![]() Fortunately for me, I’m not someone who needs to be right. It was a volatile situation the tug ‘o’ war way of doing things (“I’m right!” “No, I’m right!”) could have prevailed, the consequences catastrophic. ![]() In the end, she held her opinion, and I technically failed to express mine, making sure I hadn’t upset her before ending things. Let me just clarify something at this point: My goal here is not to impose an opinion on arranged marriages, or even present a bias toward either individual or collectivistic cultures it’s simply a matter of making a point that we all have a touch of ethnocentrism–in it’s most simplistic, thinking your culture’s way is the only way–more abstracted, the failure to take into account cultural parallax. Well, that’s valid… Except the two biggest watched American TV shows internationally seem to be “The Jerry Springer Show” and, as I found out from my Skype conversation with a young man from Algeria, “America’s Funniest Home Videos”–enough said, don’t you think? I put the latter scenario to this particula user, but she said that was a different situation, saying that people in those countries could watch American TV shows, so they know the difference. If you ask a person blind if they ever miss having sight, a large number of them will say that they don’t know, and how can they? Their being blind is your being sighted, essentially–you were born with it, you’ve never been without it, you can’t have true feelings towards the other side of the scope. ![]() How would you like it if I stormed into your home, took your kids and said, “You’re a lousy parent because you’re not raising them in a way that I feel is intellectually sound?”įurthermore, just like us, arranged marriages are just part of these cultures’ reality, so that’s all they know. I agreed that I would not be thrilled to be in an arranged marriage, but pointed out that we were both part of individualistic cultures, so we are expected to feel this way, but that didn’t necessarily make arranged marriages wrong. This user, only sixteen, was not to be swayed from her opinion, holding that these marriages were just wrong. I told her that arranged marriages were still commonly accepted across many cultures not being set up was actually worse than anything else, because most of these cultures were collectivistic, the marriages a gateway for economic and political security. With the basic concept for this blog slowly taking formation, I was intrigued. I was buzzing around Twitter the other day, reading more than writing for once, and I ran across a user who was talking about arranged marriages and how wrong they were. If the actual definition of culture varies from place to place, individual to individual, group to group, then there’s just not much room for the reasoning that what works for one group of people will work for all groups of people, an idea that feels more and more essential to one’s survival in the rapidly globalizing community. That’s quite the complex definition, especially when you take into account all the different definitions of the word culture the student who asks seemingly meaningless questions about your powerpoint presentation may feel this is a genuine effort to forge a connection with you, the person who says “I love you,” only expressing their feelings about your friendship. This, the team of lecturers said, was the concept of parallax applied to individual perspectives.Ĭultural Parallax: The concept that a situation or idea looks different depending on the beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, traditions, etc, of a given group of people. The general idea behind the seminar is that one culture may view the apocalypse as a coming attraction–rich, highly technological, reasonably educated, ingrained with the idea that clothing and food come from the nearest retail store–while other cultures see themselves as being in the midst of the apocalypse–low in technology, resources are produced locally, economically unstable. But this blog is always at the back of my mind, the primary concern being how to keep it going how to keep revealing the outsider perspective, to be precise, and I found it in a humanities seminar I attended last night, the subject being the apocalypse. No, folks, there will be no blog post on the excitingly different ways to look at cheerleaders I don’t really see things, so I have no idea what I’m actually talking about, and I’m pretty sure that kind of entry is classified as soft literary pornography. In simple terms, it means that the hot cheerleader looks different when seen from the top of a roller coaster, than when standing face-to-face, or when you’re on the bottom of the ever popular pyramid formation. ![]() Parallax: The concept that an object looks like two different objects when seen from two different viewpoints not just another brand of that stuff you take to make you go to the bathroom.
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