Western Self And Non Western People

.Kellehear, Allan. Ed. (1996) Social Self, Global Culture; An Introduction to Sociological Ideas. Oxford Universi

In Communications Between Cultures individualism and collectivism are described by researchers as “self-orientation versus collective orientation as one of the basic pattern variables that determine human action.” These differences can be found in family life, school, and workplace

Ruth Benedict’s anthropological book, Patterns of Culture explores the dualism of culture and personality. Benedict studies different cultures such as the Zuni tribe and the Dobu Indians. Each culture she finds is so different and distinctive in relation to the norm of our society. Each difference is what makes it unique. Benedict compares the likenesses of culture and individuality, “A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought or action” (46), but note, they are not the same by use of the word, “like.” Benedict is saying that figuratively, cultures are like personalities. Culture and individuality are intertwined and dependent upon each other for survival.

In Storti’s book he defines the concept of self as a scale, individualism being one of the poles and collectivism as the other. Many people fall somewhere in between these two but there are some that are to the extreme of each. Storti defines individualist as “the smallest unit of survival is the individual (Storti, 1999, p. 25). According to Storti (1999) people identify primarily with self, and the needs of the individual are satisfied before those of the group”. The opposite pole is

Individualism is a habit of being self- reliant. A cultural value is a persons desired and preferred way of acting. Every culture has their own cultural values and individualism but whether individualism is their cultural value is up to the person entirely. This could pose a conflict when persuading the wrong culture especially a culture as diverse as the American culture. Poranee Sponsel is a born and raised Thai who is now a professor at a university in Hawaii and gives us the outsider’s perspective of the American culture. In Sponsel’s article “The Young, the Rich, and the Famous: Individualism as an American Cultural value” Sponsel

In “Individual Autonomy and Social Structure”, Dorothy Lee discusses different types of cultures within a given society. Lee states that “the principle of personal autonomy is supported by the cultural framework.”(Lee, 5). Lee examines the differences between the individual autonomy of non-western societies and the autonomy of western societies in order to better the society we live in. The reading gave Lee’s point of view on how different societies deal with their conflicts. The conflict between the social structure in western society and individual autonomy is the key social problem that Lee is addressing. Individual autonomy is understood by one’s capacity to decide for them self, to be one’s own person, and the ability to determine their own actions. Individual autonomy is a large principle in western society, as individuals are free to make their own decisions, without being restricted by societies norms. In the article, Lee describes that personal autonomy can lead to lawlessness and chaos in our western culture. Dorothy Lee talks about individual autonomy and the social structure in western culture, and how it is very difficult to comply these two areas in order for them to work in accordance to one another.

Western culture is and has been influenced by the values and norms of the majorities dominant ideologies. The ruling class determines the acceptance of discourse and interaction within given settings. This creates a sense of difficulty for minority groups whose customs, values, and norms are not acclimated to the ideologies of the dominant actants. To obtain acceptance within a foreign culture or society, the minority are requested to adapt and adhere to the new set of values. In the brief video with Seth Myers and Jon Snow, it is apparent that the struggle to conform to cultural changes is very difficult for minority groups. Furthermore, the video implies that Western culture places importance on the use of superficial discourse that neither holds significance to the topics of communication or includes overly personalized information. Instead, Western culture shows a fascination with "over the top" drama and exaggerated story telling.

Culture is defined by a construction of one's world-view, and it is transmitted by individuals and collectives through socialization and enculturation (Pederson & Ivey, 13). It contains values, beliefs, language, and perception. In studying cultural differences among members of distinct national, ethnic groups researcher have examined the concept of collectivism and individualism. People form individualistic cultures tend to view themselves as unique entities and independent form one another (Coon & Kemmelmeier, 348)

I have to say that most if not all of the western governments are reactionary due to the nature of the people under and in that government. I think that the nature of its people being self centered and unwilling to give up convenience for safety will always result in that governments hands being tied. In order for the US to take a pro active roll and implement real change, they will have to pass certain requirements and pass those on to an unwilling public. Unless we as a collective whole change our mindset and thought process regarding our way of life, true change will not happen. As soon as the “I” mentality is changed to the “WE” mentality a more proactive way of living will follow. Its sad to see an overwhelming amount of individuals

Triandis ( 1972 in Pedersen 1994) focused on the culture ‘in our heads’ , which is composed of the shared experiences and knowledge of a self-perpetuating and continuous human group, which is part and parcel of the personal reality. Triandis, Bontemplo, Leung & Hui (1990 cited in Pedersen 1994) distinguished between demographic, cultural and personal constructs. Cultural constructs they identified as being shared by group of people, who live in the same geographical location at the same time, speak the same dialect and shared the same norms, roles, values and ways to describe experience. Demographic constructs deal with the same topics, but when shared by a particular demographic group within a culture, such as men and women, young and old. Personal constructs belong to another category of individual differences and cannot be meaningfully interpreted with references to the cultural and demographic membership. Each of the three constructs are closely related with the others, but they should be examined independently. Counselling in this case should take into account cultural and demographic differences, but work on a personal level. Contrary to this view stands Hofstede( 1986, 1992 cited in Pedersen 1996) who described three factors or dimensions that constitute and influence culture. The first concept is individualism-collectivism- a person experiences himself as a self-contained unique entity, striving to attain his or her own goals and to realize his or her

It cannot be argued that there are obvious contradictions between archaeological accounts of the past and Indigenous accounts. However, we cannot have one without the other because these two points of view provide us with a more in-depth and thorough understanding of the past, present, and future. For example, Nicholas and Markey (2014) state that Aboriginal medicine was once viewed as unscientific, but now it is valued in the search for new drugs (Nicholas & Markey 2014, 300).

Based off of the results from completed researches, there are a couple hypotheses that could be used. One of the hypotheses would be that there would be no real linkage between races in order to judge attractiveness. The other hypothesis would be that people would find their own race more attractive than other races. Since there were various findings in how race would affect attractiveness, going in more depth within the issue would be useful, which is how we then came up with our experiment of; if western faces or non-western faces would be rated more attractive in a multi-cultural society.

Globalization is far reaching in this day and age. Globalization is the worldwide flow of goods, services, money, people, information, and culture. It leads to a greater interdependence and mutual awareness among the people of the world (Tischler, 2011, 2007, p. 430). One non-Western culture that has been impacted by globalization is China. An example of the impact of globalization on China is their economy. Since joining the World Trade Organization, China has transformed from a culture that relied on economic self-sufficiency and shunned the thought of globalization to an economy that is progressively more open to trade and foreign investment.

A. J. Polyzoides, an honorary senior lecturer at Birmingham University, states: “The western world has adopted and developed their discoveries throughout the centuries.” (Polyzoides 1). As the Hellenistic society shifted away from the Classical ideals of perfectionism and idolization of the elites and gods in sculpture, artists began to be fixated on illustrating imperfection of a variety of individuals faced with the ruthless authenticity of their emotional struggles. Whereas, Classical architecture focused on dedicating massive structures to the gods to emphasize their divinity, but Hellenistic architecture used advanced technology to exemplify Alexander the Great’s magnificence. Thus, differences in the architecture can be seen in the sophisticated town of Alexandria with structures such as the lighthouse that show how Alexander the Great influenced town planning that was centralized on the creation of a superior city, likewise, The Altar at Pergamon expresses the loss of focus on the divine through unique sculptural techniques. Change can also be seen in the sculptures of The Boxer and The Old Market Woman as they are depicted to be imperfectly individualistic and in emotional distress.

Expanding on that, a person is immeresed in his/her culture since birth, and has no choice but to adopt the values necessary to survive. An individualistic community encourages a person to make his/her own choices; moreover, one would be less concerned about the “we” and more concerned about the “I”. This lowers conformity levels, because each person is willing to do what he/she wants and is more concerned about self-surival than harmony in the community. A strength of this study could be participant variability because it eliminates the possibility of this behavior only being limited to one type of person/community. Accordingly, a limitation could be the lack of ecological validity (one will not be asked to identify the length of a line in real life), and the multitude of confounding variables including the time and place, which could influence the results. Overall, the study demonstrates how individualism affects behavior, since a person who demonstrates indivdualistic behavior would exhibit less conformity, as seen above.