Culture In Karen Ho's Biographies Of Hegemony

Especially in today’s world, instead of using force to dominate people, culture surmounts, using things, such as advertisements, to hook and reel a person in without them being aware. Culture is important because it gives rise to conformity and travels away from individuality and uniqueness. This, in turn, constitutes the formation of interests, values, appearance, and lifestyles a certain group of people hold based on their status. To introduce a group, Karen Ho, a Princeton graduate and author of Biographies of Hegemony, reveals that status ultimately translates into entitlement as shown with Ivy League colleges, such as Princeton, where students are basically hand-given high-paying jobs, like investment banking due to their prestigious ranking.

Because citizens are presented with this “bow down-or-die” sort of culture, they must assimilate undesirable lifestyles and personalities due to the strict rules imposed on them; something that people in America never have to think twice about dealing with. Hegemony may be necessary to maintain the social structure within a given region; However, because aspects of hegemony are so imperceptible, most people oftentimes succumb to it without further exploring their other options of a potentially happier lifestyle.

In Reading Lolita in Tehran and Biographies of Hegemony, hegemony exerts a predominant influence that is exercised by a person or group in power. In Ho’s essay, Ivy League schools such as Princeton and Harvard, are assigned a leadership role, in which they breed their students to become the best and smartest in the country. Associations, such as investment banking, are able to take advantage and obtain power over these students through their ability to use hegemony in their favor. For example, Ho

While some commercials may seem like they are trying too hard and essentially forcing consumers to buy their product, most advertisements have the same approach, hegemony. Instead of straight out saying “buy my product or we will hunt you down”, instead, companies will take their audience into consideration and move forward by attracting that specific group. Wall Street, for example, targets undergraduates because they can be easily persuaded and manipulated as most of them are still assimilating into the transition from high school to college; So, everything is new and open to interpretation. By exposing students to the lavishness and extravagance of an investment banker’s lifestyle, investment bankers can hook students and leave them yearning for more, as “they quickly become used to the respect, status, and impressive nods from peers” (Ho 179). Like getting addicted to a drug, these students are dependent on inclusion of investment banking when exposed. Because this is so ubiquitous, it is hard to notice. It is like the breathing, it is only when a person directs their attention to it that they start noticing it. This can be related to hegemony, it plays a role in a person’s daily life, but it is only when something goes wrong that a person will start investigating what went wrong. This is seen in Reading Lolita in Tehran, where Nafisi and a group of her