Cultures

You wake up. Was it all a nightmare or is this reality? The people you see to your left do not look like you and do not act like you. You turn to your right and those people don’t have the same clothing as you and apparently do not speak the same language as you. You say hello, but this is obviously not the correct thing to do in this culture because if you didn’t have everyone’s attention before, you sure do now. Glares and stares come your way but after a few minutes you are “old news”. They begin conversing in a most unusual way. Hands are held high when one is speaking. Those who are listening must bend at the knees and fold their hands. What kind of rhetoric rules are these? Each person has different colored shoe laces and soon you understand that this is a kind of identification. You, wearing your slip on shoes with no laces are definitely an outcast. This culture looks so complicated in the rules and ways in which they communicate with one another. Is it really that different though from our own communication and rhetoric? Why isn’t our rhetoric unusual? Why are we so quick to accept our own cultures rhetoric? We don’t think twice about hugging our friends when we meet them, or giving a handshake when we are first introduced to someone else. These cultural rhetorical tools may seem common to us, but to someone else, they might feel like the alien above.