Blog Assignment #1

I chose Cultural Studies for my major because I am very interested in sociolinguistics. I love looking at how languages both reflect and shape their culture and people and I felt Cultural Studies was a place I could study both this and everything else related to culture.

I am drawn to culture because it fascinates me how it is ever-changing. As we discussed in our first meeting, it is the mundane, everyday things that make a culture and it amazes me how oblivious we are to our culture, while anything out of the ordinary seems a bizarre oddity to be studied and put in a textbook. The idea that one race can be so incredibly diverse that cultures can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood intrigues me infinitely. While anthropologists may study tribes with "weird" beliefs and rituals, that is their life-- it would never come upon the majority to take a step back and look at why we send out children to school or how the "scenester" subculture has evolved.

To me, culture is how we live and how we justify our lives. Our systems of belief not only in religious or spiritual settings, but our systems of belief within society-- how we view the government, how we shop, how we choose which house to buy-- are what makes up our culture. Culture is everything that can be studied about a society--from economy to celebrities to gender roles. Culture is what makes us so diverse but what inevitably makes us all one race.