Post Week One & Two: 1-30-11
Readings: Holliday (3-5) (63-75), Kumara. Chapter 2
While reading through Holliday’s writing as well as participating in our class lecture, I have a better understanding on what culture is. Culture is almost indefinable in the sense that it has so many wide aspects and entities. Two views on culture that are very interesting are the essentialist and non-essentialist views. “A culture is a physical entity, as though it is a place, which people can visit…” (essentialist view) “Culture is a social force which is evident where it is significant…” (non-essentialist view) (Holliday p. 3). It seems to me, that one emphasizes the “human” aspect more than the other. The non-essentialist view seems to focus more on the human aspect, that culture is a complex society with specific values and can be characterized by a discourse as much as by a language. The non-essentialist view also states that culture can “flow, change, intermingle, and cut across and through each other.”
I agree with this very much. In a simple sense, we can observe this in any classroom. The classroom can be thought of as a vessel, the vessel contains many different cultures, being the people. The people all bring their own cultures into the vessel and in order to communicate, learn and grow we must allow our cultures to mix and take and give information to each other that we may learn from our cultures. The non-essentialist view on culture does not group together cultures just by regions, I believe. They group cultures and even sub-cultures on more in depth characteristics. I find this extremely interesting and hope to further study this view and the phenomenon that is “culture.”
While reading the sections in Holliday on pages 63-75, I read about “culturespeak” for the first time. I believe it is important for anyone, especially teachers, to be aware on how we speak about cultures. Small words like in the reading, “multicultural inferno,” can have a negative connotation. These types of negative connotations portray culture in a bad light. When in fact, everyone belongs to their own culture, if not many cultures. Teachers have their own culture; subsets of students have their own cultures, like the athletes, artists, LGBTQ, and student council members. Small words can ostracize a group in a situation. So I believe the first part of these sections is just calling for the readers so be more culturally sensitive because whether we realize it or not, there are so many cultures around us at a given time that we might say the wrong thing without even realizing. This proves that anything we say can be viewed as rhetoric, thus giving it the capability to be read in many different ways.
Also in this section, they describe culture in two different categories again. This time the categories are standard and complex. In the standard view, “culture is a complex set of shared beliefs, values, and concepts which enables a group to make sense of its life which provides it with directions for how to live.” What I take from reading about the standard view is that when a person takes on the beliefs and values and makes it their own, their identity, they are part of that culture. By taking on these beliefs and traditions, the people become who they are. The culture forms and shapes them. The “penetration” of culture produces their distinctive capabilities and characteristics: mentally, physically, and socially.
The complex view, I believe is just how it sounds. It is more complex in the sense that the members have conflicting beliefs and rules that are often mixed together. This could be because rules require interpretation, and interpretation can be learned culturally, but still vary depending on the specific person.
All and all, these readings are very interesting but dense at the same time. It takes quite a bit of concentration to not only get through them but to also comprehend and analyze them. I hope that throughout this semester I become more aware culturally as well as be able to make my own statements on culture and critically analyze readings on it.
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