issue 63

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Issue 63
To truly understand your own culture-no matter how you define it-require personal knowledge of at least one other culture that is distinctly different from your own.

Do people get a better understanding of their own culture through knowing more about the culture very different from their own? The author claims so. I concede the culture varied from our own can bring us new awareness of culture and thiking of the disadvantages of our own. However, in my view, people learn more about their own culture through research on culture similar to our own.

18:03

People come to realize flaws and disadvantages of their own culture through comparison of culture different from their own. After all, no present culture reveals absolutely perfection in the world, and vice versa. The culture different from our own reveals another view and value toward the world on the basis of its own experience of the history. Its existence proves some of its reasonable worth. Through the difference, people can obviously judge whether some parts of each kind of culture is right or not, thus more objectively commenting on their own culture. For example, we can look no further than the study of history both in china and roman in ancient time. The antient Chinese who were easily content with their life owing to ample resources of living and vast territory developed more humanities rather than science, while Romans who generally were puffed with ambitions to conquer the world spent more time on progressing science and reasoning thinking. Through this difference, we can learn from roman culture of the proper desire for progress and development of science, and we also can learn that tolerance and forgiveness in a culture contribute a lot to peace.

However, only through comparison between two different cultures may not suffice to know better about one's own culture. If a person is unaware of the essence and common sense of his own culture, he should not judge more about this culture by incomplete comparison. What's worse, those who compare with just the surface or some superficial appearance of two culture are inclined to be blindly favor of the different culture and negate their own culture as a whole. For example, when pop music and R&B coming from American youth culture were brought in to china, there's a mania for such music popular among Chinese teenagers. While being crazy and curious about the rapid tempos and beating in these kinds of music, teenagers generally regard Chinese traditional music as stale and old-fashioned bygones and they were critical of any traditional music without awareness of the marrow of it.

In order to know more about our own culture, however, it is more important to consider taking a similar culture as a comparison. Since another culture may have the same customs and tradition but different background. Through comparison by different backgrounds, we can learn value lessons about the essence, rules, and cause of common habits and tradition. What's more, if we find valid solutions to such situation in the culture similar to our own, we may apply the same methods to solve the same situation confronted in our own culture. Having analyzing the same situations of scarcity of resources and outdated production capacity with Japan's past, Korean's decision to imitate Japanese strategies like export-oriented economic plan and investment abroad brings prosperity and status to change this backward country.

19:17

To sum up, unless people who want to compare the culture different from his own has a common sense of his own culture's background, I fundamentally disagree with the speaker. In my point of view, by comparing similar culture we can know better about the essence of our culture and seek out solutions for reference for common situations in both cultures.