Hofstede’s Cultural Model (Part 1)


When we say Hofstede's model, my mind immediately goes to the Cultural Onion. As a person who has travelled all their childhood, although it has some limitations and it may vary from person to person, this model is a very relatable model to look at and understand. A cultural onion is just like an onion with many layer. The inner layer shows what you value the most, what is the most important and the last layer shows what you value the least. So, this model doesn’t have any right or wrong since if differs. Here comes in the culture part because as I have even seen in my exchange process, we all come from different cultures. So you can easily pick a friend you met and sort of make out their onions in your head by the way they act, talk and do stuff. It only takes a bit of time to understand their greatest values. I would also at this matter talk about a Ted Talk that I had watched which made me think about this model along with our cultures. In his ‘’Where Is Home?’’ talk, Pico Iyer talks about what the word ‘’home’’ really means to people. This also made me think about myself and where I call ‘’home’’. When it comes to culture, I feel like it is a very personal topic. And well, it is absolutely something that can be understood differently. In this case, when people ask ''Where are you from?'' to me, I say ''Turkey'' because that's where my grandparents are, that is where we have a village and where I am living right now and have lived for the past couple of years but when I say ''Turkey'', it really is a way of just saying it. I just say it because as a society, I believe that we are pushed to somewhat say where our ancestors come from. It is not true, not in my case. I was born in Istanbul but that does not make it home because I grew up travelling the world with my parents. So as I travelled more, I picked up many different cultures I wanted to pick up and applied it to myself. I spent most of my childhood years going from one place to another, meeting new people and experiencing new stuff, almost as if on a world tour. So that is why, Turkey isn't a home really. But when I don't say Turkey and say somewhere else, people are like ''but where are you really from?''. I ask them to guess. I get a lot of Middle Eastern places thrown at me which is okay but is this not some kind of stereotypical act or even racism? It’s like ''If you are not blonde, you cannot be Russian.'' or ''If you are blonde, you cannot be from a Middle Eastern country.'' which is a weird thing. So when I tell people that home for me is England because I have spent my childhood there, and have all my memories there than they are like ''Oh so you don't like Turkey?'' or ''You don't accept your own identity?''. I am Turkish but being Turkish does not mean that you have to grow up there. It's just a thing. When it comes to being Turkish or not, than when we look at my childhood, I would say ''I am from all around the world'' because for me, being and travelling feels like home. When I don't travel or go somewhere and have to stand at a place for a couple of years, I become bored. So, I have found that ''home'' for me is traveling, meeting new people and experiencing new cultures. If it was a physical place, than I would tell you about the beautiful city of Portsmouth where I would ride my bike around the pier, go on the rides with my friends, take a walk along the beach and rush back home after school to be able to play in the garden.
But this matter somehow clashes with what people accept as culture and what they don’t. But I can truly say: “I’m an individual, not a representative of any culture.” Which would be acceptable in many cultures. But as I have stated out before, there are so many cultures and opinions around the world, there is no right or wrong. So I think that everyone should respect and get to know each other’s cultures rather than trying to find a ‘’correct’’ opinion that is suitable for them.

Click to watch Pico Iyer's Ted Talk Here!

I have also myself made a Cultural Onion to show my values.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Edward T. Hall’s Cultural Iceberg Model

Image
One of the things I was very much interested in when I came to Finland was the culture. As we all know and as I have written about in my previous posts, culture differs from people to people. I find culture as a very important impact in my life and growing up, I have always been through many different cultures. I must say that I do have many different influences on me caused by these cultures. For me, a culture is a new person, a different character. So, this made me take in interest in Edward Hall’s Iceberg Model. In this model, we can see that many cultures have many important opinions about different topics. For example, some cultures have religion, some have people, and some have animals. It all differs and makes every culture unique in its own way. Along this, Edward Hall really pointed out how we have a surface culture and a deep culture. These all differ very much from people to people. I find it very interesting and think that it is a good way to reflect who we are to o...
Read more

Salmiakki Ice Cream

Image
Let’s talk about something I really love in general: Ice Cream. Now, I must say that summer has officially come (not to Finland in this case since it was basically raining and snowing a couple of days ago) but, summer is out there. And here we are still wearing coats. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t have ice cream! Ice cream is life. One of the best things about summer is, you can have ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can even make your own ice cream or popsicles. I remember making these lovely strawberry popsicles last summer, they were healthy too! Overall, everyone loves a bit of ice cream. Coming to ice cream flavours, I am a great bitter chocolate, normal chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and another ice cream type they have fan. As long as it is ice cream, I have no problem gobbling it down. But…Salmiakki ice cream? We need to talk. First of all, as we had tried Salmiakki which you can check out from the video up there! It wasn’t the sweetest f...
Read more

Finnish Is Hard!

Today, I wanted to write about something I have not written in a long time but wanted to write about. Let’s talk about the Finnish language! The first thing I would like to state out is, as knowing English for many years myself, it is very easy for me to be able to predict what other languages mean and to figure out their sentences or words to their meanings. As you understand a language more, you realize that you start to understand other languages too…well that changed now but still.This year, like every other year, my goal was to learn something new which can be information wise or starting something new but this year, I learnt one very major thing : Finnish cannot be predicted. You can’t make out any words or sentences in Finnish. In fact, you can’t even remember the words you learnt in Finnish after a couple of minutes! Why is it so hard? What I have seen is the fact that Finnish has words in words which means, there are separate words, than if you want to say something that ...
Read more