From: Kharin (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 04:54:05 MDT
"For instance, both Chinese and Anglo-American culture regard time as a continuum, but when referring to the past and the future in terms of "back" and "ahead," they adopt different starting points. A traditional Chinese stands facing the past, perceiving what just happened as ahead of him and what is yet to come as behind him. A native English speaker, however, assumes the opposite viewpoint. "
Not entirely surprising given the importance of ancestors in Chinese culture. There was something similar cited by Lee Whorf in Language, Thought and Reality;
"I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future. "
"While Western culture prizes the individual, for example, traditional Chinese culture places great emphasis on the group."
Dubious relaibility but amusing nonetheless for the way in which China broke this particular form of cultural analysis:
http://geert-hofstede.com/hofstede_china.shtml
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