SELF-EVALUATION IN A CHANGING WORLD

Self-Evaluation in a Changing World

Self-Evaluation in a Changing World

One of the first difficulties that needs to be overcome whenever trying to make a globalization approach is the lack of a universal acceptation of a unique terminology. As we will be trying to identify any relationship between cultural difference and globalization on the following pages, and knowing about the recurrent problem stated before whenever making these type of analysis, I consider that the clearest way of starting one is by giving a detailed explanation of the terms that I will be using in it.

A nice starting point in setting out to navigate around these intellectual terrains would be the concept of Culture. Several past intellectual experiences have demonstrated that it is quite a risky task to discuss Culture, as the disambiguation surrounding the term is quite huge. But I will prefer to use here an anthropological approach to the concept of Culture, as I consider that the most important role that Culture involves is a human-involving one.Culture should be regarded “as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs“. Culture can also be understood as communication, in the sense that all the involving features stated before are trespassed inside the social groups through both direct and subtler ways of communication. In a broader sense, Culture enriches communication itself. Culture is the reason why some levels of close communication between social groups can be reached. The hallmark of this process is the Cultural Identity that every social group bears.

In the past, a social group bearing a unique cultural identity could have been development itself as a form of civilization occupying a specific terrain or location. In this sense, Culture has been understood as civilization, but we should not, however, take for granted the relation hidden between both words. Cultural differences and Cultural identity are the hard and the tail of the same coin. Cultural differences between social groups get evident as cultural identities in social groups reach high expressions of self-determination and uniqueness. From now on, a social group that bears a more or less homogeneous and unique cultural identity will be referred as a cultural group. As an example, I will mention the Aymara people living in the Andes region of South America. Sharing a common language is to some extend sharing the same way of living , and this is perfectly exemplified in the Aymara view of the world (cosmovision) and its relationship with the language they use . Because of sharing a more or less homogeneous way of viewing the world, a language, and even a unique cuisine, etc, we might well call the Aymara people a cultural group (Pieterse, 2005).The process by which two or more cultural groups extol and determine the cultural differences between them is a cultural differentiation ...