Culture Shock

The readings for this week can definitely be circled around the question of how can we determine if (or when) a culture change is either positive or negative. I would consider that trying to label which culture has had a positive or negative experience all depends on their certain situation and the affects that have occurred due to that situation. We can’t assume that all culture changes only either have a positive or negative effect on the culture because the outcome could be different for each different type of society that is being affected by globalization or a strict culture change. There are many different types of cultures that have been affected by modernization or some sort of culture shock, yet they all have had different kinds of responses to it. What makes the Gebusi so different in this scenario is that instead of being the kind of culture that is forced to change, they willingly change their culture and way of running their society in order to “fit in” and be noticed by the western culture. They start to sell their stuff in the markets for less money in hopes that the white people will see them in a different light, the women work more and are paid less, they just completely lose their previous cultural significance and give up on anything that they’ve previously considered to be a part of their culture. Normally, it’s the western culture that forces itself onto other tribes or cultures that they consider to be in need of help or in need of a culture change, but the weird thing about the Gebusi is that they willingly are giving up their culture in order to fit in with the big dogs and are trying to prove that they can be a part of the western culture as well. This kind of situation makes you wonder if a culture is assimilating to another culture, then how can we not justify globalization?


This type of situation makes us second guess if globalization and a forced culture change could be considered positive or negative if the culture that is changing is fully accepting the consequences of the culture shift? The Gebusi are willingly doing this and the affects of the culture change are taken into their own hands and they deal with it because they just want to fit in and be part of a culture that is considered to be better in some people’s eyes. When considering the question how can we determine when or if a culture change is positive or negative, we can see from this example that it all depends on the situation and how the culture takes the drastic change. We can never pre-determine how the affects will take place or what will happen to the assimilated culture, but we can assume that the culture change will definitely affect it somehow. There are just as many cases of negative effects from culture change as there are positive. It all comes down to how the culture will take the change and what they do in reaction to globalization.

Changing the World?

How can we make sense of changing the world? Do we start with reading “365 ways that YOU can change the world”? Do we start with separating our trash? Buying clothes that weren’t made in a sweatshop? These are the kinds of things that come to mind when we think about ‘changing the world’ yet we never really do anything too extreme. Today is Earth Day and it’s great that we have a day to celebrate the Earth and take to remember that we need to take care of it, but what about “Bolivian Cocaine Abuse Awareness Day?” Now that’s a day that I don’t think will be celebrated any time soon. Our nation takes time to appreciate the big picture, but in order to get to the next page that is clearer and better we need to start looking at the smaller details that make our world such a confusing and unbalanced place to live. I’m not saying that everyone on this planet doesn’t take time to appreciate each other or just writes off anything that is going on in the world, because there are some people that dedicate their lives to justice and winning equality for all. But, I am saying that most of us know what’s going on yet don’t do anything about it. I am guilty of that crime. When reading the article about the people who are getting pushed out of their culture just for trying to get by and pay for food and medicine, it made me realize how much I take for granted in my life. It’s hard to change the world when you’re only a sophomore at a private college in north east Iowa, but I would like to think that one day I could do something to help others.

We’ve always been asked growing up “how can you make a difference” and been told it’s easy as 1, 2, 3 to help someone in need and to help our culture as a whole. When talking about in class how a whole culture can be pushed out and the world culture be put in its place, it was interesting to see how often that happens and how blind our culture makes us to it. Sure we have the news, but when people watch it they usually just say “oh that’s awful” and then move on to making dinner in the kitchen. IT’s hard to be connected to people that are so far away and it makes it even more difficult when we can’t even comprehend their situation and what they’re going through.


To change the world is a difficult task to manage. We ask this at a beauty pageant to see if the woman who is competing is balanced in beauty, brains and body but their answers aren’t quite what we’re looking for. How can we make sense of changing the world? I don’t by any means have the definite answer to that question, but when thinking about the readings for this week, our nation and even our whole entire globe needs to take into consideration the culture that we’re pushing out while we’re trying to push something completely different in. Without culture, people lose who they are and are forced to become something they’re not. Who would want that? People try to survive and they try to thrive by being who they are and doing what they need to do in order to feed their families. With us pushing everything out of the way, it makes it difficult for the existing culture to survive and extinguishes any chance of hope.

Rituals

For this week’s readings, it’s been interesting to see how far some people will go in order to secure a “good day” or a “winning game”. The idea that people will go so far as to do the same thing at every game, makes you think that they live in a constant “Groundhog’s Day” where everything is the same and if there’s one slip up than the whole day will go down the drain. I know I’ve been faulted into doing the same thing because our culture works well with comfortable and will do anything the same again in order to reach that peak of ‘comfortableness’ if you will. As one article described, when people see how some of their reactions create a good outcome, they will continue to do that action until the outcome doesn’t turn out the way they wanted. I know as a performer, I have some rituals that I do in order to make me feel comfortable before I go out in front of an audience. I make sure not to wash my hands too close to performance time just because I feel like it washes off something that could help my performance. It sounds a little crazy now that I’m writing it out, but to me, it helps me get in the mind set of knowing that I have a performance to do and I need to do it well. From looking at things this week, I’ve realized that there are tons of rituals that go on everyday and most of them aren’t even accounted for. Sure Baseball is a great example of an American televised sport that has rituals left and right, but there are many other examples where rituals are used. This is where the idea of the rabbit’s foot and in the general, ‘lucky charm’ come into effect.

As Bradd Shore wrote in his article, “Rituals, on the other hand, bring the shared framework of forms and rules forward into consciousness… Often, however, a ritual is assumed to be more important than everyday behavior”, and that is definitely so. Rituals are more for the individual than they are for a group of people. Rituals are different for each person and everyone does theirs differently than everyone else. We now even have products called “Everyday Rituals” by Aveda that assure great hair every time you use them. Our culture is obsessed with rituals and the end products that result when they go well. The one thing I thought was funny though when reading about how baseball players will change their rituals when the last one doesn’t go so well was the fact that if one their ritual doesn’t work one time they will find a new one all of a sudden. In our culture, if things don’t go our way, we first blame something else for our misfortune and then after everything else has been crossed out, we blame ourselves. Rituals are a way of putting off the process of blaming ourselves in the end. Sure they may help us win a game, or perform well, but in the end we have to see that we must work hard at our paths in order to make the destination a little more worthwhile.

Love and Marriage(?)

Love and Marriage. This is the topic that has been circling the class this week. Learning about different cultures and their different ideas of marriage has truly been an interesting journey to set upon. Growing up in the American culture, I learned that when a person falls in love they get married, move away from their parents, buy a house and start a family; this is what we call the “American dream”. Our goal is to move away from our loved ones and start living independently so that we can be considered normal Americans that don’t live with their parents until they’re thirty or so. To us this is a great thing; to become independent and move away from our old lives so that we can pursue our own dreams and aspirations. But what about the family left behind? Many other cultures take this into consideration and have been using marriage as a way to keep the family close and property in each other’s hands.

The readings this week have talked about many different styles of marriages and what other cultures consider to be a good marriage. Some involve a woman marrying into a family of brothers in order to keep property within the family and avoid confrontation when having to divide lands; other marriages are arranged by the parents who are more experienced in the ways of love and matching up couples. The more I read what other cultures believe is the way to go for marriage, really made me rethink what our culture calls a typical marriage. Step 1: Find love. Our culture is constantly saying (even without knowing) that in order to live a happy life, you have to find that “one “person to be with and live the rest of your life with that person. If you don’t find someone to share your life’s experiences with, then you are either called a spinster or are just truly considered an outsider within your community. Step 2: Get married and move away. This is an interesting step because when learning about other cultures this week, they get married in order to make the family closer quite literally in some cases. Families move into each other’s houses in order to keep each other safe, keep themselves company, and to be able to share the workload. I’m sure my mother wouldn’t mind having a little more help around the house these days, and as they say, many hands make light work!

Since I already mixed step 3 (start your own life) with step 2, this just leaves me time to ponder about how our society decided to deal with marriage? I know there are many people out there who are truly against the idea of marriage and all that is has to offer (or not offer), but to some, marriage is the dream they always wish to grab. To me, marriage is about love and finding that someone special but it also has to be about communication and family. Of course I think this because I’ve been raised in a culture where love is the underlying factor when deciding to get married, but in other cultures this could seem completely mad. The basic idea of this week was to open our eyes to the idea of marriage and see how other cultures treat marriage and the bond between people (or land). Marriage is what you make it, whether it’s for family or sustainability, or just to have that extra support when you go home after a long day, marriage is something that each culture takes into consideration when planning out their future and their children’s future.

Learning through Culture

In our society, culture is established birth when the doctor says, “It’s a _____”. We are told that a child has to be either (a) or (b) in order to leave the hospital and start living to their culture’s expectations. This weeks readings have talked about how gender is different in every culture and that we categorize ‘male’ and ‘female’ differently. The ideas and realizations of gender that we come to understand start at a very early age. When watching the commercial from Fischer Price I was again amazed at how different the narrator and the children acted towards each separate toy. The boys were very aggressive and wanted to continue moving the cars and racing as fast as they could while the narrator was also speaking in a more aggressive tone. When the panned over to the girl, the music changed to a less intense theme and more of a fairy like tune. It was such a dramatic change that it made me ask, “wait… did that really happen?”, and sure enough it did. Our culture has become so caught in the idea that gender can only fit into these two categories and if you’re not part of either of them, than you’re either cast out or forced to change.

In order to get a different idea of gender, I just simply typed in ‘gender’ on youtube. I got a whole array of videos but one was of a man interviewing little children on what they think gender is. The children (boys and girls) agreed that boys have to dress like boys, and girls have to dress like girls and if either of them switched clothes than that “wouldn’t be okay”. We aren’t able to allow gender stereotypes to be reserved because we just don’t feel alright with it; in order to feel comfortable with someone, we have to put them in one category first and then go from there. The fact that we have to put someone into a category in order to be able to communicate with him or her on some level is ridiculous in itself, or the fact that we have to put ourselves in a category in order to do anything in society is also a cultural idea. We put these gender forms into people’s minds at such a young age because that’s what is considered ‘normal’ in our society to do. At a young age I remember being told to wear more dresses or hear the saying “little girls don’t behave like that “ ( I was a rambunctious child), and my idea of gender was constructed over and over again. Growing up watching my sister’s put on make-up and doing their hair made me think that this must be what “girls” do and that I was only allowed to do things in the ‘girl’ category. My culture supported the idea that this what normal girls and boys do and if you don’t match up to your gender then you have to change.

It’s amazing to see how much our idea of gender affects everyone in his or her lives everyday. We see it when younger children play with one another and the girls play with dolls while the boys play with action figures or mud because that’s more ‘boy’ like. In considering the question, “how do humans learn culture”, it can be seen that humans learn culture by being taught at a young age what their gender is and how their culture treats that gender. What would happen if people stop caring about gender and just accept what people feel like and take time to understand that individual? We try too hard to put people into categories that we forget how those categories started in the first place.

The Reaction of Ethnography

This week has been a total look into the lives of another woman, and a completely different lifestyle. When reading from the book, “Nisa”, it was amazing how open she was to sharing her culture with a complete stranger and how detailed she was when describing her home life. I could actually picture, word for word, what was happening whether it was her describing herself gathering nuts or the telling of how she gave birth. One thing that truly blew my mind was the fact that she gave birth by herself every time. If I ever tried to do that today, my mother would be furious and probably would force herself to be there. It reminded me of something that was discussed in my Women and Gender class last semester. We were talking about women giving birth and how that in the American society, a woman gives birth when it’s convenient for the doctor, or the doctor makes it convenient by inducing labor. The fact that the chairs or tables I suppose you can call them that women sit on is placed so that whoever the Doctor is, they have control of the woman giving birth. I understand that they are there in order to deal with any complications that might arise, but in many places, women give birth in many different ways; one way is by standing up and using gravity to do the work! Our culture has placed so much reliance (and money) to the idea that a woman must give birth in a hospital surrounding by medical strangers there to assist her, but to some extent, we don’t need all that in order for a woman to have a successful birth.


One thing that I’ve continuously thought though throughout this whole process is realizing how equal, or at least as equal as one could describe, the sexes are and how little of a gap there is between the roles of a female and male. Sure, the male is hunter, but the woman is there also to gather berries and take care of the children. They work together to raise a family and try to have a successful family life. Shostak’s work has also shown how close the women are in each tribe. Although they may bicker about food or accuse people of affairs, they are generally open to each other and share everything with each other. In order to survive you need to have a close connection with someone else or another group of people who will always be there to listen and try to understand what you’re going through.

Shostak’s work is a big leap into understanding different cultures and shows what can be accomplished with the effort to getting to know another human being in a different setting. In considering the question “what can ethnography tell us about others and about ourselves?”, well, I think a huge consideration is realizing how different we all are yet how important it is to understand our differences. When watching the video, it was clear to see the differences from what their tribe was like before ‘the white people came’ and how they were affected afterwards. They were nomadic and foraged for food and were able to travel at any point in time, but then they were suddenly placed in one spot with a limiting amount of space to travel and to hunt; their whole world had changed. In watching that video, I learned how fascinating it can be to watch another group of people live. Today we try to do that with reality shows such as “the Real World”, but they are hardly a view into what a completely different tribe of people are like. I don't understand completely what everyone in different parts of the world go through, but after this week, I have some idea that if I took time to understand and learn from them than that would teach me so much more about myself and my culture.

What is Culture?

Throughout this week and with the readings, we’ve been talking about the basis of culture; what it is, where can we see it and how do other cultures evolve. We’ve also been talking about the people who dedicate years, and in some cases, their lives in order to find out how other cultures are different from one another. This whole week has opened my eyes to different ideas of ‘culture’ than anything has really before. Sure, I knew that in others cultures they do different greetings or have different rules for what is ‘appropriate behavior’, but there are so many cultures out there that have completely different ideas of what’s important that it’s amazing to compare them together. The idea of a behavior being appropriate or inappropriate really gave me a glimpse into how our culture became what it is today. As I was talking to one my friends one day about this class, she told me a little fact that the American culture started shaking hands years ago when people had to check whether or not that person was carrying a weapon of some kind. Today we consider it a nice, casual, and an especially polite way to greet someone, but we’ve never asked the question ‘why’ do we do it? “Why” goes along with so many other things in our culture. Why do we eat with utensils? Why do we sit in chairs? Why do we have products to beautify ourselves and why are the people beautifying themselves usually a female? It just boggles my mind that our culture has become what it is, and other cultures seem small or less important than ours. When did we decide that our culture is ‘the’ culture to focus on or to relate to when other cultures are brought in?

Culture is such a broad term and subject that it’s hard to focus on one aspect of culture or a specific culture. The people that dedicate years of research just to focus on one aspect of a different culture are truly remarkable people. When reading the article by Cognan, I was amazed once I had figured out how long he was there. He had been there a year and hadn’t even made any good friends or connections with the tribe, yet he continued on for a couple more years in order to get the research he was there to receive. Understanding a culture and being totally engulfed in it would be an amazing learning experience and an overall thrill. I’m not sure whether or not I would handle it with the greatest of ease… I’ve grown up in a certain household, been taught different things and has learned to always say my ‘please’ and ‘thank you’s’. When going through my everyday activities, it’s amazing to realize how much of it has been shaped by culture. I shower because I’ve been told hygiene is good (well, hygiene is good, but maybe not showering everyday isn’t too bad), I go to school because having an education is valued, and I eat different types of food because I’ve also been told that they’re either good for me or that they just will taste good. So many things are involved in culture that I am looking forward to seeing what else shapes culture and how it affects the people involved. This week was only just the beginning to a long series of ‘eye openers’ that will shape my opinion and my thoughts towards other cultures.