|
But I realize that its not possible to talk about cultures without making generalizations. These subjects relate to looking at an object or noticing the context of that object. Though, I'm always wary of generalizations of culture, especially without any time-period as culture is changing. In it, the author looks at the difference in philosophy between ancient Greece and ancient China and notes interesting difference in how thought has evolved.
He provides two common perspectives. The second part summarizes many research on cultural differences the author has done and read about. One) cultures are all westernizing and becoming more similar and two) the cultures are fundamentally different, will stay so, and this will clash in the future. Chapter eight provides mainly questions about how the differences in this book apply to real life. The second and third chapter build on this by showing that these ancient differences are still there in modern life.The second part consists of the authors research work, four chapters per subject. The last part offers some conclusion.The first part consist of three chapter.
The first part lays the foundation for the rest by looking in the history and how it influenced cultures. I speak English and some Chinese. (and I agree with that conclusion, based on my experiences living in both west and east).I enjoyed reading the book. I've lived most of my live in Europe and in Asia. The last epilogue asks the question whether cultures are converging or going to clash.
The first one sets the tone and theme of the whole book. from that perspective. Looking at focus on nouns and object or focus on verbs and relationships and last using pure logic in daily life or dealing with contradictions and finding a middle way. I've always had an interest in differences between cultures especially related to thought. Interestingly, the author gives his opinion which is a middle way (so he did learn something during his research :P) between to two extremes. Cultures will converge but they will as much westernize as easternize. The author starts of by apologizing for the generalizations he makes.
Even though he did, it did still annoy me. I was disappointed. Still I found Nisbett's work insightful and funny at times.The book consist of 3 different parts (though not marked in the book). Still, this book is definitively worth reading if you are interested in fundamental differences between eastern and western thinking. Looking for cause at properties of individuals or at the relationship of individual and its environment. Each of his claims were backed up with interesting psychological experiments.The last part is the conclusion of the book. Even though I enjoyed the book, I didn't have the kind of huge insight that the title promised me and.
Well worth my time.
Keep in mind that Nisbett later publishes his book "Intelligence and How to Get It" which makes use of much of the same work in building the thesis that fluency comes from immersion and fluent parents result in more fluent children. Can both be true. New vocabulary is created and meanings change with cultural developments but the logic of the language seems to remain the same. A pretty clear conclusion follows this study: "There is an effect of culture on thought independent of language." (p. If so, this must certainly weaken the thesis, at least the strong Whorfian thesis, that Nesbitt seems to support.
161) and "There is also clearly an effect of language independent of culture - but only for the coordinate speakers from China and Taiwan. An interesting point Nisbett makes regarding the globalization of American Culture is a description of Francis Fukuyama's point of view in "The End of History" that "everyone is really an American at heart, or if not, it's only a matter of time until they will be". (p. One focus of the book argues European languages lead more to an individualist perspective while Chinese leads more towards a communal one.
So what kind of intelligence the fluency gives a person depends on the sort of intelligence the linguistic tools make possible. In this book Nisbett outlines the relationships between different languages and aspects of apparent perception using much new empirical support from a host of studies. Perhaps the weakness of each can be enhanced towards the more logical by an appreciation of both. Or do modern investigation techniques help support the thesis that language structures thought. An interesting issue concerns the difference between compound bilinguals and coordinate bilinguals. Here I certainly wonder if the sort of study Charles Taylor gives us in either "Sources of the Self" or "A Secular Age" details a historical evolution that offers a different explanation of these differences in perspective - especially since the languages seem relatively persistent while the cultural focus changes.
But societies. In this way ancient Greeks still had the grammar but the vocabulary evolves through cultural periods. Is this book just crying Whorf. They responded very differently depending on whether they are tested in Chinese or in English." (p. 162) So tentatively "language does indeed influence thought so long as different languages are plausibly associated with different systems of representation." Both cultural groups tend to make logical errors but each shows light on the other.
Would this also be reflected in an individuals maturation.
Romantics emphasize individualism more than the Scholastics did.
have become modern without becoming very Western." (p.
A main result - intelligence comes from linguistic fluency.
224) Nisbett continues with the suggestion that convergence might be more likely.
What if the logical structure of the language - especially the grammar - predisposes speakers to evolve a certain type of perspective.
Perhaps.
220) But describing Huntington's views as the contrary Nisbett says "Westerners tend to confuse modernization - defined as industrialization, a more complex occupational structure, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy, ad urbanization - with Westernization.
(This reminds me of Peter Berger's book "The Heretical Imperative").
In the fifteenth century the Chinese set out with hundreds of ships superior to anything ever known in the West. In another interesting experiment, Asians and Westerners are asked to tell a story about when they were at the center of attention. There is no word for "individualism" either; the closest thing is one that translates as "selfishness." Japanese has no generic word for "I". The most influential person in Chinese history never tried to explain where the universe came from, what happens when you die, or what the meaning of life is.
"Tell me about yourself" seems like a pretty straightforward question. They had no desire to learn about the discoveries or cultures of the peoples they came across. "It's a fish, maybe a trout." Asians likewise are better at remembering background information and worse at remembering a previously seen object taken out of context. Snow can be white, and you can even talk about the whiteness of the snow, but not whiteness as a concept in and of itself. This lack of curiosity extended into science. The ancient Greeks in contrast wrote and debated tirelessly about abstract ideas that had no connection to the real world. Until Buddhism came along there was no "why" to the Chinese universe.
Westerners, thinking in terms of categories, put the panda with the monkey.Nisbett's treats Asians and Europeans fairly and has no problem recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of each way of thought. In China the question never came up; everything was continuous and blended into everything else. The ancient Greeks debated whether the world was made of individual atoms or simply material. While ancient China was in many ways more technologically advanced than ancient Greece, knowledge for its own sake was never valued. Interestingly, in evolutionary psychology gender differences that show up in studies are usually assumed to beat least partly biologically based while race differences are chalked up exclusively to culture.
There exists a genetic world out there beyond IQ that helps determine our social structures, politics and history. Easterners, thinking in terms of relationships, will put the monkey with the banana. This difference is part of a pattern of Westerners seeing the part in isolation and Easterners talking a field's eye view. Confucianism only concerned itself with proper social relations and real world success. An apple is always an apple, but "hit" requires somebody to do the hitting and someone to be hit. The Confucian system of the Chinese saw the individual as a brother, sister, mother, servant, etc in relation to others. Whether the world is made up of nouns and things or verbs and events depends on the perspective.
Before University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett became the darling of the establishment media for telling them what they wanted to hear about black/white differences, he was best known for his research into Asian/European differences that culminated in his 2003 book The Geography of Thought. Asians began the description from a holistic point of view. His unwillingness to consider biological differences is disappointing but if he did he may have never got the funding needed to carry out these experiments. Experiments have been done in which groups of students are given three objects, say a monkey, panda and banana and asked which two go together. Chinese has no word for "size." If you want to buy someone shoes, you need to know the "big-small" of their feet. Unsurprisingly, Western children acquire nouns faster than verbs.
A man talking to his child, a girl talking to a sibling and a woman giving a speech each use a different term. The goal was to go around Asia, the Middle East and Africa to convince the rest of the world's known people that the Chinese were superior in every way. The ancient Greeks invented the concept of the individual, an agent with its own will. Asians, on the other hand, learn verbs and nouns at about the same rate. The mental differences between racial groups goes way beyond IQ.Before talking about what's been found in laboratory, the author treats us to his own research into the philosophy, religion, science, ethnics and worldview of the ancient East and West.
It's always been thought that nouns are easier to learn than verbs because they can be understood outside of a fixed situation. When some Africans tried to show the Chinese travelers a giraffe they weren't interested.The Eastern dislike of abstractions shows up in language. Asians tells the story in the 3rd person. It influences our religions and ideas of right and wrong. Although he was as much an environmentalist then as he is now, chalking up all differences to "culture," the data brought together here is a gold mine for race realists. Much is made of the fact that Asians can be primed to think like Europeans (by for example, reading a story with an individualistic protagonist) and vice versa but that doesn't do away with inherent racial differences. If two groups differ in testosterone, priming the lower testosterone group with pictures of naked girls doesn't prove that the two races are potentially equal in sex drive.
Differences exist in the way children acquire language.
Asians and Europeans were shown a picture with a big fish swimming in a body of water.
When Westerners answer it they say things like "I'm fun, nice, outgoing." When Asians answer the question, they tend to say things like "I am serious at work" or "I'm happy with my family." It's hard for them conceptualize an "I" outside of a specific context.
Another interesting aspect of the ethical/religious system of Confucianism is that it's missing much of what Westerners would associate with a religion.
"It looks like a pond, the water is blue." Westerners started with the individual object that stood out.
There is no suffix that corresponds to the English "-ness" either.
If a Korean wants to ask someone to come to dinner, not only does the word for "you" depend on context but the word for "dinner".
Nisbett doesn't connect the dots between our respective cultures and natures but there's enough in this work for the reader to do so himself.
Westerners tell the story from the 1st person point of view.
The Geography of thought is a pretty good book, content-wise. Certain thing I didn't like, though. I learned a lot, since I hadn't come accross this topic before. Very interesting, surprising and informative. Sometimes I felt that the author keeps writing about the same thing over and over again. But overall, the book gave me a lot and helped me understand certain differences between the two cultures.
Nisbett's study finds that most Oriental families decide for their children, that children have no real scope for autonomous decision-making even for themselves. Nisbett's book is full of such nuances & differences between eastern & western ways of thinking. This books goes on the explain the western inclination to codify, compartmentalize, devise rules & laws & a general love of "orderliness". In fact, I distinctly remember that I was rather overjoyed everytime my opinion was sought about something.The other interesting bit about children really is the denial of any intrinsic ability for a given skill, & the emphasis on practice as the way to honing a skill.
Consequently, thinking "out-of-the-box" constitutes a paradigm shift in west - but is not as revolutionary a concept in the Orient. I always used to wonder why "Out-of-the-box" was such a powerful phrase in the west, while as an idiomatic expression it had little sway over me. However, this is not really perceived as detrimental to personality-growth. I think that this is one of the better books I read this year - in spite of the fact that, in general, we tend to like things that work well with our own personal model of the world - whether this is the objective truth or not.This book every now & then is a little harsh of what it calls "the western ways of thinking". The obvious problem with writing about something as macro-level as culture is that you can find numerous exceptions to the broad framework.
Most Indians continue to seek opinions & agreements on their personal decisions (buying property, car, investments) from their elders in the family upto a fairly advanced age. But Nisbett writes engagingly, & whether you agree with his model or not - this book will definitely work you up. In other words, a neat little bundle of discrete boxes that the world & life is modeled as. Science & Mathematics are religions in their own right for Indian students - you just HAVE to be good at these - you can run; but you can't hide.I think that one can also look at conflict-resolution as a bit of a differentiator. Many Americans may not identify with the typical westerner definition in Nisbett's book, just as all Orientals may not see the pond for the fish.
From my own experience, though Indians are not really studied & talked about in this book, I can tell of a few truths. Most of us do not like to confront, while the west does a much better job of it because it objectifies the conflict separating out the people involved in it.
|
