FOCS Communication, Culture and Identity

Question 1

What is “Culture”?

Answer 1

Tribes and Customs? Exotic scenery? Styles of fashion? Religious and traditional events? Special food like fish heard curry?

Question 2

Tension

Answer 2

Do we have the same view when we define culture?

Question 3

“Asians in the library” video

Answer 3

Young girl backlashed at Asians for not displaying proper etiquette but instead an “intrusive” Asian attitude of intruding the no-no squares of others → Girl received lots of death threats and eventually withdrew.

Question 4

Culture is the ongoing negotiation of learned and patterned beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviours

Answer 4

Culture is learned. You are not borned into a culture but you have to learn the cultural values. Schools and family play a major role in socialise you into the way of thinking. Culture is patterned recognisable similarity spread across a culture and may not be present in other culture. Beliefs → Perceived facts or truths. Attitudes → Cultures’ likes or dislikes. Values → Right and Wrong , patterned ways of believing.

Question 5

Layers of Culture

Answer 5

• Speech Communities: People have regular contact with each other, and have shared norms and values. (eg. WKW/Family)
• Standpoints: Shared life experiences (eg. Woman, Middle Class, NS Men, People you go through JC with)
• Cultural Institutions: (Nationality, Religion and Ethnic Heritage

Question 6

How cultures form and change (1)?

Answer 6

• Culture emerges through selectivity
  -> Cultures focus on different things (bowing vs shaking hands)
  -> Find meaning in these things (definition of bowing vs shaking hands)

Question 7

How cultures form and change (2)?

Answer 7

• Culture is shared with new members
  -> “Socialisation” process when newcomers come to understand a culture’s assumptions and guidelines (eg. parents instinctively teaching their kids different kinds of languages and gently “socialising” them to value certain things over other things) (eg. throwing veggies aside is wrong because of how others view you when you do that and veggies feel bad. Not the underestimated benefits veggies have - focus on shame instead of science to educate children)

Question 8

How cultures form and change (3)?

Answer 8

• Culture changes over time
  -> Ways of thinking, feeling, behaving that defines a culture overtime
  -> “Invention”: Development of new cultural practices - Covid , Technological Advancements which introduced new social rules to everyone (eg. 2007 emails can be left in their inbox for 7 days. 2022 emails should be responded to quickly) (In 1974, SG had operation snip snip where men are not allowed to have long hair or they will be served last at public places, reducing desirability of long hair)

Question 9

Classifying Cultures: Hofstede’s Dimensions

Answer 9

PDI, IDV, MAS, UAI, LTO, IND

Question 10

Powder Distance Index (PDI)

Answer 10

High: Acceptance of hierarchy

Low: People strive for equalise distribution of power

Question 11

Individualism verus Collectivism (IDV)

Answer 11

Individualism: Preference for loosely knit social framework

Collectivism: Tightly kit framework in society

Question 12

Masculinity versus Femininity (MAS)

Answer 12

Masculinity: Preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material rewards

Femininity: Preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life

Question 13

Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI)

Answer 13

High: Maintain rigid codes of beliefs and intolerant of unorthodox ideas (Ikaris)

Low: Maintain more relaxed attitude in which practice counts more than principles (Sersi)

Question 14

Long Term Orientation versus Short Term Normative Orientation (LTO)

Answer 14

High: Pragmatic approach, encourage practices and efforts to better prepare for the future

Low: Value time-honoured traditions and suspicious of societal change

Question 15

Indulgence vs Restraint (IND)

Answer 15

Indulgence: Societies value free gratification driving enjoying life and having fun

Restraint: Repress gratification by strict social norms

Question 16

Culture Shapes Communication

Answer 16

• Speech Code
  
  • System of symbols, rules, assumptions people create to accomplish (within a culture) → People communicate based on the different interpretations of the context. We are highly context dependent.
  • “Communication as a local practice influenced by the specifics of a cultural’s articulate way of communicating” → Singlish

Question 17

Communication Reflects Culture (1)

Answer 17

• Messages people create reveal culture
  
  • Acts of communicating reflects a cultural groups way of thinking
    
    • Eg. Humour
• Boundary Markets
  
  • Messages signal action is inappropriate or off-limits
    
    • Eg. Alexandra Wallace’s case

Question 18

Communication Reflects Culture (2)

Answer 18

• Myths
  
  • Sacred stories that embed cultural themes
    
    • Eg. Merlion
• Rituals
  
  • Carefully scripted performances that mark culturally significant events

Question 19

Intercultural Communication

Answer 19

• Interaction guided by a person’s membership in social group
• Interaction not guided by his unique qualities as an individual
• Marking the differences between “you and I”

Question 20

Barriers to Intercultural Communication (1)

Answer 20

-> Ethnocentrism
- Tendency to see one’s cultural beliefs as more correctly appropriate and moral than other cultures
- Tricky: Prof not knowing who to hire domestic helpers; Ethnocentric Perspective of coming from an environment without domestic helpers → Does not feel right to hire these FDWs like commodities. Weird to “shop for people”
- Tricky: How to train FDSw: Personal hygiene of a FDW is weird to impose on a FDWs, because hygiene belongs to them and is their rights. Ethnocentric Perspective may not seem appropriate
- Deviant, Immoral, Wrong, Weird

Question 21

Barriers to Intercultural Communication (2)

Answer 21

• Uncertainty and Anxiety
  
  • Uncertainty: Lack of knowledge of others
  • Anxiety: Negative emotional state when you feel uneasy, worried or apprehensive → Heartbeat elevated, sweating
    
    • Chief Raoni Metuktire → Environmental activist who embodies a body adornment that is very foreign to all of us. We don’t necessarily hold negative views of them but we may think if we are in a person to person interaction with him, we may feel a sudden rise in anxiety

Question 22

Barriers to Intercultural Communication (3)

Answer 22

• Marginalisation
  
  • Tendency to treat less dominant groups (eg. size) of people in society as inferior or unimportant
    
    • Eg. Trump points about UK marginalises Muslim and Mexico → Calling a group of problem → Categorising them as a collective problem → Clearly uproar because of marginalisation → Calling them rapists, drug traffickers eg. Second class citizen

Question 23

Identity and Culture

Answer 23

Matters as “Who am I” is what is reflected back on us from other of people → Multiple layers of culture influencing our sense of self

eg. Singaporean → Asian / Malay → WKW Student

Question 24

On culture, marginalisation and identity: “Danger of a single story”

Answer 24

• When she was young, read English books. Early writer (7 yo) wrote about characters who are white, ate apple, played in snow.
• Ironic how she wrote about this when she was from Nigeria
• Characters in book drank lots of ginger beer
  -** Demonstrates: How impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly children
• Convinced that books must have foreigners in them and about things which she does not personally identify with
• Once she read African books, she realised that books can represent more than what she saw - White people - when people of colour are also represented
• Mother echoed views that Fide came from a poor family. So Ngozi views became slanted to the point that Fide is very poor, nothing else but poor → Shocked when she saw his brother made her a gift. Poverty was single story of them
• White Roommate assumed Ngozi was a typical Afrian - poor, cannot use stoves, came from a tribe. Labelled Africa as a country of poverty. Literature represents Africans being unable to be similar to her → only feelings are pity
• Created a chamber of representing this single story in different versions → Africans are beasts without homes, foreign creatures without the capacity to think for themselves
• Immigration = Mexicans : Fleeing across the border stories
• So immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans → Become the abject immigrant when Mexicans too have culture
• Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and this is what they become
• Stories are defined by the Principle “Nkali” → To be greater than another; how [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told → dependent on power, who has it?