Ethnographic Interview Farhana Loonat

I interviewed Farhana Loonat for my ethnographic interview. She is of Indian decent but was born and raised in Durban South Africa. She came to the U.S. in July of 2006 for educational purposes and attended University of Virginia. I went into the interview with the assumption that she was from India based on the fact that she had told me in the past that her family was in India. Also based on her appearance it reinforced my assumption that she was from India. This right off the bat was a perfect learning experience! We cannot make the assumptions based on people’s appearance and little information that we may have.

I do not know much about this culture. There are commonly held stereotypes such as there are slums everywhere, Indians aren’t

I feel since Farhana is highly educated and wrote some of her dissertation on cultural studies that her awareness and responses were much different than the common person of this cultural group. She is very well traveled so her world views are much more diverse than the average person. She emphasized that culture is something that is socially and politically constructed, that it doesn’t have any identifiable markers, which I somewhat understand. But I did leave a little confused. For the sake of this class I am conflicted. We as human service workers need to be aware of cultural norms and traditions when working with different cultural groups. When I look up Indian culture and tradition I find quite a lot of information that seems specific to the country. I sent Farhana a thank you email thanking her for her time and telling her that the interview experience prompted me to do some more research on the Indian culture and she replied to the email saying “there is no “Indian culture””. Is there no Mexican culture, no African culture, no American culture, and no Asian culture?? I understand that we cannot put people in these cookie cutter molds based on their ethnic groups but I do feel like different groups do have cultural traditions, norms, and values, or maybe it is best described as ethnic elements? Obviously they are not going to be the same for the whole group and we cannot universalize different beliefs and values for a specific ethnic