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Worldwide Non Western Cultures Faced Fundamental Challenges to Their Cultural Identities Not so Much a Recentering of Culture but a Decentering of Culture

In: Historical Events

Submitted By david6660
Words 395
Pages 2
Individual Project # 4
David Henderson
American Intercontinental University

Abstract
The Chinese have been in America since the early 1600’s and have contributed to the growth of this country in many ways. When leaving your home land and coming to a new one, there are many new and different ways of doing things that may be contrary to what is normal or acceptable in you culture. The decentering of a culture is examined, as well as the impact on a culture when this happens.

China’s Decentering Process
“Worldwide, non-Western cultures faced fundamental challenges to their cultural identities-not do much a recentering of culture but a decentering” (Sayre, 2010). What can we gather from this statement. Sayer is stating that Western cultures have begun to loose their original identities that they brought over from their native countries. Every culture that immigrated to the U.S. brought with them some of their own culture. Most brought just the clothes on their back along with hopes and dreams of a better life and ideals from the homeland. Cultures that were ‘non-western’ were caught between two continents, on the one hand, they had the values and views that they grew accustomed to, and on the other hand they were being introduced to a totally new and different way of life and a new set of standards, and as a result they started to adapt to a newer way of life, and in doing so their old way of life began to be replaced by a newer culture which caused their native lands culture to become decentered, and as a result the older culture started to rescind .
What is really happening here is not really the decentering of cultures or even the recentering of cultures, but rather a melding of many different cultures in to one. Cultural identities are the faces societies wear to present themselves to the world. These faces represent the recentering of many different

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