"The fact is that you can never tell who someone is or where their ancestors came from just by looking at them. Identity is complex.Its roots lie beneath the surface. It's a product of events that we don't know about ourselves." Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
In our first reading of the semester Intercultural Communication Competence, we learn about different metaphors used to describe the mixing of different cultures. The begins with a focus on the United States and how cultures came together. A common metaphor used for this meshing of cultures is to call America the melting pot. The reading continues to explain that this metaphor sets up America to be like a giant container that withstands extreme heat and is able to "melt, mix and ultimately fuse together metals or other substances." The next page of this reading turns the table and explains the inaccuracy of the melting pot metaphor.
"Dynamic as the melting pot metaphor has been in the United States, it has never been an accurate description.The tendency for diverse cultures to melt together and assimilate their unique heritages into a single cultural entity has never really existed. Rather, the many cultural groups within the United States have continuously adapted to one another as they have accommodated and perhaps adopted some of the practices and preferences of other groups while maintaining their own unique and distinctive heritages."
This quote directly from the reading, explains how cultures, rather than mixing, adapt and sometimes adopt the practices of other groups. The reading then goes on to explain some other metaphors are perhaps better suited for the meshing of cultures in America. One of those metaphors is the tributaries metaphor.
This metaphor states that "America, according to this image, is like a huge cultural watershed, providing numerous paths in which the many tributary cultures can flow. The tributaries maintain their unique identities as they surge toward their common destination."
In our second reading Corporate Web Design, we look at how cultures mix on the web. One thing that was stated at the beginning of the reading was that English is currently the dominant language on the internet. While I had never thought otherwise, I learned that other languages are beginning to rise in dominance on the web. Among those languages German, Chinese, Japanese, and Slavic are on the rise.
This article states that "Culture can be defined as a shared set of values that influence societal perceptions, attitudes, preferences, and responses." We often can agree that this is true of groups of people as a whole; however, I believe this also clearly points out that, based on this statement, many different "cultural" groups can be found within a single culture.
Just looking at America, we could agree that for the most part, we are a single culture based on the common laws that we recognize. But if we look closer at the values that are specific to different groups of people, we see that a culture as a whole is also divided into different cultures.
The Corporate Web Design reading soon breaks into different terms that are related to culture and the web. One of those terms was 'power distance'. Power distance defined by the reading is "the extent to which less powerful members of a society accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. In large power distance cultures, there are strong dependency relationships between parents and children, bosses and subordinates, professors and students. In small power distance cultures, children are raised to be independent at a young age."
While we might not use this term in our everyday language, most people could probably recognize this power structure in our lives. Most people have dealt closely with a societal power that so-to-speak "rules over us." It can be said of most individuals that during the first part of their lives, the role of child, subordinate, or student apply directly to their lives. While oftentimes the later part of an individual's life takes on the role of either parent, boss, or professor. Sometimes all three of those upper-level roles can apply to a single being.
No comments:
Post a Comment