Blog 6

I'm going to go a little off topic on my blog and talk about something I've been thinking about when it comes to Latin American culture. Maybe I'll talk a little bit about food at the end (although, this definitely has to do with family, holdays, etc). One of my other classes this semester has been a psychology class dealing with Reasoning and Decision-Making. I've also had a Cross-Cultural Psychology class here at UT. In the former of the two, we just discussed how individualist cultures and collectivist cultures influence how decisions are made by members of each culture. It turns out it's a lot more complicated than "they do this and we do that" since you can manipulate people in lab settings to make decisions based on the other cultural tendancies, but the culture definitely has an influence on the decisions. Anyway, I'm getting off topic a bit. My point has to do with who we talked about when discussing the two different categories. The primary examples of "collectivist cultures" are generally east Asian cultures, and sometimes includes other parts of Asia and eastern Europe. The primary examples of "individualist cultures" are generally western European countries, the United States, Canada and Australia. Notice any countries missing? Africa, yes, but also Latin America. Mexico sometimes gets lumped in with the other North American countries, but overall the Latin American countries don't seem to get included with one cultural type or the other.

Going back to my Cross Cultural Psychology class, I'd have to wonder if maybe this is because the Latin American countries are kind of a combination of individualist and collectivist cultures that is harder to characterize simply. Based on prior experiences, these psychology classes, and SPN 506, it seems as though... at least where family is concerned... there may be somewhat of a colletivist focus. Family seems to hold a very high importance and, while that can be true in individualist cultures like those found in the United States, the bond seems to be stronger. On the other hand, there are still strong signs of individualist tendancies when it comes to competativeness for jobs and such.

Anyway, like I said, this was a little off the path of the current chapters but I thought it was an interesting observation. Oh well, back to studying!