Hi, my name is Peijia and I am one of the class bloggers for this week! That is to say, I hope I can formulate an interesting class post for this week’s ASTU reading, which is an article called “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” by Farhat Shahzad. This article goes on to explore how interpretive communities around us shape how humans learn and interact with one another.While Shahzad never made a solid conclusion as to how these communities actually shape how we learn and remember, I did find some similar themes of questioning self-identity from some of the blogs posted this week.
The blogs of Ken Sakamoto and Kihan Yoon-Henderson (hi if you are reading this!) explore the interpretative communities that exist in their lives that seem to be a little more confusing than the rest of us. The reason for that is (that) they are both of mixed blood, with parents from different parts of the world and each with their own different cultures. In their blogs, both of them identify with struggling to choose with which race they identified more of – being Asian (sorry to be general but just to keep it simple) or White? Both of them have a similar response, in which that being seen as more “White” was more favoured than being seen as “Asian”. This is not surprising considering that most of the world’s population in some sense tries to cater to the “White”/Western culture.
So what exactly do I mean by that?
There is a lot of push towards identifying yourself as White or Western as opposed to a minority race. This is because of how our society is set up. Kihan mentions in her blog post how in Korea, her looks are sought after by Korean citizens who desire a more Western look. Ken, on the other hand, seemed to idolize his American background for a period of time.
Why is this happening?
The answer could be found in history. In my history class, we learn how Britain and France and all these countries with a large Caucasian background colonized and brought their ideologies to all other parts of the world. Similarly, in sociology, this concept of colonizing and spreading western ideologies was also discussed. And now this term of “colonizing” or “assimilating” may—in fact—actually be globalization.
While we usually think of globalization as a positive spread of many cultures, it actually may not be. In an alternate perspective, the term globalization can also be seen as Westernization. For example, the globalization of fast food joints such as McDonald or KFC is historically tied in with Western culture. By bringing these fast food joints to other areas of the world, not only are we serving non-traditional foods with a side of fries, we are also serving the idea that you can be a part of the western culture when you consume Western products. So does that mean the interpretative community of your local fast food joint really does impact how people self-identify if the communities of these joints are not local to the area? To some degree, yes, it does. Look at this one blog (How McDonald is posh in China) explaining the significance of McDonald in China, and how its interpretative community represents not only the western culture, but also a status of middle class. If you want to be seen as a somewhat affluent, westernized individual in China, McDonald is an acceptable place to go.
I realize I went on a bit of a tangent, but I feel there is some connection between how individuals like Ken and Kihan to the larger movement of globalization to other parts of the world in terms of how to identify who or what you belong with. While they have been personally impacted by the interpretative communities of family and school, we can also realize that large scales of worldwide or cultural communities also exist. The Western culture can be seen a giant interpretative community that shapes parts of life as we know it. That leads me to think, as the world continues to globalize and change, will there really be an identity we can clearly distinguish for ourselves?
Peijia Ding