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Culture Language Biology Sapir-Whorf Thesis

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.""

Morality Uncertainty Culture

In many Asian-headquartered corporations, this expression of power stomps flat the multi-level relationships and open communication required for innovation. When businesses fail to address issues of power, they remain vulnerable to failure.

Professor Geert Hofstede calls the phenomenon "power distance." What makes it particularly relevant in Asia? Power distance is the degree to which less powerful members of institutions and organizations accept that power is distributed unequally. In very high power distance cultures, the lower level person will unfailingly defer to the higher level person, and feel relatively ok with that as it is the natural order. The higher level person accepts this truth as well — or metes out consequences for failure to comply. In low power distance cultures, everyone expects to be listened to regardless of rank or background, and they will reject leaders whom they perceive as autocratic or patronizing.

The notion applies in any sort of community, from countries to companies to communities to families — anywhere there are two people or more. Top-down leadership exists everywhere. What makes power distance in Asian businesses special is that this aspect of the corporate culture is rooted in deeply held values in the larger culture, which makes it much tougher to shift.

Power Culture Hofstede Organization

Entrepreneurship Singapore Policy Culture Education

It is debatable whether English or Mandarin will dominate in South East Asia in the future. There are arguments for both on the economic front.

But culturally, there is no dispute.

Even Mandarin language enthusiasts like Singaporean businessman Mr Lee, says that English will remain popular so long as Hollywood exists.

The success of movies such as Kung Fu Panda, an American production about a Chinese animal, has caused a lot of anxiety in China, he says.

There have been many cartoons in China about pandas before, but none had reached commercial success, says Mr Lee.

"The moment Kung Fu Panda hit the cinemas everybody watched it. They bought the merchandise and they learned English."

Language Currency Globalization Culture Cultural Industries

Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they’re interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail.

Creativity Law Regulation Remix Culture

"When it comes to the debt crisis," says Eco, "and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't understand anything about the economy, we must remember that it is culture, not war, that cements our [European] identity. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we've been at peace for 70 years and no one realises how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war between Spain and France, or Italy and Germany, provokes hilarity. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. I hope that culture and the [European] market will do the same for us."

Culture Europe Economics

It is thus difficult to point to the number of languages that are needed, as well as to which ones are needed. There is no unique solution. It is clear today that globalisation has taken its toll, at least on some, if not on many of us. Do we need more of it by going to a unique language, whichever it is?

Language Culture Globalization

culture is an adaptation, which exists because it conferred a reproductive advantage on our hunter-gatherer ancestors. According to this view many of the diverse customs that the standard social science model attributes to nurture are local variations of attributes acquired 70 or more millennia ago, during the Pleistocene age, and now (like other evolutionary adaptations) “hard-wired in the brain.” But if this is so, cultural characteristics may not be as plastic as the social scientists suggest. There are features of the human condition, such as gender roles, that people have believed to be cultural and therefore changeable. But if culture is an aspect of nature, “cultural” does not mean “changeable.” Maybe these controversial features of human culture are part of the genetic endowment of human kind.

Culture Nature Nurture Gender Stereotype

China, however, is a strong counterpoint to the claim that moralising, universal gods are needed for the establishment of co-operative mega-societies. Religion in China simply doe snot play the same role as it doe sin the West. Most religion is composed of a blend of philosophical life stances with localised folk myths.

And yet China is by anyone's standards an enormously successful mega-society, really without parallel in the World. As an example of large-scale co-operation among unrelated individuals, it really is a paragon of orderliness and stability.

And yet, the case of Yueye has got me thinking. I'm certainly no expert on Chinese psychology and culture. But if, as Zhang implies, there really is this profound cultural difference between China and other cultures, then maybe the type of religion really does have a meaningful effect on altruism.

Culture Psychology Guanxi China Monotheism Religion Alturism

Nouveau Riche Parvenu Capitalism Culture

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't*. If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummt into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right. Western science, acting on good evidence that the moon orbits the Earth a quarter of a million miles away, using Western-designed computers and rockets, has succeeded in placing people on its surface. Tribal science, believing that the moon is just above the treetops, will never touch it outside of dreams.

Science Culture Relativism

“What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses?”

Gender Equality Infanticide India Culture Capitalism

By distinguishing between acts of random violence and acts of violence against women, the sponsors of the Violence Against Women Act believe that they are showing sensitivity to feminist concerns. In fact, they may be doing social harm by accepting a divisive, gender-specific approach to a problem that is not caused by gender bias, misogyny, or "patriarchy"-an approach that can obscure real and urgent problems such as lesbian battering or male-on-male sexual violence

Culture Rape Gender Equality Class Inequality

There is an obvious tension between our self-evident diversity and a highly normative concern with or idealization of appearance. While Amy Winehouse turned her overly normative critical apparatus on herself, Breivik applied his with monstrous consequences on just about anyone other than himself (as has been pointed out, unlike so-called “spree killers,” Breivik never had any notion of seeking his own destruction). One was a self-hater, the other would appear to be more a delusional self-lover. But both seem to have been suffering from hypernomia.

Norms Culture Suicide Durkheim Sociology Death

Language Culture Democracy Identity Literature

"translated" and "foreign" are two separate things – sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.

Translation Reading Language Culture

In nature, the balance of males and females is maintained by natural selection acting on parents. As Sir Ronald Fisher brilliantly pointed out in 1930, a surplus of one sex will be redressed by selection in favour of rearing the other sex, up to the point where it is no longer the minority. It isn’t quite as simple as that. You have to take into account the relative economic costs of rearing one sex rather than the other. If, say, it costs twice as much to rear a son to maturity as a daughter (e.g. because males are bigger than females), the true choice facing a parent is not “Shall I rear a son or a daughter?” but “Shall I rear a son or two daughters?” So, Fisher concluded, what is equlibrated by natural selection is not the total numbers of sons and daughters born in the population, but the total parental expenditure on sons versus daughters. In practice, this usually amounts to an approximately equal ratio of males to females in the population at the end of the period of parental expenditure.

Note that the word ‘decision’ doesn’t mean conscious decision: we employ the usual ‘selfish gene’ metaphorical reasoning, in which natural selection favours genes that produce behaviour ‘as if’ decisions are being made.

Sex Gender Children Gender Equality Economics Bioethics Culture

The recent events swirling about the ex-next-president of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has revived old tropes about how culture affects sex, including sexual violence. Before this scandal, many continued to believe that Americans are still infected by their Puritan past in matters sexuel, while the French are just chaud lapins: hot rabbits. The supposed difference consisted of not only a heightened sexual activity but an altered set of conventions about where to draw the line between benign sexual interaction and harassment. The French, many believed, drew that line differently.

One needs to be a cultural relativist to know when one is being hit upon.
The number of women speaking out in France post-scandal calls into question this easy embrace of relativism.

Relativism Sex Culture Rape Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Power