Violating Cultural Norms: American Culture
During this semester you have been violating cultural norms and posting these to the discussion board. Now we have a large number of experiences for you to consider. For this assignment, you will be reflecting on what these tell us about American culture.
STEP ONE: Read through all of the submissions. Think about comparisons, contrasts, and possible over-arching themes as you go through them.
As a reminder, each student was tasked with answering the following questions:
1) What was the context? What did you do? How did you feel while doing this?
2) What was the reaction?
3) What does this cultural norm reflect?
STEP TWO: Choose your sample/topic. You may choose to use all of the submissions, or you may choose to use a subset of them to include in your discussion. As you read them, you will notice that they can group in a variety of ways by topics and/or outcomes (i.e., stranger etiquette, personal space, turn-taking, behavior with friends/family, table manners, time efficiencies, and others).
STEP THREE: Think about what these tell you about American culture. This should be more than “Americans have rules” or “it is not nice to be impolite.” Your goal should be to step back from American culture and look at these submissions as an outsider might see it. What does it tell you about Americans? What do we value? Why? Also keep in mind that the following parts of the submission are important for you to consider:
- the context (what might be ok in one context might not in another)
- social position (age, gender, family role, customer, worker, etc.)
- how the person felt violating the norm (because you all violated the norms in your own culture, how doing this made you feel is a valuable piece for analyzing what it means for American society)
- the reactions (all the same? different? varying degrees of the same? what influences these reactions? etc.)
STEP FOUR: Write your paper. This is a thinking paper, so you will need to demonstrate your process. Which submissions did you use? How do these specific examples compare and contrast? What patterns do you see? What does it tell you about American culture?
Nuts and bolts:
- no more than 3 pages double-spaced (seriously); 12 pt. font
- one inch margins, and, for my sanity, please staple your pages together
- grammar, spelling, references, and all that jazz, definitely matter
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