Summary and reflection 3

Edgar Rojas ID 01490620

03/18/2013

In the class of this week we saw on the subject of culture, starting with an introduction about what culture means, wondering what culture means to us first, because we usually tend to understand culture to things more striking and colorful of a country, society as part of a culture, the relationship between culture and society, as culture involves things like way of life, customs, knowledge, material objects and behaviors. Elements of culture were seen, they are 4; language, belief and values, norms and sanctions. About language element we saw how symbols are used to convey the culture, the language goes hand in hand with the foundation of a culture, and language distinguishes one culture from another, as knowing other languages can help to achieve an intercultural interaction and more. In the element of values we have seen that in different cultures there are different ways of looking at what is good and what is not, individualism and collectivism, besides the criteria used by each culture to evaluate the actions of others. We also saw norms used by culture and also the sanctions, including positive and negative. It is very interesting to talk about culture and society, when we review important aspects of culture, I can see that the culture is the daily life of a person living in a certain part of the world, part of the world where their ancestors have lived and formed the basis for a specific style of life that tradition continues to maintain identity as a society proud of its past. I see the elements of culture as interesting aspects that are essential in every culture; we can identify these elements in every culture that we revise. The language for me is the clearest element exists to identify a culture, each culture usually has its own language, which has its great historical content, I can get to know a lot about a culture by simply watching the language spoken there, some of these are truly amazing languages, many of these share many commonalties which can show us a lot about commonalties with those countries, although some countries share the same language, this language varies by country and is not exactly the same because each country influences their culture in their language. I would like to mention that in my case, the languages are very important, a great tool to communicate with people from other parts of the world, a way to know a new culture, for people like me who want to live in foreign countries, it is very important to learn languages. When we talk about values, each culture has lived and learned different situations in different ways, so although we are all human and we live equally, each culture has a different way of seeing things, this is the same when analyzing values, there are things that are not accepted by some cultures, but for other cultures they are accepted, sometimes there may be conflicts between certain cultures, because some of them do not see well the actions of other cultures, but there also some cultures that their convictions harm the harmony and peace of other cultures, so it must be a balance to avoid problems between different parts. For norms and sanctions, I see the similarity values, each culture has different rules and different form of sanction its members, when referring about sanctions, I can comment that certain cultures have very peculiar forms of sanction, some cultures use more severe negative sanctions to control their people, other cultures are not that hard to punish his people, although it is noteworthy that some cultures have a very good program of positive sanctions contribute much to its prosperity. This issue of culture has been very interesting, be able to see how each country has its own identity and how to identify it, this is very beneficial for me.