Popular Culture Review 30.2
entiate between what the dominant group regards as normal according to their own views and what might be excluded as the other ( Hall 234 ). Stereotypes may also be developed by what is ignored , trivialized , or left out of the mass media , a theoretical approach labeled symbolic annihilation ( Tuchman et al . 13 ).
In “ Tourism , Mass Media , and the Making of Visual Culture in the Greater Yucatan Peninsula ,” Geddes Gonzales asks excellent questions about Western portrayals of indigenous cultures :
Could it be that representations of the non-Western other , coded as difference , continue to facilitate the reaffirmation of the modern constitution ? Is this a form of “ imperialist nostalgia ” that mourns the subjugation of the other , yet simultaneously perpetuates the “ primitive ,” at times actually identifying with it ? If so , what does this say about the influence of the margins in defining Western subjectivity and visual culture ? What has been the Mayan ( or Oceanic and other cultures ’) response ? ( 52 )
The answer to these questions may lie in conducting critical ethnographies of the way indigenous people experience contemporary visual culture , taking into consideration the socially and historically contingent context of social interaction and signification . Indeed , one might say that given the extant asymmetrical social and symbolic media and film representations , Pacific Islanders are subject to an ongoing process of dispossession of their material and cultural resources , a process accentuated by a neoliberal order promoted by corporate and local elites . The resulting toll on the environment ,
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