Culture & Perception

[David]

Originally Posted by ariel

I was referring to the article you cited. Its author clearly separates Western culture and thinking ("individualistic", "analytical" etc ) from non-Western ones ( "collectivist", "holistic" etc).

I do not like when an entire ethnicity/ race is put on a psychological couch and every member gets slapped with a uniform label.
Humans should be viewed as individuals, not as homogeneous members of a breed.

Actually Ariel, unless i have developed some kind of block and have simply missed it despite numerous readings i cannot find the place in this article where it claims that Western individualistic thinking is "analytical" while Eastern collectivistic thinking is not. In fact i cannot locate the word "analytical" anywhere in the article at all. Clearly both individualistic and collectivistic cultures can be "analytical", but they tend to analyze in different ways. The example given in the article is the fish tank, where most collectivistic thinkers analyze the background while the individualistic thinkers focus on the fish. Both are analyzing. This is not a value judgement of good or bad, though certainly i would much prefer to consider myself a collectivistic thinker who interprets the world through a greater sense of interconnectiveness and wholeness. But the opposite of "holistic" is not "analytical".
The other misconception you seem to be working with is that this article is discussing a question of race/ethnicity. I do not believe it is. It is discussing how different cultures think and react, not different races. Though you have not seen to fit to comment upon it, i already suggested that a person that is ethnically/genetically Malay who is brought up in Western culture in most likely going to think and behave like a Westerner. Culture is a matter of nurture more than nature IMHO. I do not believe anyone is biologically disposed to one way of thinking or another based upon their DNA.