Week 1 Kuma Ch. 2 reading

In the third page of the this reading I like how they identifies culture not only as the artistic or aesthetic aspects but as the beliefs, norms, values, customs, etc. of a group of people. I also thought that it was interesting when the said that when a group of sociologists get together to discuss culture they never agree on a meaning. This really shows how abstract this concept is.

I’ve noticed that this article has many different points about how culture affects one person’s life, whether it be by guiding one to believe a certain thing, act a certain way, speak a certain language. By evaluating that this is how a culture influences a person’s life, it really shows that each person could share many different cultures. Each characteristic of a person could make them a part of a different culture which makes for a world of many, many cultures.

I like how in the third page they compared culture to an octopus. That is slow moving and changes over time. And it doesn’t always move at once but in disjointed movements causing change to other parts as well. This was an interesting metaphor to use in this article, but It’s also a lot like the ripple effect when it comes to one change in a culture affecting other cultures, even though it might not be in the same way.

I like how both readings also repeated the fact that a culture doesn’t have distinct boundaries but can also overlap with others and is always open to new people. I thought the term “otherization” was an interesting concept. It’s a good way to describe arrogance or racism or discrimination in my opinion. There are no cultures superior to others or inferior to others. But this is an important concept because it exists in every society. There will always be a group of people that have a ideal standard of what’s superior and acceptable and if other don’t live up to that standard, they are thought of as inferior.

In section 2.3 it says that “no two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality”. Then it goes on to say that people perceive reality in a different way if they speak a different native language because languages are so different that many things could be interpreted differently. I thought this was so awesome because since most of the time there is not direct translation from one language to another that things could be lost in translation and people can take away different meanings. I just thought that was a good quote from the reading.