Trang blog này nhằm lưu lại những bài viết của chính tác giả hoặc của những tác giả khác đã viết và công bố trên các ấn phẩm chính thức, trên phương tiện truyền thông đại chúng, và trên mạng Internet, về những vấn đề giáo dục VN, hoặc những vấn đề chung của GD thế giới có liên quan đến những vấn đề mà GD VN đang cần tìm hiểu.
Mong nhận được sự góp ý và chia sẻ của mọi người về những vấn đề mà các bài viết nêu ra.
Monday, December 15, 2014
Tư liệu: Tại sao một số nền văn hóa lại nhấn mạnh tính cá nhân hơn những nền văn hóa khác? (New York Times 3/12/2014)re individualistic than others?
Why Are Some Cultures More Individualistic Than Others?
Dịch tóm tắt một số đoạn quan trọng:
Một nghiên cứu được công bố trên tạp chí Science vào tháng 5 vừa qua đã cho rằng nguyên nhân của sự khác biệt giữa phương Tây và phương Đông là do những định hướng xã hội khác nhau của cách làm nông nghiệp ở những nơi trồng lúa gạo và trồng lúa mì. Do việc trồng lúa gạo cần phải có các ruộng nước và chúng đòi hỏi một hệ thống thủy lợi phức tạp mà hàng năm đều phải đưa nước vào và rút nước ra. Việc sử dụng nước trong đồng ruộng của một người có thể ảnh hưởng đến năng suất của người hàng xóm. Vì vậy cộng đồng trồng lúa gạo cần phải phối hợp làm việc cùng nhau một cách chặt chẽ.
Trồng
lúa mì thì khác, chỉ cần mưa, không cần hệ thống thủy lợi. Điều này
không đòi hỏi sự phối hợp và hợp tác trong cộng đồng người làm nông. Và
trong lịch sử thì châu Âu luôn là người trồng lúa mì còn châu Á luôn
trồng lúa gạo.
Các tác giả của công trình lập luận rằng qua hàng ngàn năm như vậy các xã hội phương Tây và phương Đông đã tạo ra cho mình những nền văn hóa khác biệt. "Bạn không cần phải trực tiếp làm nông dân mới có thể thừa hưởng nền văn hóa ấy."
AMERICANS
and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of
ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique,
autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.
People
in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as
interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In
such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to
others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger
whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America,
we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say
that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.
These are broad brush strokes, but the research demonstrating the
differences is remarkably robust and it shows that they have
far-reaching consequences. The social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett
and his colleagues found that these different orientations toward
independence and interdependence affected cognitive processing. For
example, Americans are more likely to ignore the context, and Asians to
attend to it. Show an image of a large fish swimming among other fish
and seaweed fronds, and the Americans will remember the single central
fish first. That’s what sticks in their minds. Japanese viewers will
begin their recall with the background. They’ll also remember more about
the seaweed and other objects in the scene.
Another social psychologist, Hazel Rose Markus,
asked people arriving at San Francisco International Airport to fill
out a survey and offered them a handful of pens to use, for example four
orange and one green; those of European descent more often chose the
one pen that stood out, while the Asians chose the one more like the
others.
Dr.
Markus and her colleagues found that these differences could affect
health. Negative affect — feeling bad about yourself — has big,
persistent consequences for your body if you are a Westerner. Those
effects are less powerful if you are Japanese, possibly because the
Japanese are more likely to attribute the feelings to their larger
situation and not to blame themselves.
There’s
some truth to the modernization hypothesis — that as social worlds
become wealthier, they also become more individualistic — but it does
not explain the persistent interdependent style of Japan, South Korea
and Hong Kong.
In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm,
that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created
by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice
paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems
that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use
affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work
together in tightly integrated ways.
Not
wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and
harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less
coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been
wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.
The
authors of the study in Science argue that over thousands of years,
rice- and wheat-growing societies developed distinctive cultures: “You
do not need to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture.”
Their
test case was China, where the Yangtze River divides northern wheat
growers from southern rice growers. The researchers gave Han Chinese
from these different regions a series of tasks. They asked, for example,
which two of these three belonged together: a bus, a train and train
tracks? More analytical, context-insensitive thinkers (the wheat
growers) paired the bus and train, because they belong to the same
abstract category. More holistic, context-sensitive thinkers (the rice
growers) paired the train and train tracks, because they work together.
Asked
to draw their social networks, wheat-region subjects drew themselves
larger than they drew their friends; subjects from rice-growing regions
drew their friends larger than themselves. Asked to describe how they’d
behave if a friend caused them to lose money in a business, subjects
from the rice region punished their friends less than subjects from the
wheat region did. Those in the wheat provinces held more patents; those
in the rice provinces had a lower rate of divorce.
I
write this from Silicon Valley, where there is little rice. The local
wisdom is that all you need is a garage, a good idea and energy, and you
can found a company that will change the world. The bold visions
presented by entrepreneurs are breathtaking in their optimism, but they
hold little space for elders, for longstanding institutions, and for the
deep roots of community and interconnection.
Nor is there much rice within the Tea Party. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, declared recently that all a man needed was a horse, a gun and the open land, and he could conquer the world.
Wheat
doesn’t grow everywhere. Start-ups won’t solve all our problems. A lone
cowboy isn’t much good in the aftermath of a Hurricane Katrina. As we
enter a season in which the values of do-it-yourself individualism are
likely to dominate our Congress, it is worth remembering that this way
of thinking might just be the product of the way our forefathers grew
their food and not a fundamental truth about the way that all humans
flourish.
ư
T.M. Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology at Stanford and a contributing opinion writer.
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