Self and other: Language and identity. Week 3.

  Any society is multi-faceted, many-layered, and complex. Parisa, the Iranian lady, is defending her identity as creative, assertive, articulate, and wordly in order to counter the implied deep-seated essentialism of the 'passing comments' of her European colleagues, and the way they construct her 'national culture'. This example proves that it is important to understand that cultural attributes can flow between societies. Here the notion 'thick description' is appropriate which Holliday defines as 'seeing the complexity of a social event by looking at it from different aspects'.He futher asserts that knowledge gained from 'understanding the juxtaposition of unexpectedness, compexity, and encounters with people, artefacts and instances' will help us create  the thick description of this person. Rather than relying on the information about one's presumed national culture, it is important 'to approach and learn about a person as a human being', as you find him/her. TESOL professionals should be especially aware of it as they teach English to students from different  countries. I see it as my mission to incorporate the non-essentialist views on culture in the ESL/EFL classroom.
  Moreover, it is important to take it seriously how an individual represents himself/herself as what he/she says and what he/she does becomes an artefact of his of his/her cultural identity. However, an individual's behavior should not be generalized to other people coming from the same background as it is just something what he/she is wishing to ascertain about his/her culture. In addition, according to the non-essentialist approach to culture, what people say about their culture is true but ephemeral, changing.
  As for the cultural identity, a persuasive example is given that proves that cultural difference is not connected with the national difference.  The gilrs on the bus assert their particular cultural identity--that is of the girls belonging to a culture of swearing girls on the bus. However, in addition to this culture, these girls belong to other cultural groups such as 'an age group, a nationality, an ethnic group, a school class goup, etc.' The point is that we are all members of different cultural groups, and we have multiplicity of identities. Moreover, individuals do not just belong to a cultural group, they can decide how to do a particular culture. Thus, the girls on the bus are playing a particular identity card. Hollidays explians that identity card is "not in essence a stable concept, but one that is achieved through the skilled manipulation of discourses in society." Furthermore, by employing certain resourses, individuals can create new indentities as in the case with the swearing girls, and promote culture change.
After reading Identity as a personal project, I immidiately thought of Lady Gaga because her choices in clothes, make-up, musical projects make me think that she is pushing the limits of the cultural supermarket. Or not? Is she promoting a culture change and bringing her credit into cultural capital?

 "The making of an American"
  Immigrants definitely assimilate when they come to live in America, for they adopt new values and behaviors. Similarly, the new immigrants in America had to 'renegotiate and reimagine national, ethnic, cultural, gender, and sometimes even religious identities.'These transformations of identity took place in political, socioeconomic, and cultural realms. However, immigrants were not subservient in their transformations, but instead, brought in their own cultures and, thus, created the opposition of the Old and New World. The approach to Americanness had to be revisited as immigrants proved to be no less Americans by contributing tremendously to the prosperity of the country.
  Another trope that identiified the American national identity was the Self-Made Man. It referred to an immigrant who achieved the status of an American by luck and pluck. Interestingly enough, the linguistic identity was not challenged as I would think it should have. However, this is not just a coincidence of events but a proof that "the notion of negotiation of identities needs to be approached from a sociohistorical perspective."From my personal experience, I, as an immigrant, have found myself in such situations where I had to defend my linguistic rights and ownership of English. For example, it occured in a situation where I had to defend my point of view on the work done by one of my doctors. It is when I have to defend my position I feel challenged by the language.

Culture: Concepts and definitions. Week 2.

  What a culture Does rather that what a culture Is seems to be correct because culture is truly "a dynamic process of meaning-making" as Brian Street asserts (Kumaravadivelu, p.10). Each of us represents a certain culture as each of us has values, religious beliefs, customs, and norms which constitute the practice of our everyday life. For example, I follow my Buryat traditions I was brought up on: drink tea with milk, read Buddhist mantras which are believed to improve one's karma, cook homemade soups as this is what they cook a lot in Russia, do not whistle in the house as it means that one is whistling his or her money away, and so on. The point is that all these values constitute my personality and shape my view on the world. Pierre Bourdieu (Kumaravadivelu, p.14) calls it as "acquired habitus".
Nevertheless, I am not monocultural, but instead, I am a representative of several cultures (in my case, Russian, Buryat, and Western) as any of us is a representative of the contact of various cultural communities.
Sociologists' division of the world into two camps on the individualism and collectivism dimentions as important aspects of cultural behavior couldn't leave me indiffirent. I agree that such a phenomenon exists as a coninuum not a dichotomy. Without denying that collectivism still plays a role in Russian cultural behavior, it would be incorrect to ascribe this feature to any Russian individual. Rather, cultural change which is an ongoing process in the life of individuals, communities, and nations, causes these two dimentions overlap.
Moreover, today each culture is a hybrid culture as the result of the cultural globalization. What used to be considered as a local or national matter is now percieved as international or global. Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian educator, suggested that the world is a global village where "cultures reposition themselves between visual and acoustic space." Ethnic reductionism which takes place not only in political rhetoric, media, and academic literature, but also happens in every day life, and confines ethnic minorities to dismissive referential images, is only a sign of narrow-mindedness and simply a pursuit for domination.

In TESOL, the concept of culture still has not recieved the proper attention. I agree that individual-cultural is inseparable because we as individuals start with our genetic phenotypes and sociocognitive materials we possess. Further on, it is important to see the individual in the cultural as we constantly bring in new ways of looking at the world and thus, we ,by our individuality, change the world in a constant manner. Thus, the concept of culture, needs reconceptualization and redifinition as this trunscultuarl world forces us to face this challenge.