Understanding Other Cultures (17-21 Nov)

  • MONDAY 17 NOVEMBER : Continuing to research another culture.

    • Rubric for grading is attached.
    • Your presentation may take any form (spoken, visual, film, etc.) and should take about 10 minutes.  Longer presentations may need to be 'shortened' in class, in order for the class to hear all presentations.
    • Click here for ideas: Multicultural 'World Cup for Kids' blogs on World Cup countries

    Cultural universals.  These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively.  No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits.  Examples of such "human cultural" traits include:

     1.  

    communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences

     2.

    using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)

     3.

    classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer to
    them (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)

     4.

    raising children in some sort of family setting

     5.

    having a division of labor  based on gender (e.g., men's work versus women's work)

     6.

    having a concept of privacy

     8.

    distinguishing between good and bad behavior

     9.

    having some sort of body ornamentation

    10.

    making jokes and playing games

    11.

    having art

    12.

    having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions

    While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them.  For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language.  


    Culture and Society

    Culture and society are not the same thing.  While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. 

    People are not the only animals that have societies.  Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies.  In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other.  People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.

    While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society.  Cultures are not the product of lone individuals.  They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other.  Cultural patterns such as language, traditions, and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people.  

    Work on developing your presentation.