With all these perspectives, the thing I’m learning most is how relative it all is. Everyone has a different study abroad experience and a different idea of what a “full” experience really means, so there’s no real way to say who “passed” or “failed” the experience. Even “culture” itself is relative! There are so many ways to categorize and sub-categorize and further divide people, and instead we generalize to one’s nation. Sometimes we over-generalize to one’s entire continent and ignore the finer points, as people do when they label someone “Asian” instead of “Vietnamese” or “Korean”. I wonder if this explains the problem of Americans having “no culture”. Are we just over-generalizing ourselves because of the vast variety of cultures present here? Alternatively, if you break it up by state, we all have our ideas about the cultures present there.<\/p>\n
To avoid going too far off topic, I’ll summarize by saying that I’m learning a lot about the relativity of culture and study abroad experiences. It’s impossible to say with any kind of certainty who’s doing multicultural experiences “right”, because it’s impossible to go to another culture without taking something <\/em>with you, good or bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With all these perspectives, the thing I’m learning most is how relative it all is. Everyone has a different study abroad experience and a different idea of what a “full” experience really means, so there’s no real way to say who “passed” or “failed” the experience. Even “culture” itself is relative! There are so many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1393,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":438,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/becoming-foreign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}