Teaching Aboriginal Culture

I have lived in India till 22 and moved to USA after finishing my bachelor’s degree. I respect Indian culture and I try to follow Indian customs. I always thought my values reflect Indian culture before coming to the class. When I initially came to US from India, I found many differences between both the cultures and I needed time to adjust to the customs and practices in USA. In India, Salutation is very important while addressing people. Indians…

When a person from one culture sends a message to a person from a different culture, this process is known as intercultural communication (McDaniel, Samnovar & Porter, 2012). We interact with people from different cultures on a daily basis and therefore it is useful to have knowledge of the theories which develop our intercultural communication skills. Several of these concepts can be explained through stories relayed to me by my friend Victoria, who has experience working with Middle Eastern…

is undisputed that with all things good, globalisation may also serve as a threat to traditional cultures as modernisation transforms societal values. Thus, as this one process continues to revolutionize our lives as every day progresses, it is important to evaluate the effects globalisation has on people and our…

There are many cultural groups in the world. Two for example is the Zulu group, the largest culture in South Africa, and Mexicans from Mexico. These are two entirely different cultures in many ways and yet in many ways they are very similar in their child rearing ways. The most popular or, common thing about Zulu are the colorful beads, baskets and carvings. Their child rearing beliefs are different and amazing from Mexicans. There is a lot of illiteracy there, meaning not being able…

Signs are a commonplace feature of daily life. A sign is defined as anything that can be used to represent something else. (Berger, 2013). Commodity signs are a crucial part of consumer culture. These signs can be found on websites, in advertisements or even in a company’s logo. The principles of semiotics and the criteria for a successful commodity sign can be seen in the logo for Apple Inc. Semiotics is the study of signs and the meanings and codes created by these signs. The pioneers of…

2010-2011 school year. The author contends that English is not unfamiliar to the region due to its historical relationship with the United Kingdom, as well as current political and economic relationships with English speaking nations and popular culture. English is also the primary language of tertiary education in the UAE. However, Arabic is the…

anthropologist whose largest and most important works were on the Balinese cockfights in Indonesia, and defined culture as a web of ideas expressed in symbols, that can have multiple meanings. Stanley Tambiah (1929-2014) was a Professor Emeritus at Harvard that formulated a performative approach to ritual, where every human action was a ‘performance’ and all performances were telling to the culture. Structure and communitas are the two main cornerstones to Victor Turner’s theory of symbols.…

During the 1960s and 1970s two schools of thought took prominence in sociocultural anthropology: development and underdevelopment theory, as well as, the world-systems theory; which, in combination with the key tenets of Marxism laid the foundation of a new critical perspective called anthropological political economy. A precursor to the modern form of “political economy”, referred to now as “classical” political economics, has been dated to the eighteenth century, this later divided into the…

When asked on what makes someone truly American, the answer you usually get is freedom, patriotism, and loving the “American way”. Culture, defined by the mannerism of what a person does, cannot be condensed into a simple phrase or quality. In the past, other cultures such as the African and Native Americans were viewed as a nuisance to achieving Uniformity as an American Country, and were sought out and assimilated to try to fit in with the norm of society. This was done to ensure that cultural…

Clarification stage is where individuals accept some of the positive attitudes about their culture and accept themselves. It has taken a long time for me to get to this stage. I spent a long time in the “Ethnic Psychological Captivity” stage. This is where individuals internalize negative ideas about their culture, have low self-esteem, and strive for higher cultural assimilation. I was never proud of my culture, because I saw mostly the hate. Having family members who use racial slurs, fly…