Identity

Following my previous ranting post, I had a small revelation in my French Class.  In our Friday discussion, we focused upon cultural identity, for both Americans and the Francophone world.  Immediately I thought about AmCon.   It occurred to me that perhaps our authors weren't being merely vague in their essays, but rather were unable to speak to the identity of an entire nation.  We faced the same problem in French, as the difficulty of translation as well as the subject made it difficult to assign one definition to American culture.   Time and time again, my classmates had to preface answers with the phrase, "ce n'est pas vrai pour tous les gens, mais..."  or "this isn't true for everyone, but..." showing how impossible it truly is to describe a culture comprised of individuals in a sentence or two.   Oftentimes, generalizations and hypotheses are as close as we get.   But in French, we began to examine how we defined our personal culture.  I feel that this applies well to our AmCon discussions following our Friday discussion as well.  In sharing our objects, over half of the members of the class focused upon the idea of freedom of expression.   The general, vague concept was important to many people, however, through conversation, it was revealed that "free expression" had different meaning for each person.  The individual matters.  We can only define our culture through the individuals who create it, and it is necessary to attempt to place each voice into the equation before attempting to speak for the group.  I enjoyed our conversation and thought that we worked well on Friday, examining several groups whose identity may not always be considered in the discussion of freedom (such as all minorities.)   I think it will be interesting to see where our discussion leads in the future!