The Karen People

Improved Essays
The Karen People
Ethnicity
The Karen people are an ethnic group living in South-East Asia with their own distinct languages and culture. The Karen people who are from Burma are ethnically distinct from other groups living in Burma and Thailand. The Karen are unique in which it is not necessary to have Karen parents in order to be Karen. To be the Karen people, a person must identify himself or herself as Karen by knowing Karen culture and customs as well as speak a Karen language. The Karen are consisted of at least 20 sub-groups rather than being a single ethnic group (International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2006). The estimations for Karen population vary widely ranged from 3 to 7 million (Barron et al., 2007; UNHCR, 2007).
The Karen
…show more content…
Women are often responsible for cleaning the house, cooking, fetching water, feeding animals and overall maintenance of the household. On the other hand, men mainly doing labour and heavy work such as ploughing, farming, hunting, building, and maintaining the physical structure of the family home. Karen women also weave clothes and blankets while men weave baskets (Barron et al., 2007). Both men and women are responsible for raising children. Both husband and wife are involved in decision-making as decisions made affect the whole family, but the husband is often the one to communicate the decision in public (Mekong, …show more content…
The Karen also eat many kinds of animal meat, fish, and insects, as well as maize, roots, millet, sweet potatoes, eggplant, bamboo sprouts, gourds, and fruits. Chilies, salt, and spices such as turmeric as well as fish paste which is a favorite for adding flavor are used in nearly every meal (Barron et al., 2007). Ngapi which is a famous dish eaten in the Karen culture consisting of a sharp-tasting and salty paste made with fermented fish, shrimp or prawns is used to flavour many dishes. Talapo, one of the popular Karen dish, is made of rice and bamboo shoots, lemon grass and fish paste (Ewen, 2012).The Karen people refuse invitations to eat with one another initially as a manner of respect and then they modestly accept (The Cleveland Clinic Office of Diversity, 2012). For Karen people, food is eaten with the fingers of the right hand. Those who live in more urban areas may eat with a fork and a spoon and sometimes chopsticks are used while eating noodles (Ewen,

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Unit 3 Frq Essay

    • 746 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Unit 3 FRQ Part A: In a lot of folk cultures, males do most and the work and are in charge of most of the decision-making. In more popular culture, females are gaining more power and more say of what goes on in their life. With globalization, this trend of women receiving more say should spread and may even take over some folk cultures. It’s known that in folk cultures women are known as a lot less than men are.…

    • 746 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gender Roles In Hmong

    • 689 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Third Space-Power and Gender Roles In a traditional Hmong family there are very distinct gender roles. I was told by my family that it was traditional to walk behind my husband, speak when spoken too, and serve him daily meals. I do this while in their home out of respect, but not anywhere else. There are distinct gender roles in every aspect, but we will hit wedding reception, childbearing, and marriage.…

    • 689 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Hmong Gender Roles

    • 1414 Words
    • 6 Pages

    She is powerless because she is not strong like men who hunts bravely by himself, nor carry or move heavy miscellaneous hardware. The gender role plays a major factor in the Hmong culture. Conventional responsibilities include the following: childbearing, household errands, embroidery, and social liability. Foremost, the people believe that the purpose of why women exist is to expand the family tree of her husbands. Hence, childbearing plays a factor in marriages on account if she cannot bear any children or…

    • 1414 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cultural Interview Essay

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages

    For this assignment, we were tasked with interviewing people from different backgrounds. As a person of Arab descent, I tried to find two people with vastly different ethnic backgrounds. The first person I interviewed was a fellow student from University. The student is a male, and his background is Irish and English. The student is an American, but his grandparents had migrated from Ireland over 80 years ago.…

    • 1254 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Gender Roles: Are learned behaviors in a given society/community, or other special group, that condition which activities, tasks and responsibilities are perceived as male and female. Gender roles are affected by age, class, race, ethnicity, religion and by the geographical, economic and political environment. Changes in gender roles often occur in response to changing economic, natural or political circumstances, including development efforts. Both men and women play multiple roles in society. The gender roles of women can be identified as reproductive, productive and community managing roles, while men’s are categorized as either productive or community politics.…

    • 346 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Perhaps due in large part to her gender (which made it more socially acceptable for her to have continued conversations with women without any significant reputational backlash for her female informants) combined with her American-ness ( which places her outside of the limitations imposed by typical gender-dictated rules regarding deportment and behavior in Thai/Sino-Thai culture) , Wilson is able to circumnavigate the gender stratified Thai society and gain information regarding the perspectives of both males and females who are navigating through modern-day Thailand. Most of the individuals who Wilson interviews are toeing the newly developed line between traditional and “modern” modes of behavior (whether these modes are referring to romantic relationships, dealings with familial obligations, navigating through the job market). One of the many examples of such navigation around or through norms in Thai culture would be the story of Sila, a Thai tom woman who was an Avon lady. As Wilson discovered while gathering information for her ethnography: Within many Sino-Thai and Thai families, earning income and fulfilling family duties can overrule the costs of inappropriate gender or sexual behaviors…what most determined status in Sila’s household was fiscal, rather than normative gender,…

    • 1588 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rejecting any socially constructed gender roles especially those of men carrying dominate role over women in a household. Believing in equitable sharing of responsibilities of home, children, and economic burdens for a successful true partnership between the sexes. With all this in mind, their heaviest concerns is to create awareness of women’s work, both home and in the…

    • 449 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mosuo Culture Analysis

    • 814 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The purpose of this essay is to explain the culture behind The Mosuo people. By using the “Barrel Model” I will break down the culture’s internal and external factors and how they have become a civilized society. The Barrel Model breaks elements or characteristics of a culture into three sections. The three sections that the model are broken into are Infrastructure, Social Structure, and Superstructure. The cultural aspect is what they value in beliefs or ideas, and the behaviors that come from these beliefs and values.…

    • 814 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In chapter eleven of the book American Ways which is written by Maryanne Kearny Datesman, Joann Crandall, and Edward N. Kearny (2014), expands our knowledge about the value of family, how it plays an important role in the Americans’s lives. It also helps us know more about American’s self-reliance, they like to take their own decisions and they certainly don’t want to be controlled by anyone in their family. In the past, American women used to be presented as secondary to men. They were undervalued, had no voice in the family and were considered as a “homemaker” who didn’t work outside of the nest. These were the same circumstancese that used to happen with Vietnamese women.…

    • 701 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In most of the African cultures girls are prepared to be “good’ wives. In African households girls cook, clean, do laundry, take out garbage, put the groceries in the fridge while, the boys just play outside and do whatever their heart desires. About the age of twenty three the girls get married but before this the a Bride Price to the girl in this case the “good” wife is first paid. When the woman is settled into her matrimonial home she has no job to support herself everything she gets and has is because of her husband.…

    • 539 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Brian Bada Mrs. Clark English 1V 31 October 2017 Ch.2 One of the problems we have in our society is identifying a women’s role in society. A man’s role in society is easy to define. A man is usually the breadwinner of the family and is responsible for providing and taking care of the family. On the other hand, a woman’s role in society has evolved over time. It used to be that a woman was supposed to take care of the house, have children and take care of them.…

    • 1353 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ute Food Resources

    • 391 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In Southwest Basin, North America, the tribe the Utes, always have an efficient amount of rich resources to get their food no matter what season it is. The Utes food resources were are Sage grouse, birds, and squirrels. Women use nets to gather the Sage grouse while they use bow and arrows to sphere kill birds and squirrels. Women fished all year long, but, also cooking, sewing, and tending the vegetable gardens became challenging, yet they accomplished their daily duties. The end of the northern reserve provided a surplus amount of fish.…

    • 391 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Gender roles often play an important role in the way we identify people in society. There are many stereotypical factors that differentiate male from female. Women, the inferior gender, are physically perceived as being weak and fragile as opposed to the dominating gender. Psychologically, women are characterized as being apathetic and submissive. Women also generally tend to be more domesticated than men.…

    • 1433 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gender roles are the set of behavioral and social norms deemed socially acceptable for an individual belonging to a particular sex to participate in (Booysen, 2010). There are no universal gender roles in a continent; however, the common trends depicted can help in explaining this concept. In America, women participate in income generation of the family; there has been a significant shift from the time when one spouse was responsible for the family income. Currently, most American homes are dual income families; this shift arose in the 1960s and 1970s after the rise of feminism resulting to an influx of women in the workforce. Before this, women were tasked with home matters while men worked and earned money.…

    • 626 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    People learn a great deal from their experiences as they can change their entire outlook and attitude towards life as well as their communication with others. Perception directly effects communication and explains how the same message can be interpreted differently by people. The relationships we have with people through communication enable us to have similar perceptions of the world, however no two people can see the world in exactly the same way because of differences in their fields of experience. There are experiences that we share together such as, love, the instinct to survive, the desire for health, knowledge and happiness but each individual has events in life that make them experience these things differently. Perception is affected…

    • 1596 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays