Before writing about the project, I have to conceptualize "culture". Culture is known as everything that comes from humanity. For instance: foods, knowledge, beliefs, dances and music, art, and the list goes on. However, I believe that culture is more than that. Claire Kramsch (1998) says, in her book "Language and Culture", that even a group of people has their own culture because they have the same language of the nation they came from, but they also have their own way of speaking, which can be seen as a kind of culture. I agree with her. Thus, for me, culture is everything that comes from a group of people; it can be their language, their belief or even their way of acting. Conceptualizing culture like this, we can talk about stereotypes.
Kramsch goes on on her explanation and she tells us that there are gatekeepers of interpretation. They are the most powerful people in the societies and they say how we have to interpret texts. As a result, people interpret the world through the eyes of gatekeepers and, more than that, gatekeepers say what can be seen as culture or not. Stereotypes are created like this. As Chimamanda1 said in her speech, gatekeepers create a single story about a place or group of people, and it starts to be the only truth. It makes people see the world through stereotypes. Because of that, we see Africa as a place full of poverty, for example; we cannot say that there is not poverty there, but there is not just that in Africa. It is the worse of stereotypes: stereotypes are not a lie, but they are not the only truth.
It is not different when talking about Brazil. Somebody created a character using the name of my country in the past, and he is still in the mind of most part of the foreigners, and it is possible to see it in the documentary "The foreign eye". I had to watch it because of the project, and there I came across the stereotypes that have been bound to Brazil for the first time: we have beaches everywhere, we have gorgeous naked women in our beaches, we have too much freedom, we have weird rituals, and we are not so polite. After that, I started to believe that every foreigner sees us like that, but one step of the project made me change my mind.
The Professor organized groups in our class to interview PPE students2. We had to think about a topic to ask them, and my group and I decided to ask about Brazilian manners. We were already expecting some answers before we asked the students; however, we were really surprised at their answers.
My group and I imagined that they would say that we are not polite, and that we have too much freedom, or that we do not care about manners. However, most of them said that we are happy and polite here, and that we are close to each other but they also said that it happens in other countries, sometimes more than here. But one of the students said that adults play more with kids here than in China, and another one said that family means a lot to us, that family means more to us than to North-Americans, and it was the most interesting and shocking answers to me because I had never looked at these two points of our culture as I look now after the project.
After interviewing the PPE students, we presented the final product of the survey – an explanation of all the answers that we collected – to them and to our classmates. During the presentations, I could realize that I had many stereotypes of other countries, and that I was judging foreigners without looking at myself. As a result, I could see that this college project changed some of my thoughts. For instance, now I do not see Chinese people as the most serious people in the world, because they make jokes as we do, and I do not see Korean people as untouchable anymore, because a girl from there said to me that they are really close to each other as we are. Therefore, I realized that I had so many stereotypes of Asian countries because a single story was presented to me.
More than changing my thoughts about other countries, this project changed my thoughts about Brazil. Before this experience, I was sad about my country because of all the events that are happening here. However, now I see that we have so many beautiful places where people from outside would like to be, and that we are always making jokes of everything, and I love it.
Chimamanda is a writer from Nigeria. She had a speech in a TED, and it is about this speech that I am talking about.
They are foreign students that are studying Portuguese at UFRGS. We interviewed one Korean, six Chinese and one North American student.