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Bingqing's picture

New understandings

When we first entered this session—topics about cultures, I regarded the culture as something that must be established on the big circumstances and involve a long time span and a wide range of people. Thus, after I got the prompt of the first paper—to write a culture that I am familiar with—in this session, I did a lot of researches about  online about Chinese civilization and struggled to avoid being too general and insipid. After talking with Anne, I realized that the cultural evolution can happen within small region and during short time, like my community and even my family. There could be a culture belonging to my small community and family.

Then, I almost did not notice that two distinguished cultures had already been formed in our two classes until Paul and classmates started to conclude the similarity and difference between two sections. Physically, we are divided by a wall; however, we are more distinguished by the cultures formed in two classes. Why we feel no that comfortable when we are in the other class? The reason I come up with is that we are like infants when we first get into an unfamiliar cultural environment. We form our special culture in our class and feel comfortable to stay here, because we shape the culture all the time with our own flavors and at the same time adapt to the culture with gradual process. In this class, we and our culture shape each other. To some extent, the culture, which is established in certain period and by certain group of people, is naturally exclusive.

 

 

 

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