Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Exploring cultural identity
Aspects of cultural identity
Aspects of cultural identity
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Exploring cultural identity
Aspects of cultural identity
Aspects of cultural identity
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
For example, Maisami felt no good toward her Iranian family. She was americanized and nothing like them. Maisami felt like she has to be more Iranian to fit in with her family. Toward the end of Maisami’s story she asks her mother, “Mom, am I Iranian or American?” and her mother tells her “you have to look at yourself in order to find out who you are - it's not where you are from that defines you”.
Ehrenreich's personal account encourages the readers to reflect on their own relationship to their cultural background and how it shapes their individual identity and practices. At the beginning of her essay, Barbara Ehrenreich shares a conversation she had
Sometimes, we don't realize how much influence our culture has on our personal identity; even something as simple as the language we speak can reflect on the way we see ourselves. The main character Jay in the "Patron Saints of Nothing" had repeated experiences where he could not relate to the issues he faced in the Philippines because he did not live there. “Jay, it's easy for us to pass judgment. But we don't live there anymore, so we can't grasp the extent to which drugs have affected the country.” (An Improvement to Society)
This remark makes it clear that it interferes with one’s own identity and battle to define oneself if they are unaware of their own traditions and customs. This demonstrated that people must be committed to their families in order to discover their own ancestry and culture, define their identity to
Chino says to himself,”I realized that by reinventing culture, they were reinventing themselves. I wanted to reinvent myself too. I no longer wanted the world to be just my neighborhood anymore”. Chino is starting to realize if he wants to reinvent himself that he would have to change social expectations humans must bond in order to belong to their social group. For example”Most women under this culture are responsible, religious and self sacrificing.
Anzaldua employs her text to express her emotions in regards to various predicaments faced by immigrants during their lives in the United States. She approaches personal insights in regards to language such as expectations from the Anglo population when it comes to being an immigrant and speaking proper English, and the expectations from her Hispanic parents and their desire for their children’s success. Anzaldua’s work has several thought-provoking ideas within it, but this paper will be focused on the analysis of the following quote: “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue-
Cultural Outsiders Many multi-cultural people live between two different cultures and often feel as if they do not belong in either. In the article “By Another Name” by Santha Rama Rau, two Indian sisters share their experience of going to an englo-indian school. In the poem “White Lies” by Natasha Thereway, the author presents a poor colored girl who lies to her community about who she really is in society. The two works differ because in the article the sisters mother does not get angry that her daughters were trying to change or “fit in” and in the poem the mother scolds her daughter for lying about herself , however the texts also have a couple similarities; both texts have characters who are ashamed about their ethnicity, and in both texts there are characters who struggle with being outsiders in their community.
This provides information about his/her past and allows them to understand what makes them who they are. For the majority, culture and race becomes a part of a person and they take great pride in that. Certain aspects of a person’s life contains traces of their culture such as traditions, festivals, family gatherings and lifestyle. These traditions become the positive side of the term ‘race’. If one takes the time to look past a race’s stereotypes they may discover that these people are simply trying to enjoy their own life and culture.
There are a variety of cultural differences depicted throughout the world. Beliefs systems and social groups in our society today are based on a person’s background history, upbringing, and consciousness. One major aspect of a social group is the study of double consciousness or the internal conflict. The presence of two unconnected streams of consciousness in one individual or experienced by subordinated groups in an oppressive society in comparison to one’s own individuality or the quality that makes one person or thing different from all others. How a person feels about themselves and the intrapersonal relationship that occurs within the individual mind or self has a great impact on a person’s life.
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God are both multicultural novels that look into the lives of persons belonging to dual cultures. In Song of Solomon we see the characters coming from an African-American background, whereby in So Far from God, they are Mexican-American. Multiculturalism is before anything else a theory about culture and its value (Rodrigues). Salee explains “most minority cultures today are trying to resist assimilation into the vortex of stronger, dominant cultures” (1994).
How others see you is influenced by material, social, and physical constraints. This causes a tension between how much control you have in constructing your own identity and how much control or constraint is exercised over you. How we see ourselves and how others see us differ in many ways, but is an important factor of our identity. “A Lesson Before Dying”,
INTRODUCTION If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.
The background of my cultural identity I am an African American female but that isn’t all there is to know me for. I am an African American girl who is very interactive with my religion and also my culture. Cultural identity can be hard to explain because some people don’t know what’s really in their culture and they fail to see , and understand it. I know what my cultural identity is because of my ethiopian flag, the baked macaroni, and the movie the lion king.
Throughout my experiences in this course so far, I have had many opportunities to reflect on my own past and have begun to better understand my own cultural identity. It has been much more difficult to wrap my head around than I would have predicted it to be because so many things play into the construction of an identity that it can be hard to look at all of those separate pieces together. My cultural identity, like all others, is more complicated than it first appears. I identify as a white person, a woman, an American, a gay person, and a feminist, just to name a few. While all of these labels carry with them stereotypes and expectations, they also interplay with the cultural influences I was subject to throughout my childhood.
They feel and become left out when they are with their community’s group of friends. In addition, some older children who came to the United States have a hard time learning a new culture because it was a culture shock to them. There are two major things that become problems in their journey to adopt a new culture; barrier to language and living their lifestyle. While adapting new culture, they have a difficult journey because of the bully, discrimination, and racism that they encounter. Some of these situations that Chin refugees face can be related to how Faith faces her problems with cultures and