Essay Example on Rich Point Projects: Bridging Cultures and Enhancing Understanding

By definition, rich point projects are mainly cultural moments or specific words or phrases that usually talks deeply about a group of people, and it often acts as a meeting point between two different cultures in a given society (Agar, 2016). It is always essential to learn other people's perceptions so that we may learn to be very accommodative, and this will prevent us from doing things that are against their tradition and culture. In most cases, a rich point project does not always have any meaning to the outsiders, so they need insiders to understand them fully.

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The first encounter with a rich point was when I was in the fieldwork, and I had to take lunch offered by a friend of mine. To my surprise, after being served lunch, I realized that there was a piece of charcoal on top of my food. My friend who helped me the meal, however, just started eating his food while the charcoal was on top. When my friend realized that I was not taking my food, he decided to question me since he thought I was familiar with that tradition in China (Jane, 2014). When I explained why I was not taking my meal, he explained to me that the charcoal has no harm in any way and that it only meant to protect me since it believed that the spirits were hovering around in their community at that particular time.

The other unique cultural moment is the aspect of the lucky money. My first encounter with it was when I had completed high school, and it was now time to reward me for attaining excellent grades in school. My parents and friends decided to give me a surprise gift, but to my surprise, the award was not wrapped in the normal envelope but a red envelope (Carbaugh et al., 2015). I was so hesitant and resistant to take the award since I have not experienced such kind of an envelope before. It decided my grandfather's interventions to give me the reason why they had used a red envelope, and his answers left me amazed since I learned that a lot of things had not learned about our Chinese culture. The red envelope was a sign of wishing me good luck in the years to come and not a sign of witchcraft has had earlier thought.

Conclusion

Since the gift I was given was money and had not been keen on the writing on the notes since my parents could not allow us to have money while still in high school, I thought had been pranked by being given a fake not since on the note it was written “None of my business anyway," but I later realized its meaning. There is also an aspect of eating some particular meals in almost all restaurants, and this has been confusing visitors in china (Boromizsa et al., 2015). However, the reason behind taking such meals during winter is a form of their tradition since it believed that those who don't make the meal would have their ears bitten off by the cold wind.

Therefore, it is essential to understand anyone’s tradition or beliefs before we can judge them. Since most of the words used by a given group of people may have a different meaning in other languages, we must have an insider who can help us understand the words better.

References

Agar, M. H. (2016). The professional stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography (Vol. 2). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Carbaugh, D., & BoromiszaHabashi, D. (2015). Ethnography of communication. The international encyclopedia of language and social interaction, 1-16.

Jackson, J. (2014). Introducing language and intercultural communication. Routledge.