uperstructure" that serves the political, financial and military needs of the imperial (North American and European) powers. By casting the media in the role of potent agent rather than protagonist, Acosta avoids the pitfalls of many Marxist scholars. At the same time, however, he avoids treating the media as an autonomous part of the imperial whole. Quite the contrary: The media's most salient characteristic, he writes, is their ubiquity.
In his discourse on culture and nationality, Tomlinson first focuses his attention on the nation-state, then largely rejects geographical identity as too narrow a context for a discussion on cultural imperialism.
Tomlinson discards on theoretical grounds the notion of "indigenous" culture. He distinguishes culture from nature. "Culture," he writes, "is entirely--even definitively--the work of human beings." Therefore, he argues, to label an individual or a group of people as native or possessing natural status is flimsy at best. Humans are not plants. Thus any attempt to define them as belonging to a certain region or in a
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