19 May 2009 - Cultural Worldview

According the the article by Tolkein, our world view is shaped from our infancy by the people and things that are included in our environment. This creates highly individualized and complex personalities with distinct ways of viewing their environs meanwhile sharing elements of a common discourse. Thus, according to Tolkein, though my siblings and I grew up in the same house, with the same parents, and the same religion, in a setting where there were few variables, such as the number of people that filled it, these same variables caused a small change and therefore created a slightly different perspective. As we leave our home and continue to be confronted with different experiences and exposure to other people and things the personal worldview of myself and my siblings begins to diverge. This explains the difference between, for example, my sisters body of folklore as compared to mine. She married early in life and moved to Utah where there are all kinds of Mormon folk traditions such as scrapbooking and other forms of genealogy. She learns different forms of memory preservance from parties with other women. I, on the other hand, have become deeply immersed in the Salvadorian culture and have learned to make pupusas and tamales from my good friends. Though we share certain elements of the greater worldview of Anglo-Saxon America, and more specifically that of the Palmer household, our world views have diverged as our life experiences do. Because our world view is shaped by the daily absorption of information and ways of being and living, our daily contact with people, from all different types of folk groups, enriches our personal store of folklore. In this manner my worldview is like a pair of glasses through which I interpret my experiences, stories, anecdotes, traditions, and practices, or folklore which then affects and alters my worldview in return.