CULTURE

Cultural Awareness



Cultural Awareness

INTRODUCTION

The term culture has variety of meanings. There are many school of thoughts associated with it. For a biologist, culture is concerned with the colony of bacteria in a Petri dish and for an anthropologist as well as behavioral scientist, it is said to be a range of human behaviors, which differs from one individual to the other. For some culture is concerned with food, good literature, art, as well as music. Edward B. Tyler who is an English anthropologist coined the term culture and he used it in the book called Primitive culture in the year of 1871. He defined culture constituting art, knowledge, morals, belief, custom along with a set of habits and capabilities possessed by an individual or a member of a society. Culture is also said to be a powerful tool but at the same time it can also be termed as being fragile (www. anthro.palomar.edu). Culture is said to be conditioned into the people belonging to a society to the extent that anything that goes against their set norms and beliefs it is then when cultural conflicts arises. The two cultures that will be discussed in this research paper are the cultures of Iraq and Iran. The culture of Iraq and Iran are very similar the difference initiated when the war against terrorism initiated in Iraq.

DIFFERENCES AMIDST IRAQ AND IRAN

High Context Versus Low Context Culture: The orientation of Iran is towards the spoken language than Iraq which has an inclination towards the written language (Tannen, 1982). A lot of focus is given to the way people communicate, as people tend to analyze the intention of the other person via the kind and type of communication that one tends to speak. Iran is said to be low context culture and once what has been committed verbally is respected since the religion Iran shares focuses on commitment and the fulfillment of the commitment. When it comes to Iraq the preferred mode of commitment is written and they want everything in black and white. The preferred means of communication is also said to be either face-to-face or voice-to-voice in Iran and when it comes to Iraq everything needs to be written and held against a person when it comes to breach of policy or contract. The “difference” exists since Iran is said to be technologically not as advanced as Iraq is due to the support provided by USA. The difference exists also because of political ad economical turmoil that led to USA assisting Iraq. Since it is very recent that both the countries have started developing so the cliché form of communication is still valued and preferred over all other forms of communication. In both the countries word of mouth eventually becomes the word of link. Both the countries culture can also be termed as high context culture. With respect to Hofstede theory and in terms of power distance both the culture (Fast, 2010).

Service versus empowerment: Iran is still said to be service-based country and Iraq ...