Kimberly Owens COMM 365 Paper #1 A culture can define a person by totaling a person s attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture is transmitted, through language, material objects, ritual, institutions, and art, from one generation to the next. 1 People may find their identity by the way they grew up, the things they were taught as children, and they ways they were taught to act, speak, dress and believe. They can find their identity through the culture they grew up in, and it is only through interaction with people that identity can be clearly defined. In this paper I will begin to outline how identity has been approached by constructionists, discussing their theoretical stance and/or their analytic methods, and also begin to show my understanding of culture and discuss communication activities as interactional practices which perform culture and construct ourselves as having particular identities. When people communicate they mix together what they have learned from their culture and begin to claim their personal identity through the words, phrases, and things they share with one another. According to Edgar Schein a culture has six formal properties which include (1) shared basic assumptions that are (2) invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it (3) learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration in ways that (4) have worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, (5) can be taught to new members of the group as the (6) correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those 1 culture. (n.d.). The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Retrieved October 11, 2011, from Dictionary.com website:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/culture
problems 2. Culture relates heavily to identity and an example is when someone new comes into a group they begin to perceive & identify what to wear, how to act, what to say, what the symbolistic meanings are and how they should act within a particular group. I guess I could use school as an example because when someone is a freshman they are just starting to get the hang of things and want to be accepted into the group. If the freshman wants to become a part of the group they must pay attention to what is normal within the group including how to speak, how to act, and the rules of the cultural group. Everyone communicates and within the talk they find cultural and personal identities while chatting with one another. The reason that I bring this up is that depending on the cultural group you are in, you begin to adapt and take shape of that particular culture. The example that I will provide is if someone from the American culture joins a Chinese cultural group, that person begins to adapt to their beliefs about food, religion, and may begin to use the words or language most prominent in that culture. When someone adapts to a particular culture it is because their beliefs that they once have been overcome by the influence of social and cultural factors in which each person can be defined. Another thing that is important to understand about someone making the transition into another culture, such as my example of someone from an American group coming together to join a Chinese cultural group, is that it is exciting at first to see the differences with the new culture you are transitioning to. While it may be exciting at first, it can also lead to the person missing their own culture because things within the culture are becoming somewhat out of their comfort zone and hard to understand and leading to a large amount of anxiety, and mixed emotions, and a feeling of ackwardness. Eventually those feelings do subside and a person can culturally adapt and make the transition to the new culture, it is not something that is automatic, 2 E i s e n b e r g, E. M. ( 2 0 1 0 ). O r g a n i z a t i o n a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n b a l a n c i n g c r e a t i v i t y a n d c o n s t r a i n t. ( S i x t h e d. ). B o s t o n : B e d f o r d / S t. M a r t i n s.
or that does not have any negative impact on that particular person who is transitioning to a new culture. We must always have knowledge about the culture we are adapting to and know the behaviors of that culture as well because one hand gesture here may not mean the same thing in another culture, as we have heard examples of in class. Learning the knowledge of another culture helps us to adopt the new culture.. Another point that I would like to make is that it is nearly impossible as human beings to not interact with those around us and strike up a conversation with them. It has been often said that humans are social animals and there have been different approaches to studying this (Burr, 2003). The thought that humans are social animals has struck up the idea that it was brought into existence or put into place for it to become such a regular, common practice, or tradition. Social constructionism is a term used mostly by psychologists and doesn t have an exact definition, and it can also include many different features, or key assumptions, such as a critical stance toward taken- for- granted knowledge, an idea that knowledge is sustained by social processes, questioning realism, language as a form of social action, a focus on interaction in social processes (Burr, 2003). The Oxford concise dictionary of sociology summed it up as this, Social Constructionism is a term sometimes applied to theories that emphasize the socially created nature of social life. (Marshall, 1994) In conclusion, I hope I was able to help bring an understanding that cultural identities are something fluid, rather than fixed, and show my understanding of language as a medium for performing and as a tool for constructing cultural identity. Also, I hope I was able to effectively outline how identity has been approached by constructionists, discussing their theoretical stance and/or their analytic methods, and also begin to show my understanding of culture and discuss
communication activities as interactional practices which perform culture and construct ourselves as having particular identities.
References Chang, Y. (2001). Performing Cultural and Personal Identities through Talk. China Media Research, 7(3), 21-32. Retrieved from EBSCOhost Marshall, G. (Ed.). (1994). The Oxford concise dictionary of sociology. Oxford: Oxford University.