Culture 's Complex Web Of Meaning

While his coworkers constructed his designs, what hobby did Bernini pursue? Answer Selected Answer: Correct Answer: Writing plays and designing stage sets Writing plays and designing stage sets

Attribute theory is a theory of culture that arose in the late nineteenth century that describes culture “as a set of stable and knowable attributes” (Yon, 2000a, 8). This view of culture suggests that culture is a “complex whole” of these particular attributes: “beliefs, morals, customs, capabilities, and habits that people acquire as members of society (Yon, 2000a, 8). Overall, attribute theory depicts culture as “coherent and predictable” and this means that there are noticeable “patterns of culture” (Yon, 2000a, 8). In contrast, Yon suggests that culture does not fit this ideal view of predictability and culture “is not only a product or a set of attributes that can be claimed and neatly recorded” (Yon, 2000a, 5). Instead, Yon coined

As Ralph Emerson once said, “To be yourself in a world that is trying to make you something else is a great accomplishment.” This brings up the question “who am I?” Before entering University, I always knew who I was as a person. I was like any other seventeen-year-old girl who went to school, and spent time with her family and friends and had all the normal problems one has at that age. I worried about my grades, finding a job, and my future. It was not until I started my first year at the University of Toronto did I begin to question my identity. By writing an ethnography about myself, I will examine, how my ethnicity, gender and age interact with one another to impact my life and my relationship with the world.

On the very first day of the class, Introduction to the Black Experience, we learned that people are defined by their culture and geography. We are also defined by the gaze of others and our own gaze. This realization led me to contemplate what the “black experience” means to me. As a first generation Haitian-American woman at Wellesley College, it has become clearer to me how important the language and culture of parents has been in shaping my identity. I have also begun to think more critically about how my identity as a woman of color separates me from black brothers as well as my white peers at Wellesley.

As we begin to go on an excursion through literature, it is important to understand the concept of what an ethnography is. Ethnography is known to be a descriptive type of work that analyzes culture and customs of individual people. James Clifford has implemented this work into his studies and has influenced many others to do the same. I saw through the books I have read, ethnography makes these books become vivacious for a reader.

Unlike many African Americans who attend church on Sundays, I attend Jummah on Friday’s and attend Eid festivities with Guineans around New York City, as well as carry myself the way Guinean females are raised: with a certain degree of modesty and reservation. In addition, due to my Guinean background, West-African name, and clear, modulated English, I am also an outsider to my neighbors in Brownsville currently, and was teased as a child. My drive and motivation to achieve the American Dream, especially for the sake of parents, in Brownsville, an inner-city African American, is seen as an affront to their perceptions of blackness. Many of my neighbors have confessed that they believe that “I am too good” or “act white.” However, despite this, when I am faced with racism or acts of white supremacy, I feel emboldened to act, where I do not call upon my Guinean identity. In those moments, I especially identify with the African- American identity. I feel a dire responsibility to assist African-American in my community, more so than I feel a responsibility to help my family members in Guinea. In all, when asked about my identity, I respond with, “My parents are from Guinea, but I was born in America.” I am comfortable, and again, proud to identify as a Guinean-American, despite the challenges with identifying as either. This conflict is drawn upon, once again, in Georges Woke Up Laughing where Schiller and Fouron

According to cultural anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, culture is a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” In other words, culture is a concept that social organizations practice in order to explain certain phenomena in nature whether through mythology, rituals, art, music, and language. However, as explained by Ethan Watters in “The Mega Marketing of Depression in Japan,” culture is not permanent, since it has the ability, and more than ever in the present society, to “move across boundaries of race, culture, class, and nation” (Watters 519). In addition, as demonstrated by Oliver Sacks in the articled called “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See,” it is a mistake to think that individuals are bound to behave in a way that culture told them to behave. Instead, individuals are free to create his or her own unique experience of interpreting the world. We might consider the “reality” that we live in to be fiction to the extent that we are willing to use different faculties and analyze what we are witnessing; this gives us the power, as individuals, to think and search for each of us’s unique interpretation of reality. .

For my ethnographic interview, I choose to interview a gentleman who I recently met at the church that I attend. For confidentiality reasons, I will refer to him as James Madison. The main focus of this ethnographic interview is to engage, explore and listen to the interviewee’s personal story. As defined in Culturally Competent Practice, by Doman Lum, cultural identity development theory is influenced at various stages of life. It is part of the growth of knowledge that a person is impacted. Although James Madison is proud that he is from Ghana, Africa, his cultural identity has changed drastically due to the knowledge that has made him grow into “a mature mindset that is like no other person in Ghana” as he describes.

Prince George’s Annual Traditional POW Wow is an event put on by the Prince George Friendship Centre, it takes place at the Carrie Jane Gray Park. It is rich in energy and historical popular culture. Hosting the powwow is a way of ensuring the rich heritage of the aboriginal people is preserved. The word Pow Wow, or pau wau, means a gathering of people coming together to trade. Explorers misinterpreted the ceremony of medicine men dancing, thinking all natives gathered to sing and dance in this manner.

The identities that each person possesses is influenced according to their attitudes, values and beliefs embedded in their culture. When people hear the word cult, the images of satan worshipping, animal sacrifices and evil, pagan rituals automatically come to mind. However, in reality, the majority of cults do not involve these things and are in fact simply a religious system with alternate beliefs. The word though refers to an unorthodox sect whose members distort the original doctrines of the religion. Heaven’s Gate is a cult that is centred in California, founded by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles in 1993. They are a UFO based ‘destructive doomsday’ cult who believed that evil space aliens called ‘Luciferians’ had kept

Throughout the world there are many holidays that connect with people’s culture. Since you live your daily life in the same culture you may not notice that you have certain ways or traditions of doing things. For me Christmas has large role in my culture. It has a specific meaning to me and my family, it helps us connect with one another while enjoying family favorite recipes.

Our entire world is perceived in the lens of culture and influences our construction of reality. The social and cultural construction of our reality is built around our social heritage. Some of the terms I found to be rather interesting were language, cultural shock, social norms, social status, and social roles in correlation to socialization.

Culture is a way of life. It can be defined as a group of people linked by geographical location, ethnicity, gender or age. Culture can be reflected through language, clothing, food, behavior, spirituality and traditions. The behavioral patterns developed through culture are difficult to change.

Culture can be defined in many ways due to the fact that everyone can have their own distinct and traditional beliefs and values. “ Culture is fluid, it is not a static entity which one takes out of the box on occasion. It is with us daily” (Cultural Handout). Someone’s culture is set as the characteristics of the group practices in language, religion, types of food, social traits and habits, and the distinct arts and music. There are a variety of different cultures for example, Western Culture, Eastern Culture, Latin Culture, Middle Eastern Culture, and African Culture. All of these different cultures have their own ideas, values, and individualism, laws that are implied, civil rights, and even technology. In our, “ Culture Handout” culture is defined as the tool of the mind, “ it is an individual’s way seeing and interacting within the world. It encompasses one’s values systems, beliefs, and perceptions of the world around them. Race, socio-economic class gender, sexual orientation, ability, geographic location, age, religion language, etc. all impact the formation of culture, but these various context are not culture” (Cultural Handout).

Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1962) identify over 150 scientific definitions of the concept of culture. Indeed, many authors have tried to define culture and this is why there are so many definitions and that a unique one is hard to find. First of all, Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) assume that culture is a suite of patterns, implicit and explicit, “of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts” (p.47). Later, Hofstede adds that culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1991, p.51). This definition is the most widely accepted one amongst practitioners. For Winthrop (1991), culture is the distinctive models of thoughts, actions and values that composed members of a society or a social group. In other words,