Post #2

            So far with the reading of the textbook by Holliday, I like the stories, or examples, that the authors share and how each one is then broken down to show what point is trying to be made. Reading the stories helps me better understand the concepts that the authors are trying to make. The story, and the explanation, at the beginning of the assigned reading were interesting to me. Zhang said that his behavior in class was because of the Confucianism in China, but the other Chinese student told the American that it wasn’t practiced much anymore. The explanation of the story states that Zhang blaming his behavior on Confucianism could just be a reaction to him trying to deal with the different classroom rules that he was experiencing. The way that Zhang talks about this part of Chinese culture shows how it is part of his cultural identity, but the other Chinese student demonstrates how Confucianism is not a part of his cultural identity. A point that was made at the end of the explanation of the story that I thought was important was the idea that in order to take people from different backgrounds seriously, communicators need to take everything they do and say seriously.

            When people communicate, they are exchanging information about their cultural identity, whether intentionally or unintentionally. An example to demonstrate someone unintentionally exchanging information about their cultural identity is the story about the group of girls on the bus. The girls used words that only their group, or “community,” would understand, kind of like a secret language or code. The girls’ use of the “secret language” demonstrates how it is part of their cultural identity. I use a “secret language” with my friends, probably like most people do. I think that it is fun to do and makes me and my friends laugh every time we use our own abbreviations or made up words, and because no one knows what or who we’re talking about. 

Later in the reading is a story about a man who assumed his neighbors we Amish just because of how they looked, dressed, and because they don’t have a television. He then later found out that they do watch television. This example demonstrates how the essentialist view of culture is based on stereotypes (prescription) and the non-essentialist view is based on observation (description). The behavior of the American student, Janet, from the earlier story shows how someone can demonstrate both views of culture.

The advertisements in section B.2 were very surprising to me, especially the “Angel and Devil” advertisement. I understand how the photographer and the company were trying to create an image with an ambiguous meaning but I still can’t believe that this was appropriate. Why would the African American child want to be in an ad like that? Today, there are so many advertisements and commercials that show several different races, like the picture with the three children sticking out their tongues. Advertisers do this so that they can depict an image that appeals to all parts of the world, but I think they make it way to obvious. All of the different skin colors and races that are depicted in commercials, ads, and billboards are all very over exaggerated. When the different races are shown, the people appear to be one hundred percent one race. They don’t show people who are mixes of more than one race.

In my opinion the chapter by Pavlenko was very difficult to read and understand. The understanding that I took from it was that the author is proposing that in order to understand identities, we need to look at the past to see how these identities were socially discussed. I’m not sure I grasped the entire concept that the author was trying to communicate to his readers.

Post #1: The many views of culture

Pages 3-5 and 63-75 in the textbook by Holliday describe the different perspectives, or points of view, that people take on culture. Under the section titled “Scrutinizing Culture Speak,” the author describes the idea of culture being spoken of in the plural form as if cultures exist together, or side by side, and that each person indentifies with only one culture. The extract by Baumann gives an example as to how this view of cultures fitting into separate “packages” is not always true. The majority of people he met in Britain identified themselves as being members of more than one community. An example that Baumann uses to describe this idea is that a member of the Muslim community could act according to the Muslim beliefs but on the other hand is also able to be a member of the Pakistani community and go against other Muslims.

These sections of the book focus a lot on the two different views of culture: essentialist and non-essentialist which we began to discuss in class. On pages 3-5 there is a chart that describes in depth the differences between the two views. Most people tend to take the essentialist view towards culture. They tend to believe that “cultures are coincidental with countries, regions, and continents” (72). The essentialist view also demonstrates an onion skin relationship since smaller topics in the culture are seen as subsets to the overall culture. This view of culture can be problematic since with this idea, the culture that people live in defines people’s behavior instead of it being defined by the individual themselves. Something that I never really thought about until reading was that we as Americans, or the west, are not the only ones that tend to have an essentialist view towards culture; other parts of the word do as well. People with a non-essentialist view of culture do not see culture as a “geographical place which can be visited,” but see it more as a social force (73). I like the way that the author defined the non-essentialist view as the idea that each culture is not a specific location around the world, but is rather mixed in all over the place. You technically don’t need to travel to a certain country or continent in order to experience a different culture. After learning the differences between the two views, I feel that like many other people, I too have an essentialist view of culture. But I now see that you are able to experience different cultures without traveling somewhere else since every individual can define themselves by more than one culture no matter where they are living. 

Chapter 2 by Kumaravadivelu also discusses culture. I felt like the author made a lot of interesting points in this chapter. It is said that culture will be the source of many future conflicts. Recent examples of cultural conflicts include 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the text, the word ‘culture’ is said to be “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English dictionary” (9). This is a statement I completely agree with since it was difficult to come up with a definition for ‘culture’ in class and everyone defined it as including something different. The text says that there is no agreement on what ‘culture’ really is. I found the section about the connection between culture and language to be interesting as well. The Sapir Whorf hypothesis states that people who speak different languages “pay attention to different aspects of reality” (19). Because of languages having different grammar, people’s observations differ. The hypothesis says that people speak differently because they think differently, and vise versa. In the closing paragraph of the chapter, the author states that cultures are hybrids because even though they all have unique features, they are interconnected with one another. I think that defining each culture as a hybrid is a good way to describe it since there are many similarities, and obviously many differences, amongst all cultures.  

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Hi, my name is Amanda Tennis.