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Activity created by Kris Acheson-Clair, PhD and Lindsey Macdonald.
Adapted from University of the Pacific. (n.d.). Cultural distinctions. In What’s up with culture? (1.3.1). https://www2.pacific.edu/sis/culture/pub/1.2.1-_Culture_Distintions.htm
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bogartb1
10:13 am 30 November 2023
I implemented this exercise with an exceptionally small class of anthropology students (N=5), and found that it achieved its stated learning objectives well, perhaps in a way that its authors would find both surprising and pleasing. I should state straight away that in place of the downloadable game cards (which I hadn't noticed in time), I used the list of 15 behaviors from the online site referenced by the authors. After all of us read the site's descriptions of what qualified as "universal," "cultural," and "personal," I gave students a full 15 minutes to discuss which category to place each behavior into. (This was a class conducted via Zoom, hence the two bite-sized groups (of 2 and 3 students), carried out their discussion in Breakout Rooms.) The students did not, in fact, use that whole time, returning from their groups, ready to discuss, after about 10 minutes. Let me mention in some detail the observations and explanations offered by the students for just one of the behaviors. Concerning "sleeping with the bedroom window open": on the one hand, both groups settled on "personal," with the explanation that while they knew persons who preferred to let the outside air in, they themselves, personally, did not; on the other, one of the students, in the course of stating this, admitted that in a big city like the one she grew up in it was probably the case that the majority of people would keep the window closed lest they invite intruders. This last qualification allowed the instructor to point out that, upon closer scrutiny, such a behavior is likely displays an interplay between both "personal" factors (say, an inborn temperamental proclivity to let natural elements suffuse human-made dwellings) and "impersonal" or collective factors (say, the exigencies of the urban environment, or climatic conditions).
As it turned out, practically each of the listed behaviors----be it "eating regularly" or "respecting old people"--generated insights of just that kind. For this implementer then, a principle virtue of this exercise is that it helps demonstrate how difficult it is to disentangle the various levels of explanation when discussing behaviors as complex as those produced by human beings. When we "peak under the hood," what at first appeared to be an exclusively personal inclination reveals itself to be, in some measure, cultural (and perhaps even universal) as well.
A last note: I came to discover that students had felt pressured to arrive at a consensus about just one category to apply to each behavior. But I also learned that students sometimes differed on whether to choose personal, or cultural, or universal. I am hence tempted, in future uses of this exercise, to let them know in advance that dissensus is fine--and to see what insights might flow from a discussion of their different standpoints.