HOW DOES Culture Influence OUR WAYS OF Knowing TOK PDF

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HOW DOES CULTURE INFLUENCE OUR WAYS OF KNOWING? Real life situation: Russian girl by Evgenia Lubich song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shAVsbW9Rvs We are going to be talking about how culture influences our ways of knowing. we chose this topic because we are in an international school and culture, religion, ethical concepts, languages do pretty much affect our interactions and comprehension of each other’s backgrounds, but also stereotypes, beauty and behavior. Everybody in this room comes from a different place: some of us are French, Italians, Romanian, English…for example, I am Russian and what I can tell you from my experience is that all of these ways of knowing have put barriers between me and my colleagues in the past due to the differences between our cultural and religious contexts. On the other hand, I will be showing pictures of beautiful women from around the world and I will specify how each culture perceives beauty and fashion from a stereotypical point of view. Culture meditates almost every aspect of our daily lives and experiences. It dictates to us with regard to language, customs, ethics, values, legal systems, eating habits and traditions. Most importantly, for our purposes, these norms can influence what we believe and what we know. Since different cultures hold certain values that may not be shared by other cultures, practices differ around the world. SO  How do stereotypes change our understanding of the world?  How does language affect culture?  How do emotions based on specific environments change our interpretation of other nations?  How does intuition lead to recognition of social standards?  ?  How does culture give birth to stereotypes and confirmation bias and why? These are questions that we are going to draw attention to in our presentation.

The first knowledge claim we are going to analyze in more detail is the LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT chapter because we must now consider the extent to which to which language affects the way we think about the world.  On one hand we have the SAPIR AND WHORF hypothesis:  According to this theory, language determines our experience or reality, and we can see and think. We can give a popular example in this case: the Inuit and the word snow. Apparently they have many words for snow, which allows them to offer more detail when talking about it because of the sophisticated vocabulary. As a consequence, they see and experience snow-covered landscapes differently than us.

 According to Edward Sapir, the “real world” is basically built upon language habits because no 2 languages are ever sufficiently similar to express the same idea or portray the same social reality.  To add everything up, fundamentally, we see and hear and experience very largely because language habits of our communities predispose our interpretation in general.  Since we are part of an international community, with people from all over the world, we either find the cultural differences interesting or simply non-understandable, in which case we choose to stay away from the people we can’t seem to have many things in common with;  In a wide-ranged nationality school, we tend to befriend people from our own countries or at least from the same side of the Earth as us, as we seem to interact with them better. This is every international student’s state of mind since we are inclined to make friends with individuals who understand the way we talk, our jokes, or just generally people who are familiar with the same thing we are familiar with.  Once different cultural viewpoint have been identified, there immediately arises a problem: which viewpoint is better? We have seen this problem before, but the point is very important because its crucial to determining standards of judgment. We should neither blindly reject not accept any cultural perspective that differs from ours but this is the reality. STEREOTYPES One danger with putting labels on people is that our labels can easily harden into stereotypes. A stereotype arises when we make assumptions about a group of people purely on the basis of their membership of the group. The use of stereotypes is particularly apparent in the case of nationality. Since Monica is Romanian, she must be either a gypsy who steals and lives on the streets, or a vampire and comes from a poor and communist country. And since Anya is Russian, she must have a pet bear and drink vodka all day long. She is also blond and likely to have blue-greyish eyes. Despite the dangers of stereotyping people some generalizations contain an element of truth in them as you can see in Anya’s case: she has blond hair and blue eyes. On the other hand, Some of Monica’s siblings were actually poor and lived under communist political structure years ago. If you visit a restaurant in Bucharest and one in Moscow, you will notice a difference in atmosphere and the way they typically behave. According to one quip, students go to international schools with prejudices about other cultures and leave realizing they are all true and without thinking outside of the box.

What, then, distinguishes damaging stereotypes from harmless generalizations? Typically, a stereotype is a caricature which exaggerates the negative features of a group and assumes they are possessed by all members of the group. Furthermore, it is usually based on prejudice rather than fact and is difficult to change in the light of contrary evidence.

EMOTIONS based on cultural background change interpretation of other nations For Example, if a racist who believes that all immigrants are lazy is shown an example of a hard-working immigrant, he will probably insist that the example is not typical, and quickly forget it. As Russians and Romanians have pretty similar racist stereotypes, we can assure you that if one of us brought home a black boyfriend, our parents would find it as a sign of disrespect and could cause major problems in our families. As a Romanian, my country has a minority of 30% gypsies, so our families associate them with Africans or black people in general. They can observe them in their natural habitat and they do not approve of their lifestyle choices, so they immediately assume that dark-skinned people live the same way. On the other hand, the same conclusion is drawn, based on the fact that in Russia the number of black people is very low, if not close to 0. This is why it is hard for us to embrace other cultures, since Russia is a very isolated nation in itself.

From this we can conclude that, even though our information comes from different sources and different contexts which are based on different emotions, the result can be the same. This is what creates racism and damaging stereotypes and reputations.

WHERE STEREOTYPES COME FROM Stereotypes generate from our second-hand knowledge. The search for knowledge is not only an individual enterprise, but also a communal one, and one of our main sources of knowledge is other people. Since we can share our experiences through language, we are able to know a great deal more about the world than if we had to rely on out own sources. If 4 people split in order to collect different information and then get back together and share their knowledge, they will do much better than if they each try to discover everything for themselves. Our ability to communicate with one another also means that we are able to pass on our beliefs and practices from one generation to another in the form of CULTURE. The

existence of culture means that, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel, we can make progress by building on the accumulated achievements of past generations. Scientist Isaac Newton once remarked “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” His point was that he was able to make his discoveries only because he was building on the contributions of other brilliant minds. Despite the advantages of accepting knowledge “second-hand” from other people, we must be careful that we do not fall into AUTHORITY WORSHIP and blindly accept what we are told without thinking about it. For hundreds of years, people believed that the Earth was the center of universe and that everything was made up of 4 elements: fire, water, earth and air; and that some people were natural slaves – but they were wrong. As this example shows, the mere longevity of a belief its no guarantee of its truth.

CONCLUSION

We believe that people should use their judgment better before being stereotypical towards a nation and should always question their sources and how reliable and accurate they are in order to have a better understanding of an area of knowledge, as it is vital to have a mixture of detail and context. On the other hand, we should base our decision mostly on our opinion that comes from our understanding of the world and our interpretation of the nation rather then fully base our beliefs on the second-hand knowledge because it might in fact be biased and cannot guarantee its truth.

Anna: blue Monica: grey...