Who on Earth are we 6

Callum: Hello and welcome to Talk about English. Today in our series ‘Who on Earth are we?’ Marc Beeby examines the differences between individual and collective based cultures. If you’re someone who likes privacy, your own space, making your own decisions, you probably belong to a culture where the individual is central. But if you like to have other people around you, and feel the need to ‘do the right thing’, your culture is probably one where the group - or the ‘collective’ -is the most important unit. Here’s Marc:

Marc: This individual/collective distinction is very important in the study of culture, and we’ll be considering it in detail over the next two programmes. So, to begin here’s Rebecca Fong - a teacher of intercultural communication at the University of the West of England - with an introduction to the ‘individualism / collectivism dimension’（尺寸）.

Rebecca Fong

The individualism / collectivism dimension or model, if you like, refers to the relationship between any individual in a society to any group or collective in that society - now what do we mean by collective? A collective could be a small group such as a family or a workplace or a group of friends or a club or it could be big groups like an individual's relationship to the nation as a whole. Obviously how you are brought up and integrated（整合的） into your society and live together with the people in your society will very much affect the way that your society's organised, the way families live together, the way institutions work the way education, politics and religion are organised and so on.

Marc: Rebecca Fong. The way you live together with the people in your society will affect the way your society is organised. People in both individualist and collectivist cultures belong to groups, but the difference lies in whether people choose to belong to a group, how they feel about the groups they belong to, and how important an influence the group has on a person’s life. Here’s Rebecca again, with comments from Devon Krohn from England and Emma Kambangula from Namibia, on the connections between the individual and the group in individualist and collectivist cultures.

Rebecca Fong

In individualist cultures people are linked together very loosely. They are brought up to follow their own individual goals and their own preferences and everyone in the society is rewarded differently according to what they personally manage to achieve. So they'll make choices about which work groups they belong to who their friends are which religion they want to belong to which clubs they want to belong to and so on. This may mean that people don't have very much loyalty 1 to any particular group, so they could switch company for example if they felt that their personal growth in one particular company had come to an end and in order to develop they would have to move to another company and do something different.

Devon Krohn

I think in terms of whether Britain is a very individualistic society I would agree. My family for example is very separate -it works well as a family unit but I'd say first and foremost we are individuals and then we are a family unit. My mother brought me up to be very individual and she deemed(认为，相信) that as a very important quality in life so from a very early age I was taught to look after myself and to go out and do my own things, take initiatives and do what I wanted to do

Rebecca Fong

In collectivist cultures people's own personal preferences are downplayed and their loyalty is first and foremost to a group or a collective. So what happens is that the group goals become the most important thing and people act in accordance with the duties of any particular collective that they're in. You'll probably have a very strong affiliation（加入，联盟） with your family group not by choice but because that's part of how your society is organised and it'll be very important that within these groups you work together and there'll be a mutual 2 search for a collective harmony within these groups.

Emma Kambangula

In Namibia, we are more collective. I’ll take an example of me and my sister. I remember there was a time that we didn’t speak to each other – when my other sister’s husband died. We went to the funeral and the family was called together to solve Emma and her sister’s problem. We were speaking and it came to the extent where we got at loggerheads with（不和，争论） my sister again and they had to intervene, take us separately to different rooms and everyone gave their side of the story and discussed it in our absence among the other members of the family and when we were called together it was like we were in court and everyone had questions until we reached an agreement.

Marc: Emma Kambangula

But why should some cultures value the individual while others value the group? Well, some cultural experts believe that there are historical reasons for this. Rebecca Fong explains, with assistance from Professor James Keegan from Bethany College in the United States of America, and Mahmoud Jamal from Pakistan.

Rebecca Fong

It has been suggested that individualist cultures may have started as the hunter gatherer type societies who had to be more self sufficient who had to survive at all costs and therefore became quite aggressive in their approach, more competitive.

James Keegan

250 years ago, this would be the frontier（边界，边境）, you know, and you existed in the way in which you could look after yourself. Yes, there might be neighbours around, but they’re not going to be all that close. And you build your log cabin, and you use it as a fort, you go out and till your little bit of land. So, historically, the individual takes care of him or herself.

Rebecca Fong

Collectivist cultures may have started more as the agrarian（有关土的） societies -more peaceful collectives of people living on the land, farming together, working together, sharing resources and so on.

Mahmoud Jamal

On the whole South Asian culture is not a greatly individualistic culture. Of course things have changed and are changing very rapidly but there's the family, the extended family, the community. You as an individual have responsibilities and duties to the collective and you have to uphold （支持，赞成，鼓励）them regardless. But I think the modern industrialised world is impacting on that - so it is breaking down but on the whole I think it still remains 3 true that the individual is less important than the community in South Asian culture as a whole, in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Marc: Mahmoud Jamal. Cultures change, and nowadays it's hard for us to see whether a culture was based on a ‘frontier’ type of society, where the individual was forced to take care of himself, or on a more co-operative ‘farming’ model. But we can say that much of the modern industrial world -the USA and parts of Europe for example - tends to be ‘individualistic’. What’s more, as Mahmoud Jamal suggests, the individualistic modern industrial world seems to be influencing the character of some collective cultures. We’ll be exploring this idea a bit further in our next programme. In preparation, here are Annabel Port from Britain, Mounia el-Kouche from Morocco and James Keegan in the USA helping 4 Rebecca Fong describe some of the more obvious differences between individualist and collectivist cultures.

Rebecca Fong

Individuals in individualistic societies will be looking for individual freedom. They'll be looking for personal truth, their own personal ideal of what is sincere and real, they'll be looking for money and success, they'll be looking for personal goals, personal objectives to be fulfilled.

Annabel Port

I think Britain is very individualistic - I think it starts with the family and it goes on through education and through to the workplace in business because we want more we've become very competitive - constantly striving to improve ourselves and competing against the next person and not necessarily working together for a common aim.

Rebecca Fong

In the collectivist societies there'll be much greater need for social harmony and action as defined by other people – virtuous(有品德的，善良的，贞洁的) action, action that will be accepted and approved of by a group and there'll be a lot of loyalty within those groups.

Mounia El Kouche

The family are very much involved in your life -you can't do anything without permission, in a sense, of your close siblings 5 and parents. You can't just run away, get married and that’s it, be the end of it. You can’t have a girlfriend or boyfriend without your parents knowing and giving their approval. And they would give advice perhaps sometimes which you don’t want to hear but at the same time they think they're helping. Things like that would shock a Westerner in a sense.

Rebecca Fong

People in collective groups get to understand each others personalities 6, each others roles in that group and they begin to communicate intuitively. （直觉地，直观的）Silence is much more an integral part of this kind of group because people know what's going on in another person's mind - you don't have to say everything that you're thinking. Communication amongst individuals in individualist societies tends to be quite verbal -you explain your feelings, what your opinion is is important and silence is in some ways quite embarrassing.

James Keegan

I think Westerners, and I’ll include Europeans in general in this, you know, we don’t like silences. We have to fill things in, particularly here in the United States, we begin to get edgy 7, （刀口锐利的，尖利的，急躁的）

we begin to want an answer immediately. Other cultures do observe a formality. We’re an informal society. In order to achieve your own individual purposes, you have to establish very quick relationships. And an example of that is of course, how quickly we use first names. We know people and we treat them as if they were real long-time friends, and we’ve known them two minutesCallum: Professor James Keegan.

It's very important when talking about individualism and collectivism to remember that these are very broad categories. In fact, they are really the two extreme ends of a long line. No culture really falls at either end. Cultures tend towards one end or the other. So where does your culture fall along the line? Do you belong to a more individualist, or more collectivist culture? We’ll help you answer that question by looking at more of the differences between the two in our next programme. But I’ll leave you with a final word from Mahmoud Jamal, who sees the benefits of both…

Mahmoud Jamal

In my case in the case of a lot of other people who came abroad to study part of the attraction also was to be able to live an individual life and you can never beat going to another culture to live an individual life because you are an alien anyway. I would recommend to a lot of people who feel that their culture or their community is bothering them to go to another culture, experience what it's like to be an individual.

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