Mercenary,
You are correct: I used a stenographic style to cite your text, and just wrote about simply contacts vs. cultural influence. Can you support your assertion with some evidence? IMHO, it would be difficult to assert that ZH’s 300+ vessel flotilla visiting India with a specific goal to bring multiple gifts to the local “rich and famous” did not bring about at least some cultural novelties.
You might be too young to remember, but a single International Youth Festival in Moscow in 1956 had changed Russian youth’s way of dressing, their haircuts all over the country etc. Not even mentioning a large number of newborn children who did not look Slavic at all :-) Soviet satyrical journals have noticed it immediately with a flurry of caricatures and newspapers published one article after another about “poisonous influence of Western culture “.
And I am not even talking about “MickeyD”, i.e. Mc Donalds.
That is how cultural changes penetrate: local elites with access to the novelties adopts them first and then they trickle down to the lower social strata.
|