Cultural Geography: Cultural Distance, Global, National, and Local Identities

All audiences have a strong sense of local identity, as they live their daily lives in a specific place and time. Their interpretive community (Lindlof et al.,

1988) is based in a family, local friends, neighbors, clubs, church congrega tions, sports groups, and so on. Most people also have a sense of region refer

ring to an area larger than their immediate locale, but smaller than the nation.

Most of their day-to-day thought and interaction is still local, as the Brazilian interviews show, and much of the knowledge or cultural capital that people use in interpreting media, such as television, comes from their local experience of daily life in a specific culture shaped by their immediate environment, place, and time. Sometimes, the experience of locality sharp ens a sense of difference between local life and what is shown of global or

national scenes on television. For example, rural Brazilians observed and interviewed by La Pastina felt themselves to be on the periphery of Brazil, somewhat alienated from what they saw of urban Brazilian life on television

(see Chapter 8). The experience of locality is bound up with other layers of identity, such as ethnicity or language and culture. For example, Rosemary Alexander Isett ( 1 995) found that Inuit interviewees in Alaska felt at considerable distance

from the culture of the lower 48 U.S. states as portrayed on television. In fact, watching U.S. culture on television, they tended to be relieved that they

lived in a rural area within their own ethnic culture. Latinos interviewed by my students and me in East Austin also tended to frame their identities in terms of local conditions, particularly neighborhoods and extended families. Like the Inuit, they often felt at considerable cultural distance from the U.S. mainstream, both in terms of language and culture. However, this sense of cultural distance varies greatly between generations and families. In fact,

234 Chapter 9 fieldwork with Latinos powerfully introduced the layer of family identity.

Among Latinos, family often roots individuals in a specific neighborhood, but it can also connect them to extended family in Mexico. Thus, while family is often bound up with locality, that link is different with migrants, particularly those who see themselves as part of a temporary diaspora, with plans to permanently or cyclically return to what they consider a cultural homeland, such as Mexico or Central America.

I want to give weight to the relative solidity of the local, as many audiences experience it, without falling into what Nederveen Pieterse (2004) called "the reification of the local, sidelining the interplay between the local and the

global" (p. 47). Well before the nation-state achieved relative primacy in insti tutional definitions of identity, local cultures generally had cultural exchange

and interpenetration with larger cultural-linguistic regions. Local groups were part of larger language, culture, and ethnic groups such as the Inca or the

Mayan cultures. These prenational cultures continue locally or subnationally in many parts of the world. In larger nations such as Brazil and China, or even medium-size nations such as Mozambique, coherent subnational regional identities often reflect these enduring hybrid forms of identity.

In fact, this balance of coexistence and conflict in the mix of local iden tity with national and transnational identities is one of the reasons that I focus here on multilayered identities alongside hybrid identities. Sometimes, the local changes with outside influence as a hybrid, and sometimes, elements of difference persist as a separate layer. My interviews in Brazil tend to show us both processes at work among most people.

In most places with relatively coherent, relatively powerful nation-states, people come to have a layer of identity that reflects an imagined national identity, as proposed by Anderson ( 1983 ). Historically, that process was experienced as beginning with the incursion into local places and cultures of national political institutions, such as the army, tax collectors, and gover nors. In many places, those national institutions left a relatively light foot print on a still largely local sense of identity. Urban elites have often been shocked at how many rural and small-town people are minimally involved with the nation. Correspondingly, those same urban elites have often radically misunderstood the local communities and identities constructed by people in the nation's periphery. When Peruvian novelist Vargas Llosa

( 1 98 1 ) was looking for a metaphor or precedent to understand the enigmatic rural rebellion of the supposedly Maoist Shining Path in Peru, he looked at the striking example of a completely misunderstood religious community in rural Brazil. In the 1 890s, this community's withdrawal into a mountain stronghold in southern Bahia at Canudos was (mis)interpreted by the national leadership as a monarchist revolt inspired by France, which led

Making Sense of World Television 235 creating one of the classic, enduring narratives of regional versus national

identity in Brazil (da Cunha, 1973). Rejecting Cosmopolitan Mores in National Television

In his work in the rural northeast of Brazil, La Pastina found that "things like that only happen in larger cities" was a common explanation for images of sex and gender relations on the major national network programming, telenovelas. Most viewers he interviewed in the small town that was called

Macambira perceived a gap between the local set of norms, attitudes, and behaviors and those at work in the urban south represented in the telenove

las. These viewers, both men and women, saw the reality represented in the telenovelas as remote and uncharacteristic of their own lived experiences. This perceived gap was stressed by the conflict between morals and values

presented in the telenovelas and those experienced in their own lives. For many, the core distinction between urban-rural lifestyles was located in the lack of privacy in small towns such as Macambira.

This difference between the two worlds-one urban and modern, the other rural and traditional-created a sense that they were in a peripheral state. Many saw Macambira at the edge of modernity as seen on TV. They could only glimpse the center of the nation through the screen. At the same time, these viewers were anxious to see these images from a different reality, to see telenovela characters engaging in activities perceived to be urban in nature and location. They were curious to see where these characters ate and entertained themselves and how they dressed, spoke, and worked. This

desire informed their views of lifestyles as well as the perceived gap between their own choices and those in urban centers. Nevertheless, this gap between urban and rural attitudes and values underscored another split between viewers. Men and women did not necessarily share the same opinion on this perceived distance between their own lived experience and the life presented in the telenovelas. Many female viewers were more reluctant then male view ers to read those differences solely in terms of their geographical location. So we see here a differentiated interplay between the seemingly dominant dis cursive awareness of place and cultural-geographic distances within the nation and gender as perceived both locally and nationally.

Dinalva, a 27-year-old mother of two children, thought that women in larger cities could act more freely, like the women in the telenovelas.

In the larger cities the rights [between men and women] are more equal, there is not as much gossip. Here men and women have the same rights but men

have more freedom; the woman is marked if she does anything, there is a lot

236 Chapter 9

For Dinalva, gossip exerts a damaging form of social control on women's lives in Macambira; she believes women in larger cities to be immune from those social pressures. For her, the distinction between men and women is

much more dramatic than the difference between women in urban and rural communities. Equal rights are assumed but qualified: "Men have more

freedom." The telenovela seemed to reinforce this perception of a gap between norms and behaviors in urban and rural settings as well as a gap in gender relations. Men viewed the representation of urban norms and values as something distant and, in many ways, unacceptable. Alternatively, women perceived their constraints in comparison to those presented in the telenov elas. For men, this gap was about northeastern rural culture versus urban southern culture; for women, it was about freedom and equal rights.

Gediao believed the character of the adulterous wife, Leia (in the 1994 telen ovela The Cattle King), was ripe for a polarized interpretation. As he saw it,

If a woman "puts horns on his head" (makes him a cuckold), for the rest of his life he will be marked. There are things no one can accept here, you see. And in the south is not like that. I hear that there (in the south) it is common, the woman betrays him and the guy accepts her back.

It seems that television was the source for this reading of different levels of acceptance of betrayal between the urbanized south and Macambira. Gediao also complained constantly about the representation of the north east region in the news media. Several other informants in different situa tions critiqued the news media's recurrent representation of the northeastern

Brazil as a poor, promiscuous, primitive, and backward place, and that a criticism sometimes reverted toward La Pastina as a potential promoter of

false images of the community (La Pastina, 2004c). The perception of distance between Macambira and the locus of moder

nity (in the south of Brazil) presented in telenovelas was manifest in the desire of some viewers to have the telenovelas present more of the lifestyles of the characters. At the same time, these images served as a reminder of their peripheral status, allowing for the circulation of new trends that could

be absorbed and digested by the viewers. This distance also served to rein force their identity as northeasterners, Sertanejos and small-towners: "I could never live in Sao Paulo, it is too dangerous, too big, too crazy," one person said. That was typical of local comments, at the same time people were talking about the amenities available for those living in urban centers: more leisure activities, greater shopping opportunities at cheaper costs, and anonymity. In this peripheral state, in which urbanness is perceived as

Making Sense of World Television 237 central, viewers in Macambira are constructed as others by the television

they watch. As media-defined others, these viewers consume modernity through the media at the same time they isolate what is perceived to be undesirable con sequences of this modern reality. This dichotomy forced viewers to seek a position between the two realities, the peripheral but lived one and the cen tral one that was only accessed through the screen.

Cultural Geography: Cultural Distance, Global, National, and Local Identities