My worldview

How is my personal folklore an expression of my worldview?

After reading Toelken's text and Miner's "Body Ritual among the Narcirema", I realized that one cultule can be viewed totally different with using other lens of worldview. Actually, I could not realize that "Narcirema" designates "American" until the last part of the text. When the description of physical torture got worse and detailed, I realized that this was a despription of American society, or modern society of the civilized world.

Since I'm an Asian and lived in conservative Asian country over 21 years, I think I have very different worldview from Western students. For example, the usage of language, concept of time, openness to opposite sex.... In here, a lot of things are different from my country even though Asian countries are fully westernized now.

Toelken said that "people speaking different languages may perceive things in basically different ways." I totally agree with that. In English, people use "my" in order to represent possessive form. (my father, my mother, my teacher.. etc) However, Koreans use "our" instead of the word "my" even though the speaker has no siblings. (our father, our mother.. ) I think that is because we consider others in community very important. In my worldview, I, my family and friends are in the center. That means I care about them very much, but don't care about the people who is outside of my community much.

In addition, the concept of time is also different. I read other student's post about being exact on time, but it's okay in my country to be late for about 10 minutes. Some people even think that it is too strict to appear on exact time and come 5 minutes late intentionally. I myself try not to be late on time, but I'm compeletely okay when the person whom I will meet is late for several minutes. Therefore, I have a comfortable or somewhat lazy attitude toward time.