Week 3 Reading Response

Summary

    The first reading for this week came from Intercultural Communication by Holliday et al. The readings focused predominantly on the formation and projection of identity within intercultural communications. Section A1.1 discusses the example of an Iranian woman named Parisa who struggles to establish her own identity w/r/t her heritage. The focus here was on the multi-facetedness of other people and societies as well as the way people talk. The authors explain in this section the concept of thick description, which is "deriving meaning from a broad view of social phenomena which pieces together different, interconnected perspectives" (Holliday 9).
    The next section, A1.2, is entitled Cultural Artefacts. As the authors write, "This unit continues to unravel the complexities of cultural identity by looking at what might lie behind what people say about their culture." The authors use the example of Ming, Zhang, and Janet to help explain some ideas. In the deconstruction section the authors write

    -When people are in a difficult, strange environment, they can close ranks and exaggerate specific aspects of their cultural identity
    -Different cultural resources can be drawn upon and invoked at different times depending on the circumstances.

and importantly: "What people say about their cultural identity should be read as the image they wish to project at a particular time rather than as evidence of an essentialist national culture." or "Take what people say about their own culture as a personal observation which should not be generalized to other people who come from the same background."

    The next section, A1.3, discusses what one says about their cultural identity when they exchange information with another person. The authors use the example of the girls on the bus who cuss. They raise the issue that there are two sides to identity, the inherited cultural identities and the creative cultural identities, the former which is traditional and presupposed and the latter which is more free-form and playful. The authors remind us at the end of this section, "Appreciate that we are creating and negotiation our own cultural identity in the process of communicating with others" and "appreciate that the creation and negotiation of cultural and personal identity are the same thing."

    The next section is unit B1.1 entitled Identity as a Personal Project. The sample text from this section is written by J.R. Ribeyro and it details how a Peruvian culturally bleaches himself to be more Americanized. There is another text in this section written by Giddens entitled Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in  the Late Modern Age. Here are some key assumptions pointed out by the authors:

1. A person is someone with a self-contained mind and consciousness: a unique individual who is separate and distinct from other people.

2. Each individual has one personality or a consistent set of traits, characteristics, preferences, or abilities which sum up that person's true nature...

3. People own their thoughts and feelings. These are private, self-generated and organized within the inner self. Thoughts, feelings and internal states can, however, be expressed publicly through language, actions and through other symbolic means.

4. People... are the centre and source of their experience. Individuals initiate action and try to realize themselves (their plans, beliefs, desires) in the world.

    In the last section assigned from the book, B1.2, we read a piece called "Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket" by G. Matthews. In it, Matthews builds a metaphor in which cultures exist within a supermarket of sorts where individuals can pick and choose which culture they would like to be a part of, given that the individual has the ability to learn about those cultures.

    Last but not least, we read an article by A. Pavlenko which analyzed the linguistic trends that occurred within memoirs of immigrants to the United States during the early 20th century.

Reflections

    I have been enjoying the readings immensely thus far. I know I touched on this in class briefly, but I think I have been "on to" the non-essentialist view of culture for some time. From a young age I felt as though I didn't quite fit in with any particular culture, seeing many. You know how middle school, high school, and even elementary school are pretty clique-y with regard to social structures. Well I never liked the concept of those cliques, and as I grew older I came to realize that while I didn't belong, per se, to any group, I could go between them with relative ease as a result of my non-committal to any particular group. I was kind of like an individual in the supermarket described by Matthews, wandering down the aisles and picking and grabbing what I choose.
    The supermarket of culture concept also reminds me of another philosophy I have learned about in a former class. It's the idea of henotheism. As explained by Max Muller, henotheism the idea that God is as God manifests himself to you, that is, you come to know God as God comes to reveal himself to you through the world. I kind of would like to extend this idea to culture in the individual, that culture is as culture reveals itself to you. The idea that you cannot know or be a part of a culture unless that culture has manifested itself to you in the "supermarket of cultures". I don't know. These are just the connections I make.

Further Questions

    Why did all of the literature avoid the concept of how a name comes to shape your identity?

    What do we do in the EFL/ESL classroom w/r/t names of students? Should we give them English names?
    In what ways can we become more aware of our essentialist bias through which we view the world?


Regards,
TfM