This week we were asked to talk to a few different people who may be in some ways culturally different from you.
I not only talked to a few different people, but I also made a post on face book to see if I could get many different perspectives. One of the people I talked with was a young girl who is in College. The second was a friend of mine who is from India, and then I also spoke to my brother. I feel that this gave me a wide base of differences.
Overall I feel that most did a great job explaining what culture is:
“Culture is the behaviors, beliefs, objects, and characteristics of a particular social group”
“Culture is history and tradition, what you do because your family, your neighborhood, your city, state, country does to celebrate and as a matter of day to day living.”
“Culture is set of values, beliefs and traditions”
My friend Priya mentioned that in India part of their culture is to touch the feet of older people as a way of expressing respect.
Here are the explanations of diversity:
“Diversity is the extent to which we allow the culture of others into our lives”
“Diversity is embracing everyone regardless their caste, color and religion”
“Diversity is the understanding that everyone of us is an individual, although we may be in the same social groups. We have differences in race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, class, age, physical abilities, politics, etc.”
For the most part I was happy with the fact that my friends could identify things that are related to deep culture: values, traditions, beliefs, as well as culture being related to the idea of characteristics of a certain group of people. These attributes are deep culture, while looking at things such as foods and artifacts may be surface culture.
In terms of diversity, each of my friends had a little bit of a different definition. Per the dictionary one word to describe diversity is variety. So, while some may feel that diversity is an action, like taking differences into consideration, it can basically mean variety.
As I listened to my friends describe these two concepts to me it was clear that we all have our own perspective of what the things mean to us. In a way, I was both happy and surprised that when asked about culture the focus was not place on surface culture. I was also very surprised to the extent that people view diversity. So how has this influenced my thinking? It is a great reminder that we are all different and may have different viewpoints as well as definitions about certain words and how they fit into our life.