by Juliane Bauer
Culture is a really difficult topic to approach, but I think is a really important one at the same time. Everyone has a different definition of culture, and, for me, it is a set of habits and artistic manifestations from a certain person. In my opinion, every person has their own culture that was created based on the learning of different cultures.
To get clearer, I will give you an example: I am Brazilian, and I have the culture of my country in me. The city I grew up in was developed by Germans and it still has a lot of the German culture in there, so I have the German culture in me as well. Through Internet and television access, I was influenced by the American, British, Mexican and many other cultures. So, I consider I have a mix of cultures inside me, based on everything I was influenced by throughout my life, and I believe it is like this for everyone.
Not everyone thinks personal culture is a mix of various cultures and I think that it happens because of the stereotypes, and how people end up considering the culture of a person is only about their country. Besides that, people generalize the culture of one country, saying they have just one type of music or just one musical influence, like: “Brazilians only listen to samba”, “Argentines just dance tango”, when a whole country is so much more than that. Brazil, for instance, has a mix of musical influences of different countries and different groups of people in its musical genres: Sertanejo, Lambada, Forró, Pagode, etc.
Studying stereotypes, I realized that a culture of a country is not only what is famous and what we know of, we just learn about a culture when we can live there. However, I do not think we can completely learn about the whole national culture, because every state and every city have their own culture in constant change, and, even if we lived a little bit in every place, we could not have full knowledge of a place.
Foreigners taught me that I cannot criticize any culture because I do not have full knowledge about it and above all that, they deserve respect, especially when they are not in their country of origin. I realized that I got defensive when people talk about Brazilian culture based on the stereotypes and I tend to explain why they are wrong, also I say what they still need to know about Brazil. Thereby, I noticed that I love my country’s culture and I love to learn about other cultures.
Culture is a really difficult topic to approach, but I think is a really important one at the same time. Everyone has a different definition of culture, and, for me, it is a set of habits and artistic manifestations from a certain person. In my opinion, every person has their own culture that was created based on the learning of different cultures.
To get clearer, I will give you an example: I am Brazilian, and I have the culture of my country in me. The city I grew up in was developed by Germans and it still has a lot of the German culture in there, so I have the German culture in me as well. Through Internet and television access, I was influenced by the American, British, Mexican and many other cultures. So, I consider I have a mix of cultures inside me, based on everything I was influenced by throughout my life, and I believe it is like this for everyone.
Not everyone thinks personal culture is a mix of various cultures and I think that it happens because of the stereotypes, and how people end up considering the culture of a person is only about their country. Besides that, people generalize the culture of one country, saying they have just one type of music or just one musical influence, like: “Brazilians only listen to samba”, “Argentines just dance tango”, when a whole country is so much more than that. Brazil, for instance, has a mix of musical influences of different countries and different groups of people in its musical genres: Sertanejo, Lambada, Forró, Pagode, etc.
Studying stereotypes, I realized that a culture of a country is not only what is famous and what we know of, we just learn about a culture when we can live there. However, I do not think we can completely learn about the whole national culture, because every state and every city have their own culture in constant change, and, even if we lived a little bit in every place, we could not have full knowledge of a place.
Foreigners taught me that I cannot criticize any culture because I do not have full knowledge about it and above all that, they deserve respect, especially when they are not in their country of origin. I realized that I got defensive when people talk about Brazilian culture based on the stereotypes and I tend to explain why they are wrong, also I say what they still need to know about Brazil. Thereby, I noticed that I love my country’s culture and I love to learn about other cultures.