An ethnic community is a group of people who reside in the same area while maintaining similar culture regardless of the location of the community. When speaking of culture, you could divide it into two parts: material culture and non-material culture. Material culture being an object used or made by members of a specific society, and non-material culture being values, knowledge, norms, beliefs, or any other type of ideologies that this group will share. I have examined the material and non-material culture within Montreal’s Chinatown ethnic community and these were my findings.
Methods
Montreal’s Chinatown located between Old port and Milton park is a seven city block wide town consisting of restaurants and other businesses related but not
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The products sold in “Centre du Cadeau Oriental Gift Centre”, though I can not confirm if were authentic or not, definitely are older and paid homage to traditional Chinese culture, for example they sold many traditional Chinese clothing, statues of soldiers and spiritual beings and many other traditional forms of art. Many of the locals practiced respect for their elders, I noticed on accouple occasions the elders within Chinatown were being taken care of or helped by a person much younger then them. Traditions and respect for elders were the two most visible values within Chinatown.
To conclude ethnic communities such as Montreal’s Chinatown consist of many forms of culture ranging from tangible things we can see and touch and non-material things we can only experience. I learned how there could even be a sense of diversity within a location originally dedicated for one ethnic group and like Canada slowly formed into a mixing pot of cultures. Though the subculture within Chinatown isn’t solely Chinese physically it does share many norms and values with its origins of China even if it is one of the oldest Asian communities in North