How culture matters

How culture matters


May 29th, 2011 by Barbara.

If you walk into a neighborhood in my part of Japan, you’ll see a display like this somewhere near the entrance. It’s a map showing all of the houses in a neighborhood, and the names of families who live in the houses. Do you have something like this where you live?
None of the streets in the neighborhood are named, but the blocks are numbered. So address plates look something like this:
Addresses start with the big picture and move to the smaller details. In this case, we’re told the larger neighborhood (Mitsugshira 三ツ頭), then the smaller division within the neighborhood (2 chōme 二丁目), then the block within the chōme, and finally the number of the house within the block.
Imagine looking at the large google map of Japan and gradually zooming in until finally you’re looking at one house. That’s the feeling behind explaining where someone lives.
This is the opposite of the way I grew up thinking of location, which was moving from the small to the large (number, street, city, state).
Both the way we describe location, and the way we think about location, are connected to our culture.
In one of my favorite (and shortest) TED Talks, Derek Sivers shares several surprising ways that culture shapes our way of looking at things: Weird or just different?



http://www.teachingvillage.org/2011/05/29/how-culture-matters/