Milly Buonanno

In “The Paradigm of Indigenization” Milly Buonanno introduces two paradigms in opposition to Herbert Schiller’s theory of cultural imperialism: indigenization and hybridity. Indigenization refers to the process by which foreign cultural models and meanings are appropriated, re-elaborated, and re-interpreted within the cultural bounds of their consumer’s society, resulting in their reconstruction as localized and heterogeneous variants. Hybridity is a result of indigenization. In appropriating and restoring foreign cultural products within the consumer’s specific local culture, the resulting product will have a mixture of native (being of the consumer’s culture) and non-native (being if the producer’s culture) elements, essentially making it a hybrid of the two cultures. Buonanno uses the spaghetti western as an example of the indigenization of a cultural model and its subsequent hybridity, the American Western genre, within the local tastes of the Italian culture. The resulting spaghetti western contains both American and Italian elements and, thus, is the hybridization of the two cultures. Buonanno also gives an example
This American program was popular here because the islanders appropriated the meaning of the program, simply as entertainment in America, to fit with their idea of bacchanal, which is the essence of their character and local tradition. Buonanno’s paradigm of indigenization challenges the theory of cultural imperialism in many ways. To begin, cultural imperialism assumes that the cultural flows involve domination, control, dependence and, in the end, cultural homogenization. Conversely, indigenization assumes that cultural flows involve asymmetry, interdependence