wants
but is not going to necessarily absorb the culture of
lIlachislIlo.
In
contrast, for example, the more hamburgers the Mexican eats, the more
he is going to absorb more American feminism. In other words, I am
suggesting, not in a magical way, but in a sociological way, that you
emphasize the absorption of an array of superficial cultural products
without distinguishing them from those Hellenistic cultural products
which have a deep sacramental character and which represent a quite
different kind of assimilation. They are visible signs of an invisible grace.
They carry with them ideological baggage of which they are symbols. In
constrast, the consumption of exotica in the U.S. or in Europe does not
carry this freight.
Ricardo Arias Calderon:
Two things you brought up worry me a
great deal. We are living for the first time in over a century in a one–
power world, under one model of economic artifact and one model of
political artifact; and I think we're paying a significant price for it. There
is an undervaluing of the cost of that model, of how it revea ls its limita-