Essay Sample on East-West Cultural Divides: A Study

Introduction

Culture varies between different groups of people due to the different environments and different social, economic, and political lifestyles that people grow up and live within their surroundings. The cultural characteristics are shown in the way people behave and their attitude towards life and their surrounding (Wang 3). The people from the Eastern and Western regions have conflicting cultures, which trace their origin to the diverge perceptions and views of the organization of the society. Eastern countries such as china, japan, Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia, among other Asian and Middle East nations, have since history embraced traditions and the spirit of socialism that they always tend to conserve and maintain (Wang 4). The people from western countries, including America, Europe, and Australia, are civilized people who value independent lives and do not embrace traditions like their counterparts in the East (Wang 4). The different nature of the two distinct groups explains their different behaviors in society. The people from the East and the West have opposing traditions, and beliefs of the people determine their distinctive practices, personalities, and their attitudes towards life and the world.

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The people from the West have contrasting views of the world. For instance, while Westerners perceive space to be an empty region in which planets float, Easterners have a completely different perspective (Bueno). According to Easterners, energy fills up space, which they refer to as ghee. Westerners believe that objects exist in an “empty” space; hence if two objects are separated, they do not have any effect on each other (Bueno). However, the people from the East believe that when one separates two objects in the space from each other, they do affect each other because the space is not empty but filled with energy (Bueno). They ascertain that objects made from the ghee are closely related to the ghee in the surrounding. According to Easterners, every object has substantial elements of ghee, which makes them closely linked to the ghee in the space that leads to the resultant reaction between separate objects (Bueno). For example, the interaction between the earth and moon results in tides. While the people of the West did not understand the concept of the tides, the interaction of objects at a distance like magnetism, and how everything in space functions, the Easterners have since the ancient times understood that it is the principle of interactivity of objects.

The Concepts of Individuality and Wholeness

Additionally, Westerners and Easterners have different thoughts regarding the concepts of individuality and wholeness. The concepts of wholeness and distinctiveness vary for objects and substances. Objects hold the notion of individuality; thereby, part or piece of it is not like an entire object (Bueno). However, the idea of wholeness applies to substance since part of an element is the same as the whole of it. For example, a piece of cake and an entire cake are different objects; however, they are the same if viewed as substance. Westerners center their thoughts on individuality; hence, objects are at the core of their thinking (Bueno). For Westerners, they are a clear distinction between plural and singular nouns; thus, when communicating, they have to specify the quantity of objects. However, wholeness is central to the way the people from the East think (Bueno). Their thinking is centered on substance and does not have to emphasize quantity since, for them, a piece or part of something is similar to the entire thing. According to Westerners, a wholeness is a group of individual elements. For instance, fruits consist of apple, orange, and banana, among others. Easterners perceive wholeness as a lack of distinct individuality; there are no smaller divisions of fruit (Bueno). Therefore, when communicating with a westerner, one has to specify the quantity and type of food, fruit, or any other object. Easterners do not bother to ask for specifications of objects since they already know what somebody is talking about.

A clear distinction emerges in the languages of the different cultures since Westerners focus on nouns while Easterners are verb focused. According to the study conducted on mothers playing with their children, American mothers used more nouns such as hospitals, water, and truck when communicating with their children (Bueno). In contrast, the Chinese mother used more verbs such as put, cook, and make in her vocabulary when conversing with her young one. When interacting, Easterners majorly think of the interactions between individuals or objects. Therefore, they use a lot of verbs in their vocabularies to express the interactions. Easterners have held the belief for 2500 years that the space changes consistently make them see a world full of action, with objects being created and disappearing as space interacts with the surrounding (Bueno). However, Westerners are more focused on the individuality of people or objects; hence they use more nouns in the expression of eccentricity (Bueno). They consider items in the space to be stationery, which makes them discount the use of verbs in their vocabularies. While Easterners are verb oriented and see a world filled action, Westerners observe a world with nouns.

Different Points of View

Additionally, Westerners and Easterners also have different points of view regarding causations. For Easterners, the cause and effect are complicated. Considering the people from the East believe that energy fills up space, they also consider surrounding as the source of everything (Bueno). For instance, an Easterner believes that an object is blue because ghee fills it up in the space. Similarly, when a balloon is floating in the air and suddenly starts to accelerate, an Easterner believes that it may be due to wind. In the context of human beings, Easterners contend that the surrounding determines a person’s behavior (Bueno). For them, an individual can be both happy and sad; if the people around them are happy, they become happy, and the vice versa is also true. However, Westerners imagine fewer causations compared to Easterners. According to Westerners, objects are exclusively separate and independent with no conditional causations. For them, an object is blue because it is its nature. Unlike Easterners, they have less connection to the surrounding; hence the properties of objects are enough to explain their behavior (Bueno). When using an example of an accelerating balloon in the air, a westerner imagines that it is accelerating because it might be losing air, which implies that the cause is always in itself. The same applies to human beings. If a person is hardworking, it is because of his or her diligence. A westerner’s point of view is that their personality traits determine their behavior.

The traditional portraits in the West and East also differ in the size of their backgrounds. In the East, the customary pictures have broad backgrounds, while in the West, the backgrounds are small (Bueno). The people in the East have withheld the culture, and in modern society, they tend to take pictures with a more extensive surrounding. For instance, when taking pictures in front of a well-known statue, Easterners would take the photograph of the person, including the entire sculpture in the background. Easterners tend to find a balance between the surroundings and the people when taking pictures (Bueno). They tend to enjoy taking different images with different backgrounds. However, the people from the West focus on the object or person when taking photographs (Bueno). In a similar case of a statue, a person from the West would take a broad picture of the face and ignore the entire background of making a smaller portion of it.

Eastern and Western Cultural Perceptions

Moreover, the Eastern and Western cultural perceptions denoted in arts and paintings actively reflect the difference in social understanding and worldview. While the Western people view themselves to be at the center of society, the Eastern people tend to see themselves outside society (Bueno). For instance, the Eastern paintings increasingly depict an aerial or bird’s view (Bueno). When focusing on figures, flowers, animals, insects, or the natural world as a theme, the Easterners like the Chinese adapt to a landscape painting (Dai 74). Famous Chinese arts such as the “golden pheasant graph” of Song Huizong depict a landscape or an aerial view of the objects (Dai 74). Chen Hongshou also consistently utilized landscape paintings to capture birds, flowers, ladies, insects, and fish during the Ming dynasty (Dai 74). The continuous favor for landscape in Eastern thematic paintings reflects the people’s pursuit of artistic conception and advocation of nature. On the other hand, the Western focal point focuses on the three-dimensional technique when painting an object (Bueno). Most American painting denotes that the painter is standing in front of the object as he or she strives to capture the real-life scenario of the element (Bueno). Unlike the Eastern painting, Western painting gives more credit or pay attention to life and objectivity of the items the author paints (Dai 74). The contemporary American painters are influenced by renaissance painters, who focused on the three-dimensional representation of objects. For example, Raphael’s portrait, “Sistine Madonna,” and Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper” substantially reflect the Western adherence to humanism, democracy, and freedom rather than the advocation of the natural world (Dai 74). Therefore, since art, precisely paintings depict cultural beliefs, understanding, and attitude, the difference in the painting trend massively portrays the socio-cultural divergence between the East and West.

Conclusion

In fact, Easterners and Westerners perceive information differently. Easterners are collectivists; hence they tend to have holistic thinking while Westerners, who are individualists, tend to interpret information with analytical perception (Stephanidis & Antona 40). According to scientific research, Westerners such as Americans have more activation of the middle temporal gyrus, a section of the brain that is in charge of linking meaning with objects. Westerners separate objects before interpreting their meaning (Bueno). The significant difference between Westerner’s analytic thinking and Easterners’ holistic thinking is that the latter focuses on the interconnectedness of the visual stimuli while the former interprets objects independently (Stephanidis & Antona 40). For instance, while viewing an image, Asians depict the entire image, scanning through both the background and focal item. With holistic processing, they display an object as a whole. Therefore, Easterners take in more contextual information and tend to use the non-central details to process data about an object. However, when Westerners view an object, they mainly look at the central item (Stephanidis & Antona 40). Their analytic processing entails detaching objects from their background or context and focuses on the attributes of the object (Stephanidis & Antona 40). Therefore, Westerners tend to recall information regarding the focal object and only use the central details when processing data.