Overcoming Intercultural Barriers
VVAREL
culture.pptCultural Barrier
Viviana Vanrel
COM/200
September 14, 2015
Shea Brooks
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Personal Background
- John Smith is an American who is thirty years old.
- He is an African-American.
- Works as a janitor in Texas.
John Smith is one of the African Americans who have been working hard to ensure that the do make the ends meet. At the age of thirty year old, he has been able to open a business of janitorial services thus employing twenty people. His hard work has placed him a the position of the best companies in Texas offering these services. His family is known to have come to Texas in over fifty years ago. After completing the college, he chose to offer janitorial services to people of the region. He is known to be an honest man who does his duties diligently.
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Where he Lives
- The man has lived in Texas for better part of his life.
- He has been interacting with different people both professionally and socially.
- Texas is his home and he has businesses at this region
John is a person who has lived in Texas all of his life. In fact, most of his schooling was conducted in this region. This areas is known to have many people of different cultures which has forced him to learn to tolerate. This region is also known to be culturally rich compared to other parts of the area. The business that he operates has been opened in this region.
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Cultural Facts
- This person has undergone through most of the African Americans rites of passage.
- He underwent through thorough shaving by that was a must to conducted.
- He had to learn different cultures so as to interact with the neighbors freely.
Learning to adapt to different culture is a difficult task that each person has to give a try. As for John, this was the only way he could have survived to live in this region. Therefore, this was a choice he could have made earlier or later in life and there was no way out of it. The most interesting of all was being asked to be shaved at the age of thirteen to symbolize that he was about to be recognized by the society as a fully grown man. In addition, understanding different cultures was to his advantage because he was now capable of interacting with different cultures(Castillo, 2006).
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Experiences in adapting new culture
- Language barrier
- Emotional constraints
- Behavior constraints
While learning these cultures, John encountered different experiences including the one for language barrier. It was difficult for him to figure out what some of the words meant so that he could have understood that culture more. Emotional constraints were other experiences that he encountered while adapting. Finally, there were behavior constraints that gave him the perfect experience for understanding that particular culture(Tosi, 2013).
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Comparison between both Johns culture and mine
- These cultures all give us a way of thinking, hearing, and seeing the world.
- Additionally, both cultures trigger a different interpretation to the world.
- However, the portrayal of emotions is different in the two cultures.
Cultural relativism is an aspect that entails comparing different cultures and evaluating in details the major similarities and differences in the cultures. These cultures are both symbolic because they help us view the world differently from different perspectives. In addition, these cultures have made it possible to interpret the world differently based on the belief of each and every culture. My culture is different from John’s in the manner in which they portray their emotions towards different circumstances.
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Reference
- Castillo, E. D. (2006). Reducing cultural barriers through Promotores de Salud.
- Tosi, A. (2013). Crossing barriers and bridging cultures: The challenges of multilingual translation for the European Union. Clevedon ; Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
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