'Whatever the order inherent in the world, it is an order mediated by human perception'
Kevin Avruch and Peter Black, 'The Culture Question and Conflict Resolution'
As may have become apparent by my earlier posts, I find the question of perception fascinating. Avruch and Black write about the idea of 'culture-as-consciousness', your culture determines how you derive meaning from the world around you and from your own actions and feelings. This suggests that the world around us, or indeed the world as we understand it is a construction, the rules of behaviour and the rules of morality are determined not according to some greater order but by cultural ideals which then alter how we perceive actions and events.
This intrigues me as I then attempt to unravel my own cultural understandings that thus create my perceptions. Becoming aware of one own prejudices and the lenses through which one looks is an uncomfortable, difficult and often nigh-on impossible process. But to be aware of such things, to attempt to take into account at all times that how I am understanding something is not due to any greater order, but to my own individual cultural foundation, is at the same time thrilling and exciting.
To me the world has a set of rules that may be followed or broken, and following them or breaking them elicits further sets of rules. Yet this ordering is placed there by my cultural perceptions, as English, as Christian, as Female, as Young, from Cambridge, Oxford Graduate, all these different cultural groups play a part in making sense of my world. What makes sense of yours?
This relates to what I find most interesting about learning a foreign language. In particular, I enjoy finding out about the commonly used figures of speech, which I hope reflect something of how native speakers see and understand the world.
ReplyDeleteThere has been some really interesting work done on metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson for instance) looking at how to a large extent our language defines what we can perceive. To the extent that we only have a few words in English for blue, so we can see fewer shades that languages which have more words for it. I find the relationship between language and perception really interesting.
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