Ethnocentrism In My Culture

769 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Problems relating to the study of intercultural communication encompass individual uniqueness, generalizing, lack of objectivity, and compromise

My Culture
Ferris and Stein (2016) defines culture as: “the entire way of life of a group of people” (p.73). Groups that come together is what creates culture. It brings together different languages, beliefs, values, norms, and even materials that are passed from one group to the next. There are also two types of of categories that make up culture. The first one is material culture, which consists of buildings, art, clothing and jewelry. The second category is Non-material culture which is a group 's way of doing and thinking. It consists of beliefs, values, and other speculations about society.
My family’s culture consists of both Texan and Mexican traditions. My mother and her side of the family are from the Southernmost tip of Texas and …show more content…

74). Which means judging another culture by the values and standards of your own culture. However, Cultural relativism means to understand a culture 's values and beliefs and not judging them. Stein and Ferris (2016) defined Cultural relativism as to “understand a culture on its own terms” (p.74) When I look back to my first trip to Mexico, I recall a time when I was being ethnocentric at an outside meat market. I was out with my parents picking items for our dinner that night. When we asked for a couple pounds of chicken, the butcher just grabs a couple chickens from their cage; killed and cleaned them right in front of us. Right away I was disgusted and thought to myself “Why they didn’t properly process the chicken?” In society the way every culture is different I don’t believe it is really possible to be culturally relative because it is our natural response to criticize or react to a certain way of life that is different of our own. I can’t recall a time something new was opened up to me and in no way I hadn’t judged

Show More
Related

  • Cultural Relativism: An Impediment to Critical Morality

    1079 Words  | 3 Pages

    Cultural Relativism is a moral theory which states that due to the vastly differing cultural norms held by people across the globe, morality cannot be judged objectively, and must instead be judged subjectively through the lense of an individuals own cultural norms. Because it is obvious that there are many different beliefs that are held by people around the world, cultural relativism can easily be seen as answer to the question of how to accurately and fairly judge the cultural morality of others, by not doing so at all. However Cultural Relativism is a lazy way to avoid the difficult task of evaluating one’s own values and weighing them against the values of other cultures. Many Cultural Relativist might abstain from making moral judgments about other cultures based on an assumed lack of understanding of other cultures, but I would argue that they do no favors to the cultures of others by assuming them to be so firmly ‘other’ that they would be unable to comprehend their moral decisions. Cultural Relativism as a moral theory fails to allow for critical thoughts on the nature of morality and encourages the stagnation

    Read More

  • Cultural Relativsim vs. Ethnocentrism

    1197 Words  | 3 Pages

    Cultural relativism. (n.d.). Dictionary.com 21st Century Lexicon. Retrieved April 16, 2014, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cultural relativism

    Read More

  • Sororities as a Social Institution

    1295 Words  | 3 Pages

    Culture by definition is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices, as well as customary beliefs, social forms and material traits that characterize a racial, religious or ...

    Read More

  • Sociology Is A Hard Study

    763 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sociology is the study of groups of people and how they interact with each other. The scientific study of social life, social change, social causes and the consequences of human behavior. Sociology is a science because it uses the scientific method to establish truth. The term of sociology is taken from the words “socio” and “logos," socio means society and logos mean science. Therefore, sociology is a study of human interaction in a social life. Sociologists seek to analyze and explain why people interact with others and belong to groups. They also examine the causes of social problems and how they can be addressed. Events in our social world affect our individual lives. Many individual problems are rooted in social or public issues. Social

    Read More

  • Cultural Relativism In 'Avatar'

    822 Words  | 2 Pages

    After analyzing cultural relativism over the semester, I have come to the conclusion that cultural relativism under anthropological analysis defines every single culture with some aspect of worth as viewed by an individual within that society. Franz Boas, termed the “Father of American Anthropology”, first introduced the concept of cultural relativism. He wanted people to understand the way certain cultures conditioned people to interact with the world around them, which created a necessity to understand the culture being studied. In my words, cultural relativism is the concept that cultures should be viewed from the people among that culture. When studied by anthropologists, cultural relativism is employed to give all cultures an equal

    Read More

  • Examples Of Ethnocentrism

    1112 Words  | 3 Pages

    Ethnocentrism is when a person judges a group by the standard of their own culture. Ethnocentrism come in many shapes and forms and takes place in all cultures. The example I found to be the best representation and explanation of ethnocentrism, was the TedTalk: Chimamanda Adichie The Danger of a single story. In her talk she relays times in her life where she thought all books had to have white British characters in them because she only read books, which had those types of characters. She also relayed the story of here first time in college where she had an American room mate who assumed she would have no idea how to do simple tasks like use a stove (Adichie). Ethnocentrism is like having a single story we see other cultures only as our culture

    Read More

  • Ethnocentrism

    1801 Words  | 4 Pages

    Ethnocentrism is the name given to a tendency to interpret or evaluate other cultures in terms of one's own. This tendency has been, perhaps, more prevalent in modern nations than among preliterate tribes. The citizens of a large nation, especially in the past, have been less likely to observe people in another nation or culture than have been members of small tribes who are well acquainted with the ways of their culturally diverse neighbours. Thus, the American tourist could report that Londoners drive "on the wrong side of the street" or an Englishman might find some customs on the Continent "queer" or "boorish," merely because they are different. Members of a Pueblo tribe in the American Southwest, on the other hand, might be well acquainted with cultural differences not only among other Pueblos but also in non-Pueblo tribes such as the Navajo and Apache.

    Read More

  • William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic

    2187 Words  | 5 Pages

    What is meant by the word culture? Culture, according to Websters Dictionary, is the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. These patterns, traits, and products are considere...

    Read More

  • Material Culture United States

    333 Words  | 1 Pages

    we hear this word culture. But what is really culture culture is made up of symbolic elements the material elements that are passed down from one generation to the next which lets a group of people work as a whole. Material culture is when objects are associated with the group such as tools buildings artwork and physical objects which give meaning to the society. Symbolic culture however is associated with the beliefs and values the way a person behaves and communicates. Here in the United States we are a material culture in many ways because we have to have the new technology that comes out every week. But we are also a symbolic culture in the reasoning of the United States was formed for religious freedom. Also in the United States

    Read More

  • Ethnocentrism And Culture Relativism Essay

    814 Words  | 2 Pages

    We create bias toward our culture and form an idea that one's own culture is the main standard to evaluate another group leading to view. They make the measuring stick. This means that people believe and feel in the superiority of one's own ethnic culture over other cultures. This behavior is known as ethnocentrism. This concept was created amongst different nations earlier than cultural relativism, which has to be devised to counter ethnocentrism.

    Read More

  • Culture of Ireland

    3089 Words  | 7 Pages

    Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people…Culture in its broadest sense of cultivated behavior; a totality of a person’s learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning (http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html).

    Read More

  • Elements Of Culture: The Elements Of Culture

    714 Words  | 2 Pages

    Culture can be summed up as the behaviors, attitudes, customs, and beliefs combined in a society at a given time and place. Culture joins people by establishing a common ground. There are many common elements that result in the formation of cultural subgroups such as religion, family traditions, and the arts. The two most important cultural elements that have influenced my own social group (for better or for worse) would be communication styles and roles within the family.

    Read More

  • Essay On Nigerian Culture

    2197 Words  | 5 Pages

    What is culture? Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving

    Read More

  • Essay On The Impact Of Globalization On Culture

    879 Words  | 2 Pages

    Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects and behavior. It includes the ideas, value, customs and artifacts of a group of people (Schaefer, 2002). Culture is a pattern of human activities and the symbols that give these activities significance. It is what people eat, how they dress, beliefs they hold and activities they engage in. It is the totality of the way of life evolved by a people in their attempts to meet the challenges of living in their environment, which gives order and meaning to their social, political, economic, aesthetic and religious norms and modes of organization thus distinguishing people from their neighbors.

    Read More

  • Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

    500 Words  | 1 Pages

    Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism are two contrasting terms that are displayed by different people all over the world. Simply put, ethnocentrism is defined as “judging other groups from the perspective of one’s own cultural point of view.” Cultural relativism, on the other hand, is defined as “the view that all beliefs are equally valid and that truth itself is relative, depending on the situation, environment, and individual.” Each of these ideas has found its way into the minds of people worldwide. The difficult part is attempting to understand why an individual portrays one or the other. It is a question that anthropologists have been asking themselves for years.

    Read More

More about Ethnocentrism In My Culture

Open Document