Analysis Of Eat Pray Love

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Learning to Eat, Pray, Love in Our Global World

When I was about sixteen, I read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. While it was not particularly lexically or stylistically challenging, it certainly was ideologically challenging. Through following Gilbert on her travels to Italy, India, and Bali, I gained a new appreciation for cultures outside of the United States and the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” world I grew up in. This appreciation manifested itself in a growing respect for both the similarities between value systems and the wonderful differences between cultures around the world.
While in India, Gilbert—a white, upper-middle class, Christian woman—explores Buddhist teachings through yoga. While religion was never very strongly …show more content…

During Gilbert’s time in Italy, she learned that Italians value in-the-moment pleasures, such as eating delicious food, much more than Americans do. As I read along with Gilbert as she combines values from all of the places she travelled—Italy, India and Bali—I realized that it is not only okay, but also beneficial to explore other cultures and even respectfully adopt their values and practices to create your own culture rather than passively accepting the culture in which one is raised. After reading Gilbert’s narrative about her time in India, I thought that cross-cultural similarities make various cultures valuable, but the book as a whole taught me that there is a lot that diverse populations can learn from differences between each other’s cultures and those differences can be much more valuable to learn about and consider than the similarities amongst all people. My bias towards beliefs with similarities to my “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” upbringing did not indicate the value of these beliefs, I realized. Various cultures are valuable no matter how they are related to other cultures. There can always be something learned from exposure to different cultures, even if you don’t want to adopt Buddhism as your religion or hedonistically eat dessert with every meal. Simple tolerance and acceptance is a significant gain that can come from education on and experience with cultures and beliefs different than one’s

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