Culture

When growing up, you learn certain rules, values, or behaviors to live by due to your specific culture. You don't know any other way of living because you've only been exposed or adapted to the environment around you. Nothing seems out of place, everyone around you also conforms and views the things you do to be "normal." Everything that is normal is a result of people and their cultural relativity.

Arriving from one culture to another could be quite overwhelming for an individual. Everything around seems so different, so new. They struggle to grasp the idea of things by taking everything in all at once. Some may feel like they have been living the wrong way and that's a result of cultural shock. Experiencing a new culture that pushes ethnocentrism can enhance this feeling. When others strive to make that individual behave the way they do, it's typically done through non-material culture such as rules, languages and gestures. These aspects vary from culture to culture, and because of this, it may make one feel as though it is necessary to conform to the cultural relativity, just to fit in. When my Hispanic friend told me he had a headache, I asked him if he wanted Ibuprofen. He then looked at me funny and said no, you. I looked at him with the same weird look and asked him why, thinking why wouldn't he want to help himself? He then told me in his culture, medicine is looked down upon and that the healthiest form of medicine is being natural; letting the body heal it. Due to the American culture, always quick with prescribing drugs and taking drugs when problems occur, it was my first instinct to just tell him to take a pill. Now looking back at the situation, he had not fallen into my ethnocentric idea; instead, he used a traditional rule from his culture.

The parts of non-material culture include folkways, mores and taboos. A folkway is the way of acting with more traditional rules, but not being judged. A more is something very serious that is supposed to be done and if it's not, the consequence will result in being judged. That something serious is like a moral or tradition. An example is if you decide not to wash your hands after you use the bathroom, people are going to judge you by viewing you as an unsanitary person. You would think that someone would want to after using the bathroom, but some do not and that's what distinguishes it from being a more versus a folkway or taboo. Now, a taboo is something so serious that even thinking about it would make you embarrassed. An example of a taboo from the story "Social time" is that here in America, people arrive at appointments earlier than they're supposed to because even thinking about being late makes Americans nervous.