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In Western popular culture, Doritos snacks present a skewed representation of South Asian culture using binary oppositions, gender roles, and class hierarchies that exists between both cultures. Through the use of technology, popular culture depicts western culture’s stereotypical view of the traditions found in South Asia. The commercial illustrates how institutions of dominant systems control and manipulate consumers to purchase cultural products. Higher class status individuals enforce power paradigms to continually reinforce dominant ideologies upon those of lower class. By exercising agency, the power lacking individuals are able to challenge Western culture ideologies. The Western society has a misunderstood notion of the marriage customs in South Asian cultures and popular culture emphasizes that Doritos provides you with the confidence to break down societal barriers.
The Doritos commercials use binary opposition to explain the hierarchical structure that exists between the Western and South Asian cultures. The term binary opposition helps to define how both cultures are “examples of symmetrically opposed pairs, which, although mutually exclusive, generate meaning through their difference” (Veldstra and Walter 309). In the Western culture, love marriages are normative and there is “a relation of dominance in which” arranged marriages are “characterized by difference or lack- a quality of ‘not-quite-ness’” (O’Brien and Szeman 79). The commercials identify authoritative love marriages as the powerful centres, where deviations like arranged marriages are ridiculed through the use of exotic music and scenery. The Western culture possesses dominant ideologies which are highlighted through the consumption of the profit generating cultural product. The groom-to-be derives pleasure from consuming the Doritos product regardless of how it reinforces the dominant Western culture power relations. The commercial illustrates that with a bite into the Doritos...