american ways

1、Chapter 1 IntroductionCulture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to underst

2、and, foreign culture but to understand our own.Edward T. HallBefore You Read1. What is “culture“?2. What do you know about the ethnic diversity of the American population? Where did the people originally come from?3. How

3、 have patterns of immigration to the United States changed over the years?4. Do you think it is possible to make generalizations about Americans?Life in the United StatesPeople are naturally curious about each other, and

4、 when they meet people from different countries, they want to know about them:? What is life like in their country?? What kind of houses do they live in?? What kind of food do they eat?? What are their customs?If we visi

5、t their country, we can observe the people and how they live, and we can answer some of these questions. But the most interesting questions are often the hardest to answer:? What do the people believe in?? What do they v

6、alue most in life?? What motivates them?? Why do they behave the way they do?In trying to answer these questions about Americans, we must remember two things: (1) the immense size of the United States, and (2) its great

7、ethnic diversity. It is difficult to comprehend the size of the country until you have tried to travel from one city to another. If you got in a car in New York and drove to Los Angeles, stopping only to get gas, eat, an

8、d sleep, it would take you four or five days. It takes two full days to drive from New York to Florida. On a typical winter day, it might be raining in Washington, D.C., and snowing in New York and Chicago, while it is w

9、arm enough to swim in Los Angeles and Miami. It is not difficult to imagine how different daily life might be in such different climates, or how lifestyles could vary in cities and towns so far apart.The other significan

10、t factor influencing American life, ethnic diversity, is probably even more important. Aside from the Native Americans who were living on the North American continent when the first European settlers arrived, all America

11、ns came from foreign countries, or their ancestors did. (Incidentally, some of the Native Americans are themselves members of separate and distinct Indian nations, each with its own language, culture, traditions, and eve

12、n government.) From the 1600s to the birth of the new nation in 1776, most immigrants were from northern Europe, and the majority were from England. It was these people who shaped the values and traditions that became th

13、e dominant culture of the United States.minority groups, many of whom are recent immigrants who do not speak English well. In Miami, three-fourths of the population speak a language other than English at home, and 67 per

14、cent of these people say they do not speak English well. Contrast this, however, with a state like South Dakota, where only 6.5 percent of the people were born in another country. Across the United States, 9 percent of t

15、he total population is “foreign-born,“ almost one in ten.The vast majority of new immigrants choose to live in seven states:California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, and Arizona. Seventy-nine percent of

16、 all new immigrants settle in one of these states. The accompanying chart shows the distribution. Note that California alone takes in 40 percent of the total number of legal immigrants coming to the United States.Cultura

17、l Pluralism in the United StatesOne of the critical questions facing the United States today is what role the new immigrants will play in their new country. How much will they choose to take on the traditional American v

18、alues and culture? How much will they try to maintain their own language and cultural traditions? Will they create an entirely new culture based on some combination of their values and those of the traditional American c

19、ulture?Historically, although the children of immigrants may have grown up bilingual and bicultural, many did not pass on much of their parents' language or culture to their own children. Thus, many grandchildren of

20、immigrants do not speak the language of the old country and are “American“ by culture. However, in some parts of the country with established communities that share a common language or culture, bilingualism and bicultur

21、alism continue. This is particularly true in communities where new immigrants are still arriving. In general, cultural pluralism is more accepted in the United States today than it was in the first half of the 20th centu

22、ry, and many of the school systems have developed bilingual programs and multicultural curricula. We will discuss this more in Chapter 9.At the close of the 20th century, there seems to be a rise in the consciousness of

23、ethnic groups around the world, and a sense of pride in what makes them unique. This occurs in the United States among many different groups, and in some cases it has resulted in new names to symbolize each group's i

24、dentity. In the United States, people have become very sensitive to the language used to describe these groups, and they try to be “politically correct“ (P.C.). For example, many black Americans, particularly young peopl

25、e, prefer the term African-American instead of black, to identify with their African heritage. Some Spanish speakers prefer to be called Latinos (referring to Latin America) instead of Hispanics, while others prefer to b

26、e identified by their country of origin (Cuban-American or Cuban, Chicano, Mexican-American or Mexican, and so on). Most of the census data continues to use the terms black and Hispanic, so we will generally use these te

27、rms, along with African-American and Latino.In spite of some very important differences, however, there is still a tie that binds Americans together. That tie is a sense of national identity—of “being an American.“ Incid

28、entally, when citizens of the United States refer to themselves as Americans, they have no intention of excluding people from Latin American countries. There is no word such as United Statesians in the English language,

29、so people call themselves Americans. Thus, what is really a language problem has sometimes caused misunderstandings. Although citizens of Latin American countries may call the people in the United States North Americans,

30、 to most people in the United States this makes no sense either, because the term North American refers to Canadians and Mexicans as well as citizens of the United States. (NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement,