Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

First I talked to my husband. He feels that culture is the deeply held beliefs and learned behaviors that a person gets from the people that they grow up with and live around. He says that culture forms many of the basic filters that shape how we begin to approach the world around us since the thoughts and words of others tell us almost everything we need to know about how to get by in the world. It tells us how to greet people, what things are just “edible” and what things are really foods, as well as what it takes to be a “good” person.  Since culture has been with us since birth, it even affects the parts of our minds that just process information as emotions, and without words, so that we react to things based on our culture without even realizing that we’ve had a reaction or have knowledge of the event in our conscious minds.

As for his definition of diversity, he says that he sees diversity as more than a situation where people are just allowed to be different. He says that this is just tolerance and that tolerance can just turn in to negative feelings that are bottled up and hidden, or come out in negative ways later. He thinks diversity is about seeking out and celebrating differences and not trying to say that everyone is really the same if you can get past the little things.  He said he feels that things are usually better if there are different ideas that are being considered.  He said that there can be more than one way of doing things in many situations, and in others, even if there is a better way, having different points of view can help us use “…the best practices,” or at least make a conscious decision to do things in a certain way based on values, or objective facts rather than just doing what others have done previously for the sake of doing them without having to think about why.  My husband also added though that this idea was easier to talk about than actually do, since our cultures really do make us react to things that our culture sees as wrong at a “…deep, emotional level.”

His definitions are more detailed and complicated than I expected. I believe this is because he majored in Anthropology in college and Applied Linguistics in his master. The examples he gives are similar to what I learned from the course. However, his idea of us getting aspects of the culture by how we act and what we say in certain situations is inspiring.

Second, I talked to my friend Mie. She has similarities to me because she is a Japanese woman who is married to an American man. The differences are that she is more than 10 years older and she has lived in many places in the US and Japan. Her definition of culture is focused on people having different ways of living such as food, houses and fashions and different attitudes towards things such as education and morals. She also shared stories about the military community that are very unique and show a lot of insight about one of the military’s sub-cultures. She shared that the wives of service members, amongst themselves, will unofficially organize themselves in ways that reflect their husbands’ ranks in the military. She also shared that attitudes towards her (as a foreigner) are different various areas of the US. Her definition of diversity is being different. She thinks the measurements include skin color, languages, food, manners and attitudes towards toward everything such as people, education and their job.

I think her answer reminded me of one of the panelist’s telling the culture is about how people exist in the world not only about how people look or what languages they speak. It was a little difficult to see cultures which are not ethnical cultures. So, her story about the military community gave me a hint to see cultures based on non-ethnical ways, which I have been omitted. Her definitions are similar to mine but her experiences with other cultures made me clear that there are so many kinds of cultures.

The third person is my father-in-law. He seems to be in different cultures from me because he is 74, a male, Caucasian, and an American who is a veteran of the military. His definition of culture is that it is the environment that someone grows up in, and the norms that reflect the beliefs of a particular group of people. And his definition of diversity is a recognition that there are differences, and a desire to become aware of the differences that exist without really being concerned with labeling those differences as objectively good, or bad, or grading them on relative scales of better to worse.

From his answer, I was able to see that some aspects of cultures are ascribed, which I learned in week 1. The omitted part is that people do think cultures in good/bad scale even though I learned that it should not be seen like that. Because of my backgrounds, me, and people around me are usually the ones who focus on understanding and co-living with differences as if they are looking at cultures from outside or between cultures. So, I felt that his ways to see cultures as if looking at from inside are to the point.