Culture And Identity

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2. Culture and Identity: Chinese ethnic in Malaysia
Culture is defined as “the way of life of a people” (Hall, 1996; Mathews, 2000). Culture will be developed over period of time as society keeps learning their culture; they will silhouette their behaviours and characters (Mathews, 2000). Culture is profound, common, un-stated experiences which group members of a given culture share. The member communicates with one another without knowing, and which form the surroundings against which all other events are judged in order to provide the approach in which a group resolves dilemmas. According to Hofstede (1980), “Culture is always a collective phenomenon, because it is at least partly shared with people who live or lived within the same social environment, which is where it was learned not distinctive.” Furthermore, culture is not uniform which enable us to access to different cultural meaning and amend between different culturally relevant behaviours depending on the context.
“In cultural metaphor, Value is core of the culture as broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affair over others such as evil vs good, moral vs immoral and so on. The next is Practice, include (symbol, heroes and rituals). They are visible to an outside observer but their cultural meaning is invisible and lies precisely and only in the way these practices are interpreted by insiders. Ritual are collective activities that are technically superfluous to reach desired ends but that are considered socially essential like paying respect to others and so on. Hero is person who possesses characteristics that are highly prized in a culture and serve as role model for behaviour. Symbol is word, gesture, picture, or object that carry a particular meaning that is r...

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...ons with Malay during business particularly as most of our customers are Malay. Business is important for us as minority of Kelantanese Chinese but we still maintain our own heritage for example we dine in the Chinese “non-halal” restaurant and I studied in Chinese vernacular school in Kelantan. I still feel very complicated in describing myself as either “Malaysian”, “Chinese” or in more appropriate term “Malaysian Chinese” because I have not found out which identity I more attached to either Chinese or Malaysian. Consequently the ethnicity of Malaysian Chinese is more integrated approach of three theories which means we, Chinese in Malaysia constructed suing our origins, understanding in specific context and time for us (Gudykunst & Kim, 1997; Lee, 2000). Move down the next part will be the discussion of the factor that helps to determine my cultural identity.

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