communication disorders across cultures iii. sociocultural diversity in the us

Communication Disorders Across Cultures

III. Sociocultural Diversity in the US

Social Organization

The way in which our world is organized affects how we perceive the people and the social events of our world, and how we behave.

It is our family and our government that most influence our perceptions and the way we communicate.

Our family introduces us to the culture; our government tells us what from our past is worth remembering.

The roles of family, government, and history are important to our understanding of social organization.

Family

The Chinese have a proverb that says if you know the family you don’t need to know the individual.

The family is probably the most influential force in the development of individual values and world view within a culture.

The family exposes the individual to countless experiences before he or she is influenced by major cultural institutions.

The family instills modes of thought and actions that, with reinforcement from society, soon become habitual.

Family

It is the family that first exposes children to some of the crucial attitudes, values, and patterns of behavior they will need to exist within the culture.

Sex roles are taught at home. Children learn to differentiate between masculine and

feminine activities at a very early age. The Navajo of the American Southwest provide an

example of gender roles.

Family

Women and children are charged with taking care of the sheep, which provide food and clothing.

Women also process the wool and weave clothing and blankets which can be sold for cash income.

The men work as silversmiths and fashion jewelry for cash income, but the Navajo women provide most subsistence labor and cash income.

Values of self-reliance are also taught at home. The child learns where to turn for emotional, support as well as where

not to turn.

Family

Through family, children learn what it is possible and desirable to strive for, as well as how to please others as well as themselves.

From early on, the family teaches children responsibility to self as well as well as to others.

Children develop a sense of what is important and worthy of attention and what they may ignore or leave on its own.

As part of their responsibility they learn obedience.

Family

They learn who and what is authoritative, and they learn to obey authority—including the people and institutions outside of the immediate family that demand respect and obedience.

They learn to recognize people superior to them in the structure and to behave in a manner appropriate to that relationship.

Tied to the concept of obedience is the parallel concept of dominance.

Family

Children learn who controls them and who or what they may control.

One obeys those who are dominant and may disobey or dominate those who are not.

Families teach loyalty in terms of who deserves one’s allegiance.

A child born in India perceives, for example, many people living together in one house, including elderly members.

Family

Through this experience, the child is learning about extended families as well as a value towards the aged.

In extended families, loyalty extends beyond the immediate family of parents and siblings to include grandparents, all sorts of cousins, aunts, uncles, great aunts, great uncles, even godparents.

In the US, the child sees only the immediate family in the house and is learning about the nuclear family.

Loyalty is generally confined to the immediate family.

Family

Within the nuclear family there is also the notion that at a certain age children move out of the house and establish their own household and financial independence.

In the extended family several generations may live in the same abode and depend upon each other financially.

Families also teach the relative importance of self. Some cultures are very adult oriented, and children are

relatively unimportant.

Family

In other cultures, children are very important, and parents often will make persona, sacrifices to ensure that their children are not wanting.

The family instructs us about what is important. Seemingly insignificant experiences, from whether one

draws his/her food from a common bowl or eats off a separate plate, to who talks at the dinner table, when combined with thousands of other “messages” from the family, shape and mold the members of each culture’s attitudes, values and behaviors.

Family

As we grow from infancy to childhood, the socialization process is stepped up and we rapidly internalize the rules of appropriate and inappropriate societal behavior.

Religion, education, recreation, health care, and many other cultural institutions reinforce our learning, shape and regulate our behavior and thought.

Government & History

Government is much more than a culture’s political system.

It is the carrier of the history of a culture, the origin of the cultural values, ideals, and behaviors.

History can help us answer such questions as why one type of activity evolved over another.

The value that Mexicans place upon “talk” for example, goes back to the socializing that was pat of the marketplace during the Aztec period.


To understand modern-day Jews and their way of perceiving events and people, you have to understand 7000 years of continuous persecution that members of this culture have experienced.

Even the behavior of Russians and their attraction to communism makes more sense when we appreciate the connection between history and culture.

During the past thousands of years, Russian has been invaded by Germans, Turks, Poles, Swedes, French, English, and many other groups.


This history has made the Russians long for security (communism) and fear the rest of the world (their valuing a strong military).

Japanese history provides insight to our understanding of perception.

Until post-World War II time, Japan permitted few outsiders to enter.

Until recently, the Japanese always guarded their racial purity—they were not a melting pot.


Their history of feudalism, in which benevolent feudal lords took care of their people, has had a major impact in the development of modern industrial Japan.

It was very easy for the Japanese to transfer this tradition of feudal loyalty to large companies because the companies, in a sense, replaced feudalism.

Companies care for their employees and provide them with lifelong employment in a king of cradle-to-grave social environment.


With their history of feudalism transferred to the large company in its stead, Japan has been phenomenally successful in becoming one of the premier industrialized nations.

The history of Islamic countries can help us understand their perception of Americans.

The Islamic faith teaches that God (Allah) is the master of the universe.


The Muslim perception of the US as a country dominated by science and technology has wounded the pride of Islam.

Muslims see the United States as the temporary masters of the world.

From an Islamic point of view, the US has upset the course of history.

Militant Muslim even perceive the US as the devil’s empire.


Within our own culture, the links among government, history, and culture help explain the evolution of specific values and attitudes.

From the War of Independence to a Constitution that tells us we can all own guns, our history has stressed individual freedom and our right to defend that freedom even if it means engaging in acts of violence.

Our notions of freedom and independence and the challenge of developing a sparsely populated land have produced a culture with a strong love of change and progress.

History & US Dominant Culture

The United States is unique in that the dominant culture is relatively young and was formed primarily through migration.

A number of diverse cultures migrated to the US and intermingled to form our current diverse culture.

But this cultural integration did not come about easily. The shared, desperate desire of the American people

to be separated from “the Crown,” from the “Divine Right,” and from the Church of England provided the thrust toward unity.

History & US Dominant Culture This impetus led in part, to the binding of Germans,

Irish, and English together in a social fabric ample enough to contain Catholics, Congregationalists, and Methodists, and to unite North, South, and West within a national framework.

Americans wanted to separate alienable rights from inalienable rights.

The American fundamental proposition became life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for each individual, whose liberties had to be protected against the abusive power of government.


The United States that exists today arose because of a variety of factors.

Not everyone arrived here as an immigrant. The American Indians became a conquered people;

African Americans were enslaved; Many Americans arrived as refugees fleeing a

homeland in which they could not remain, only to find themselves in a country in which they were subjected to similar prejudice and discrimination.


The dominant culture of the United States is an amalgamation of the diverse cultures of Europe, to which have been added aspects of American Indian, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and more recently Hispanic cultures.

Although some aspects of these cultures have been assimilated, there has not be acceptance of these races/ethnicities as equals in a diverse, multicultural society.

History & US Dominant Culture A second historical aspect of American culture is that

the people who settled the colonies disliked formality and valued individuality.

When you emigrate to a new land and attempt to stake out a new life, especially in a land that was undeveloped, a great deal of attention has to be paid to the daily activities of surviving.

The situation did not lend itself to nonsensical European or British rules of formality.

Life in the colonies was a constant struggle; only the independent survived.

History & US Dominant Culture Psychologically, habits of survival based on

individualism and a lack of formality lead to thought patterns, beliefs, values, and attitudes attuned to that environment.

Individualism has come to lie at the very core of American culture.

It is a moral affront to be denied the right to think for ourselves, judge for ourselves, make our own decisions, or live our lives as we see fit.


Another aspect of American history that has shaped the culture is violence.

Our history is filled with violence, ranging from taking Indian lands by force, to fighting the War of Independence and the Civil War, to the development of the West.

Guns are so much a part of our culture and history that our Constitution guarantees our right to bear arms—a right no other nation grants.

The Paradox of American Mainsteam

A paradox exists within the American mainstream in that nationalists, or persons who have been the traditional elite, seek to deny rights to certain groups even as multiculturalists work to claim such rights.

There are two forces at play here: homogeneity versus heterogeneity; and essentialism versus constructionism.

Homogeneity “refers to biological, social, and cultural similarities of a group” (Kottak & Kozaitis, 2008, p. 60).


Homogeneity if often used to describe national culture.

It involves a type of sophisticated stereotyping which reduces a complex culture to a shorthand description thought to be applicable to all the individuals inhabiting that country/nation.

This stereotyping is more useful in making comparisons between cultures than in understanding the wide variations of behavior within a single culture (Osland & Allan, 2000).


The basis of national identity is its historical territory or homeland, common myths, common historical memory, mass public culture, common legal rights and duties, and common economy with territorial mobility for members.

A nation’s cultural identity is constructed and reconstructed through different levels of the historical process.

Historical texts and symbols maintain the national identity.


Economic parameters, such as major industries, per capita income, play an important role in shaping the symbols and myths of material culture.

Institutional factors, such as the extent of rule of law, shared duties and responsibilities, system of governance, etc., also plays an important role in the development of a homogenous national culture.

Geography is central to national identity; it can determine economic structures, food habits, societal structures, division of labor, and group rituals.


In contrast to those aspects of biology, sociology, and culture that make us alike, heterogeneity is concerned with our differences—our cultural variations—our diversity.

Although members of the our nation may share a common American citizenship and loyalty, ethnic groups maintain and foster their particular language, customs, and cultural values.

Heterogeneity is synonymous with diversity.


Diversity comes from the Latin verb divertere, to differ.

It is the condition of being different or having differences.

Diversity implies a lack of standardization, of orderliness, of homogeneity.

When we talk about diversity, we are talking about the other, whatever that other might be: someone of a different gender, race, class, national origin; somebody at a greater or lesser distance from the norm; someone outside the set; or


someone who doesn’t fit into the mental configurations that give our lives order and meaning.

In short, diversity is desirable in principle, but may not be so in practice.

Long live diversity…as long as it conforms to my standards, to my mind set, to my view of life, to my sense of order.

The United States, by its very nature, by its very development, is the essence of diversity.


It is diverse in its geography, population, institutions, technology, its social, cultural, and intellectual modes.

What keeps our society together is tolerance for cultural, religious, social, political, and even linguistic differences.

In this new century, we need attitudes and behaviors that recognize and promote interdependence and cooperation among various cultural groups, both nationally and globally.


However, the process of interdependence and cooperation is made more complex by the presence of more than one set of core referents and beliefs.

Essentialism is a belief in natural and fixed characteristics of human categories.

Throughout the world, racial, cultural, and ethnic differences are used to place people into different categories.

Once we categorize people in this way, we automatically assume that they have the essence of this category.


In other words, there is a tendency to believe that those who belong to a specific culture exhibit morals, ideas, or traits universally, e.g. whites are greedy.

Essentialist positions on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or other group characteristics, consider these to be fixed traits, discounting variation among group members as secondary.

Placing someone in a category and believing that person possess certain ideas or traits effects the way we think about that person.


Calling someone a musician, for example, makes playing music seem much more central to their being--more essential--than just saying that the person plays music.

As we will see, the basis for racial stereotyping arose from these essentialist categories.

Constructionism, on the other hand, refers to a process of socialization by which people “construct” ideas, beliefs, and practices.

Categories of knowledge and reality are actively created by social relationships and interactions.


Our categories of thought (and thus the ideas we have), how we talk (and thus what we say), our experiences and feelings, and what we express and do are primarily determined by the culture in which we live.

These constructions are fluid, more culturally malleable depending on context.

Examples of contemporary “constructions” include feminism, gay rights, and racial equality.


Even when we describe groups of people as "tribes," or "clans" or "extended families," for example, we are not naming the truth of how people cohabit together, but we are constructing a reality based on our socialization and interactional patterns.

It is through relationships that our worlds are created, through which all that we take to be beautiful, valuable, and worthy of commitment are constituted.

And it is through relationships that we may, at any time, begin the process of reconstructing the world.


The value of constructionism is that it does not attempt to establish the last word, a position beyond which dialogue is impossible.

Rather, constructionism functions as an invitation to possibilities, to exploration, to creation, and possibly to material conditions in which there is greater tolerance, and the coordination of peoples toward what they may see as a more humane and life sustaining world.

Linguistic Relativism

Meaning is a human construction. There is no particular configuration of words or

phrases that is uniquely matched to what it is we call either the world "out there" or "in here."

We may wish to agree that "something exists," but whatever "is" makes no demands on the configuration of phonemes or phrases used by humans in communicating about it.


Language gains its capacity for meaning from relationships--from the way in which it is used as people coordinate themselves with each other and the world about them.

Because "what there is" makes no intrinsic demands on our language, words gain their meaning through use within human relationships.

One of the most important theoretical formulations concerning language is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which posits that language is a guide to social reality.


Language is not simply a means of reporting experience; it is a way of defining experience.

There is no intrinsic superiority of any language or dialect over another.

Linguistic relativism recognizes that all known languages and dialects are effective means of communication.

Each language presents us with the unique way in which individuals construct meaning, based on their perceptions of the world and their interpretations of experience.


For example, the use of language to describe time differs among various peoples of the world.

Western societies perceive time as something that can be kept, saved, lost, or wasted.

Being on time is extremely important. In other societies, time take on different values. In Vietnamese, for example, context determines time,

not the form of the verb. The Sioux Indian language contains no words to

represent the concepts of being late or waiting.


Some adherents of Zen Buddhism perceive time as a place, an infinite pool in which acts cause waves or ripples that eventually subside, so there is no past, no present, no future.

Languages are flexible and constantly changing; they undergo the process of growth and differentiation, sometimes by borrowing foreign terms, or by creating entirely new expressions.

As their construct of reality and meaning change, so too will the language.

Linguistic Stratification

No language or dialect can confer, by inherent properties of the language itself, a differential advantage on its speakers.

However, the social evaluation of its speakers, and by extension, the language itself, particularly as it reflects political and economic contexts, can lead to judgments about power and prestige.

Consider what is termed “standard American English.” What is the “standard?” Has the standard changed

over time to reflect changing political and economic realities?

Linguistic Stratification

In your textbook, Kottak and Kozaitis (2008) discuss the notion of language serving as symbolic capital in the linguistic market of employability, materials resources, and positions of power and prestige.

In stratified societies, there is always differential control of prestige speech by formal institutions—the educational establishment, state, church, and the media.

And, some forms of nonstandard speech carry greater stigma.

Linguistic Inequality

As we have seen, all languages, as systems of communication, are equal, but socially, linguistic diversity is stratified.

Why are some linguistic varieties and dialects viewed as more prestigious and useful than others?

The answer has to do with the speakers—the ones who hold social power—and determine the distribution of resources, especially education and employment.

Linguistic varieties reinforce cohesion and external distinction, creating and valorizing a social identity.

communication disorders across cultures iii. sociocultural diversity in the us

Documents

family children

family women

roles of family

immediate family

us slide

children responsibility

cash income

navajo women