Shaheed Nick Mohammed'sCommunication and the Globalization of Culture: Beyond Tradition and Borders provides a unique perspective on the concept of culture and its fate in the globalized, mediated environment. Acknowledging widespread fears of cultural erosion at the hands of dominant global forces, Mohammed argues that what we understand as culture has always been the product of global forces, including those of trade and exchange. Our very conceptions of culture are questioned. The sanctity of tradition, religion, and heritage, the book suggests, should give way to an appreciation of the quite mundane origins of cultural artifacts, invented often as matters of political or social expedience, adopted sometimes in accidents of history and canonized by time into the catechisms of cultural belief.

Communication and the Globalization of Culture also suggests several mechanisms by which pragmatic social practices and fictional discourses make their way into the cultural beliefs and traditions of societies. Shaheed Nick Mohammed examines how the modern globalized environment gives rise to cultural practices that demonstrate cultural inventions, imagined communities, and manufactured cultural products, suggesting that such inventions and imaginations are not uniquely modern but rather a continuation of cultural inventions that long pre-date our media-globalized environment.

Shaheed Nick Mohammed is associate professor of communication at Penn State Altoona.

Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 Chapter One: Culture, Humankind, and Society
Chapter 4 Chapter Two: The Birth of Culture
Chapter 5 Chapter Three: Conquest, Imperialism, and Culture
Chapter 6 Chapter Four: Neoimperialism, Media, and Culture
Chapter 7 Chapter Five: New Mythology, New Media, and the Globalization of Culture
Chapter 8 Chapter Six: Corporate Domination of Cultural Product
Chapter 9 Chapter Seven: Cultural Erosion and Globalization
Chapter 10 Chapter Eight: Counterculture and Cultural Imaginations
Chapter 11 Chapter Nine: Long Live Culture?
Chapter 12 Afterword
Chapter 13 Epilogue
Chapter 14 About the Author
Chapter 15 Bibliography
Chapter 16 Index