The Social Lens: The Views Of Culture And Culture

Throughout history different cultures and societies have shaped us to be who we are today despite differences most cultures worked together to get us to where we are in the world today. The way our societies influence our experiences help us to find our own truth which, in turn, adds to what we personally view as reality. Our different cultures and societies influence each other through our different languages, our thinking processes and our sets of knowledge. In unit one of World Experience we have read many different texts, most of them have the common theme that thinking, knowledge, and language all shape our societies and cultures and how we interact with one another and how it changes the way we perceive things such as reality.

“While such cross-cultural variability often leads us to look down on other cultures’ classificatory schemas as primitive or ‘confused,’ it ought to help us recognize and accept the relative validity of our own.” (Zerubavel 125). Certain cultures look down on other cultures just because a word in one language means one specific thing but in another language two different things have the same word. “For example, while there is a single word for both rats and mice in Latin, insects and airplanes in Hopi, … there are separate words for blankets that are folded and spread out, … in Navajo.” (Zerubavel 125). We assume that because the way they classify things they are automatically inferior to us but in reality it doesn’t matter because to them the way we classify things could be wrong in their eyes. Thinking, knowledge, and language are all important factors in how everyone’s culture and society is shaped. Knowledge contributes to what each culture knows and believes to be true. Thinking affects what we accept from other cultures that have different views. Language affects how we are able to communicate our views. Thinking knowledge and language all shape what our societies and cultures turn out to be