Culture and Politics Essay

close and regime An interesting concept, the idea of agri husbandry is delicate to pay off. What exactly is culture? How does it run us? In J. Harry Wrays book Sense and Nonsense American Culture and Politics, he says culture is a shargond symbol system, linking members of a theme to each former(a) and to history, thus providing them with an identity. What this path is that culture is how polar gatherings respond to and run into symbols. As lawsuits Wray talks around a aboriginal tribe in Malaysia who view that bellowing storms be the result of valet de chambre violations of the natural order of things, whereas we see thunder storms as the mixing of a toothsome air mass colliding with a caller wiz in the presence of certain(a) conditions.Now that Ive tried to define culture I want to picture to show its importance. By defining culture as the right sm guile a collect group of tidy sum run into symbols one must try to give an example of these symbols. Cultural symbols are essentially anything that is approximation of as unique to a group people however, it really could be anything much(prenominal) as a house, car, clothes, but in addition street signs, telephones, television, and radio. These cultural symbols are all over and usually we arent even informed that they are symbols of and to our culture.Since culture is the way we interpret these symbols, it is very eventful to slang that these symbols go away match our culture and moreover they testament affect our politics. The slipway our symbols allow for affect our politics are that they can neuter our perspectives and ideas about our communities and the world around us. Symbols in culture often affect politics and how government works, an example that Wray gives is the importance of family. In the U.S. family is stressed by almost every politician seeking office, however the Family date Bill took years to be voted into law. This arguable bill would allow a lift of a new born to record up to sixteen weeks of leave, without pay, without worrying about being fired.In Sweden, however, in that location were already different survival of the hold uptests for new parents. New parents there afford the options of either parent winning up to a year off, with 80 percent of pay, or they can stifle their workload to five hours over the initiatory fewyears of early childishness at full pay. It makes me wonder why, in a society that is so cerebrate on family that it took years to pass a bill that only gives one option and only to people who work for grand businesses and in Sweden there were already at least two options.Another sight of culture and politics is through multiculturalism. We more often than not sound off of society as a melting pot, but this really doesnt explain multiculturalism well. Wray suggests that we suppose of our society as a mosaic, where different tiles represent different groups of people. This is a pretty good represe ntation, but it is sturdy to decide how to split people up into different tiles. As more and more people come to the U.S. they alteration the society and may not fit into a tile that already exists. This shows how hard it is to actually define multiculturalism. Wray also suggests that we imagine of society as a cooking pot. As something is added to the stew it becomes part of the stew, sometimes it can even be solely dissolved onto the stew, but it can tranquilize be tasted.One way multiculturalism affects us is that it makes us more subtile to differing views. In a society where there are people from different cultures you have to be able to listen to and make judgments for these people. In a society like ours you have to try to do what is good for everyone and that is hard when there are many cultures mingled together. Another way culture is modify is that you have different symbols to interpret and you bequeath have different ways of interpreting these symbols. This wi ll cause you to be sensitive to the views of others because you dont know how symbols will be interpreted by other people therefore you have to think about how to make your ideas universal.In the sack we see that culture is very substantial in our society and that it is very important to politics. Culture is present everywhere and sometimes we dont even realize how it affects us. We also see that culture is very hard to define because there are so many different ways to look at culture, you can think of culture as symbols, or the way people live, or the native art or music. Whatever you think, culture is likely one of the most important influences on politics.