Experiencing Cultural Cringe in the Global South Through Social Media Cultural Assimilation.

For a person living in the Global South, a variety of foreign influences shape everyday experience. Given this perspective, we ask, "how is foreign culture assimilated by consumers in the Global South?" We collected data from urban Pakistani informants to empirically examine how these consumers absorb elements of foreign culture while making lifestyle choices. Our informants tell us a medley of different consumer experiences that point towards a spectrum of cultural heterogeneity. We thematize these stories in terms of widespread acceptance and cautious rejection depending on socio-historic backdrops of our informants. Our study has implications of advancing current theoretical offerings by unveiling the complexities of Global South consumer experiences that cannot be explained by individual theories relating to globalization, consumer acculturation, or postcolonial, but perhaps need to partially use existing theoretics to help up better understand assimilation in Global South contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]