Final Interview Paper. Kyler Korth Anthropology 12/4/2015

Transcription

1 1 Final Interview Paper Kyler Korth Anthropology 12/4/2015

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3 3 For my personal interview I chose to interview Jefferson Beal who is from London. My first question to him was what his definition of culture. He defined culture as traditions and symbols. This is very much how I would have answered the same question before I took this anthropology class. For some reason I expected him to say culture is the way people act and how they live because that is how I see it. The next question that I asked was about family and how he defines it. He said that he defines family as the the people you are blood related. I then asked him about being adopted or being about step parents. He said that he would consider them family but nothing like that is relevant to him. I then proceeded to ask him about gender roles in his family. He said that he thought that his dad was supposed to work and his mom take care of his family. This is how our culture views gender roles in terms of household roles. My next questions were about food. The first one was what is the most important meal of the day. He replied breakfast. I asked him why and he told me that it is because that is what he had heard in school and by his family. That is exactly what I would have said. My second question on food was what kind of drinks are popular in London. He told me that the two most popular drinks in London are Tea and Bitter. I asked him what Bitter was and he said it is what they call beer. Next I asked a couple of questions about how he views religion. The first one was how important religion was to him. He said that religion was not a huge part of his life but he did attend church on a regular basis. After he told me this I asked him if religion was a big part of where he is from. He said that the most common religion was being Christian and that he was a Christian. He also said that people aren t normally religious and don t make religion a big part of

4 4 their lives. I asked him if they were mostly Christians then is Christmas the biggest holiday that they celebrated. He replied yes but there is also a lot of people that celebrate other holidays around the same time like Honokaa. That sounded very similar to what we do here in America. The biggest holiday here is and has always been Christmas. We love to celebrate Christmas and the number one religion in America is being Christian as well. One of the biggest questions that I asked Jeff was what the gender roles were in his culture. He said that they are pretty similar to here. The way of thinking is that the men work and provide for the family. The female is expected to stay at home and clean and care for the family. She is supposed to be the one that cooks and does not work. This surprised me because I thought that they would be a little more equal and not as bad as they are here. I thought that he was going to say that women aren t expected to stay at the house and can go work. Of course it isn t frowned upon if women work but the men would rather them not. This surprisingly is how we think it should be here in America. We think that the man should work and that the women should stay home and take care of the children. If it s the opposite, then we think that the men are failures and that they are wrong for having the wife work. The next question that I asked was do young people have a sense of culture. He gave me an interesting answer saying that the young people don t really think about culture. They just do what their parents do. They don t think that what they are doing has anything to do with what their culture is. They don t even think of how other cultures and different people celebrate or conduct their traditions differently. They are just caught up in what they are doing and that is all that they care about. I think that this is really true. When we celebrate Christmas we don t think of how others celebrate it. We just care about the presents that we are getting, getting the house ready, preparing for Christmas., shopping for presents for other people, and for some of us the

5 5 birth of Christ. We don t care about other cultures and what they are doing or how they celebrate it. Even if we do know how they celebrate Christmas but it is different we think that they are doing it wrong and they should celebrate as we do. At the end of my interview with Jeff I asked him if there was anything else that he would like to talk about. He mentioned that the US culture and his culture is very similar. We both speak English (even though they use more formal language and have a different accent). And there is a very good reason for this. Our country was made from mostly the British. This means that we had basically the same culture for most of the American existence. The only reason that we don t drink tea like they do is because when America was under British rule, Britain started putting taxes on things and one of the things that they decided to tax was tea. This angered the Americans. They decided to show Britain that they did not agree with what Britain was doing. The Americans decided to throw all of the tea that Britain was exporting to America into the Boston harbor. This assignment was really fun to do and I learned a lot about Jeff and his culture. I learned that our culture and the UK culture is very similar. We both have similar views on a lot of things like families, gender roles (even though we both agree that they are changing), drinks, and religion just to name a few. I did not know hat other cultures had the same views as ours. I thought that Jeff s culture was going to have some similarities but not a ton. I thought that they would despise women working and the men staying home. But times are changing and so are peoples views.

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7 7 If I were to do this project again I would choose to interview somebody that is part of a culture that is on the totally opposite end of the spectrum than our culture. I want to see how others views on things like family, gender roles, and religion.