ABSTRACT

The idea of culture is central to anthropology, culture being, among other things, the symbols, objects, and meanings that allow people to turn the chaos of shifting impressions that constitute raw experience into a seemingly ordered and coherent universe. But, in some ways, culture has become our enemy. In modern society, however, with its vast global communications technology, culture is no longer communally created and maintained; rather, it is created and maintained by those with the political and economic power to control how the world is represented and the mechanisms through which these representations reach us. A word commonly used to describe the power to define how society members define their world is spin. Americans do not talk much about power. Ask Americans how McDonald's, or Disney, or General Motors, or Barack Obama has shaped them or constructed their consciousness, and you will likely draw blank stares.