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.