Culture and Ethnicity - Nature of the Early Feeding Patterns - Assignment Example

The paper "Culture and Ethnicity - Nature of the Early Feeding Patterns" is a great example of a finance and accounting assignment. Ethnicity became a viable term for discourse in the recent 20th century. The perception of ethnicity became the concept by which an individual or a community of separate individuals saw themselves apart from others in proximity to themselves. This individual or internal communal assessment led these individuals to perceive themselves as either subordinated or excluded from the mainstream. A further examination of the meaning of ethnicity would encompass the language, religious beliefs, and certain patterns of behaviour, which were described as the content of the group's cultural composition. Prior to the 1940s, the working definition for ethnicity was simply a biological depiction, which was based on physical differences. However, ethnicity as a social theory challenged the attempts to merely use physical appearance to elucidate the differences between persons. While members of any given ethnic minority may exhibit and express exclusivity in their ethnic status, whereas one's ethnicity is a state of one being. On the other hand, one culture is the state of one co-existence,.( values, beliefs, practices, and rituals) there may not be any perimeters or limitations placed on the cultural leanings.

The individualistic approach to cultural psychology also finds expression in the work of Jaan Valsiner. Valsiner seeks to combine the symbolic and individualistic approaches. Thus, he recognizes that there is a collective culture of socially shared meanings. However, "belief systems that exist within a collective culture do not have an effect in the sense of being copied directly (or appropriated) by individuals. Instead, they constitute resources from which active persons construct their own (personal) belief structures" (Lightfoot & Valsiner, 1992, p. 395). Valsiner argues that individuals construct a personal culture within a collective culture. Culture is thus partly shared and partly personal.