Culture And Cultural Awareness

“A culturally competent individual is capable of using knowledge of cultural patterns to understand priorities, communicate empathy and acceptance, be responsive to individual and community needs, and work effectively with cultural groups to develop culturally relevant interventions” (Winkelman, 2009). This quote was taken from the book Culture and Health: Applying Medical Anthropology written by Michael Winkelman. This definition of cultural competence shows the importance of understanding culture for medical or even everyday life situations. This book is the main material used for this medical anthropology course, in which the self-assessment questionnaire in the first chapter was used to analyze my prior skills and knowledge of cultural

Seeing as the score of 3 I received was relatively low on the scale of 0-12 for this segment, it displays that I am mainly part of one sole culture. In my opinion, this score is true to my lifestyle since I only practice my birth culture, which is being a French catholic. Although I am always interested in learning about other cultures, I do not currently associate myself to any other culture than my original culture. For the section of marginalized biculturalism, my answers gave an over-all score of 2 on a scale of 0-8. A marginalized biculturalism experience is “feeling a lack of identity and acceptance in either cultural group”, hence not feeling like you belong in either one of the cultures you identify yourself to or practice (Winkelman, 2009). For this scale, a score of 0 indicates no experience of a marginalized biculturalism and a score of 8 defines a high level of experiencing a marginalized biculturalism. Thus, my lower score illustrates that I mainly feel accepted within my cultural group. The lower score could also be due to the fact that I do not associate myself to more than one culture and therefore don’t have any conflicting feelings towards multiple

The scale ranged from 0-10, where the score of 0 indicates no cultural proficiency and the score of 10 as being culturally proficient. My answers provided a score of 5, which signifies that I am the middle point of culturally non-proficient and proficient. I was shocked after completing this section of the quiz since, coming from my neighborhood in Sudbury, the only time I was ever surrounded by people of different cultures than my own was at school and there was not very much cultural diversity near my home life. It was surprising to me to have such a higher score than I expected considering that, although we learnt about cultures and religions in school, I certainly do not feel as if I have a high enough level of competence to teach people on how to treat and behave with people of different cultures. Becoming friends with people from different cultural backgrounds has shown me how different cultures are from one another and has made me respect people of any culture, but it has not given me all the pertinent details about their cultures that would be necessary to help others understand them for their learning of cultural