What culture do you participate in?
That was the question DP had to answer for a anthropology class, and he didn't really know what to put. Is there a list somewhere?
I told him to put hipster, but he said no.
It seems like a really vague question.
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had to write about her culture in third grade, and it was required that she write about her religion. they didn't let kids write that they don't practice one, even if they wrote about why, or prominent atheists. so my kid wrote this whole report taht was supposed to be about her, with a whole irish catholic section.
i guess it's assumed that you "participate" in something.
i really really wanted my daughter to pick NJ culture. i told her she can get pictures of her relative's homes with cars on blocks in the driveways, relatives with high hair and 2" long fingernails, describe how we all lecture to people on the road how they're SUPPOSED to drive, and cite that NJ consistently ranks at the bottom of teh entire country for driving knowledge, all these things. there is so much to write about. and the teacher seemed to think that "culture" had a very distinct definition, which is ethnicity and religion.
and i really, really, really wanted her to write about atheism, tracing it way back to socrates. but she didn't have the nerve. all she mustered the nerve to do was give a presentation and say to the class, "This isn't MY culture, Mrs ____ made me put it in here."
So if you're in that teacher's class and you don't practice a religion or don't believe in religion, you're just supposed to lie?
Amazing.
"Overcome the angry by non-anger; overcome the wicked by goodness; overcome the miser by generosity; overcome the liar by truth." -Buddha
welcome to the machine.
hahaha hipster.
and madfilth, this is what i worry about in schools for my not yet school-aged child...
I'm glad that the hipster part was understood as a joke.
We are so not hip, but we totally have friends that identify with that culture and look the part.
I used to identify with the whole hippie dead head culture, but I guess we're just boring now!
Ugh
Oops, this was supposed to be a reply to Madame Filth's story about atheism and 3rd graders.
as an anthropology student/sociology student and practicing anthropologist culture has many definitions but they are somewhat condensed in to one which states that culture is a shared, learned system of norms, morals, beliefs and behaviors. No one in America really participates in one and only one culture (by my chosen definition) - which begs the question - is 'American' a culture? I won't bore any one with my opinion on that but: I don't know what I would do if my kid had to do that project - or, specifically, the religion based one. To assume that one's religion and one's culture are one in the same is faulty. Here goes my rant about sociocultural anthropology being a mandatory class for prospective teachers..............
"If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that you might go from day to day without finding shit in our hair." ~ David Sedaris
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Really it seems like we (Dp and I) participate in many cultures depending on how you define culture--online culture (message boards), Southern culture (sweet Tea, and ya'll), American Culture (aka consumer culture, St*rb*cks, white privilege culture, etc...)
But because we are not a specific religion or ethnicity we don't really have definitive culture it seems like a fluid concept. I think at one point there was 160 definitions for culture.