Thursday, February 24, 2011
Hand Gestures
In class the past few days, we've been talking alot about cultures and how we interact with other cultures. One thing we have been learning about with cultures interacting with each other is culture shock which is when people from different cultures see and think when they are thrown into another culture. One example of this is when people use hand gestures to communicate with each other. Since I come from an Italian family I am very familiar with seeing people talking with their hands. These hand gestures we make to each other can be shocking to different cultures because one gesture for us might mean a different gesture for them. In my family alot of the people speak by putting all 5 of their fingertips together and rock it back and forth. In some different cultures this may mean something else like in japanese it could come off as talking about money. What some things mean for us could and probably do mean something different for other people from different parts of the world.
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I like how you related hand gestures that you use within your family to those we learned about in class. Being Italian must make it easy to relate to Sal!
ReplyDeleteYour blog was really insightful! I thought the whole idea of how one gesture can mean the complete opposite in another region was very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI definitely see this a lot with various cultures. In my Polish family, we tend to be very loud when at social gatherings and sometimes we may be interpreted differently by Americans.
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