Saturday, January 26, 2013

Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

For this assignment, I interviewed 3 people with different cultural and educational background.  Two  people have a different culture than me.  Some of the similarities in their responses about culture are that culture refers to a group of people that shares customs and traditions including food, music, folklore and language.  Also, when they spoke about diversity, they all coincide that diversity is variety and options.  They all found that the question about diversity was more difficult to answer than the question about culture.  I noticed that when they spoke about culture they described what I learned is the “surface culture” and omitted the part of the culture that is known as “deep culture” which is what, people cannot easily tell unless they take the time to investigate and learn a culture. For diversity, no one mentioned that diversity made someone unique and was not associated with a group of choices ascribed or assumed by someone that makes his/her personal identity.

The way they define culture make me think of culture as a group of characteristics that identifies a certain group people, but also that they are there being  other options in the society that they can choose from, for example,  sports, religions, political parties, career, etc.

2 comments:

  1. Marta,

    I think they had a really good understanding of culture and diversity. It's interesting how diverse we are, but at the same time similar in our cultural beliefs.

    Maggie

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  2. I find it interesting that other people's definitions of cultures only touched on surface culture and not deep culture. I feel a reason might be is because of the evolution of how people live now and how much culture is blended together. If we were to take a poll, I bet most people would only base culture off of surface culture as well. Thank you for the interesting facts!

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