2. Piano room at home. Part of my culture is enough comfort with my family that I can sing and play music at any time and it doesn't annoy anyone. Furthermore, I grew up listening to music with primarily piano or orchestral scores-- there isn't a guitar or drum set to be seen in the house. This image represents the culture of my musical taste and ability my family's music focus gave me to learn to be a musician.
3. In my home, the pantry is fair game. It is always full of food. My culture has been that there will always be food to eat when I want it and I don't need to limit myself or wait for family mealtimes if I want to eat. A culture of ease towards food.
4. My mother keeps these folders on the wall in the mudroom. She puts mail for each child or important documents in here. This is a great example of the culture of organization that pervades my home. For us it is a given that things are always clean and put in their place. If there isn't a place for something, you make one, like these folders.
5. In our house, we lock the bathroom door when we're using it. Privacy is a part of our bathroom culture, but not our bedroom culture-- we do not lock our bedroom doors ever. Even after I turned 18 it was a rule I just continued to keep. Mom can pop in to vacuum any time she likes even if I'm not home and I don't feel my privacy has been violated. But the best way to signal to someone that the bathroom is in use is to lock the door (although we do always turn out the light when we leave a room-- culture of saving energy). This was an uncomfortable realization for me when an aunt and uncle's family stayed with us for a month and I walked in on people several times.
6. We also always sit down when we use the restroom in my home-- man or woman, it doesn't matter. It's cleaner and less noisy. And when we are finished, we always shut the very top lid, too. This unique cultural difference means I don't get along very well with male roommates.
7. General cleanliness is part of American culture. You're taught to wash your hands after using the restroom. But there are plenty of people who don't do it. Not in my culture. I was raised to be a germaphobe, haha, so not washing is never ever an option! Sometimes I just need to go wash my hands even if I haven't been to the restroom-- usually after coming home from a public place (like campus).
8. Part of my culture is that I have my own bedroom. This wasn't the case while growing up in a very small house with plenty of siblings. But when I was 12 we moved, and so during my adolescence I became used to being alone in my room. This culture is very strange in, say, certain classes in China where the students go to boarding school and might even share a room with their parents their whole life.
9. Landline (but we have cell phones, as well). Part of my culture is the expectation of being available. If I don't text people back relatively quickly, they get impatient. If I were to leave my cell phone at home, say, and only respond to texts in the evening when getting home from my obligations, my friends would annoyed! But I often do just leave my phone sitting in my room when studying in the study so that I can be free of it. So my culture of 'being available' is less complete than most Americans.
10. This picture represents the culture of values in my family. Not only do we have a distinct set of frequently-reinforced religious / moral values, but we also consciously value value. Get it? We have a culture of daily trying to develop Christlike attributes, which shows itself in my Mom posting inspirational sayings like this on the pantry door. The saying rotates every month. We look at it often, think about it, and it influences how we live. So it is also a cyclical cultural feature, coming back to influence our culture because of how prevalent we make it.
11. We always have fresh fruit available, but have very little unhealthy food around the house. The is a part of our culture that's difficult for some people when they stay with us for extended periods. They're apt to say, "There's nothing to eat here ever..." Yet for me, having to cook something if I want to eat or eating fresh fruit when I'm hungry is very normal.
12. My family culture includes expectations that when we have a family meal, everyone is involved in either cooking or cleaning. We had a special family breakfast together for President's Day, and since I didn't cook or prepare, I washed the dishes. What's more, our culture is to wash the dishes immediately after dirtying them. Often the person cooking leaves no dishes to be washed except those the food is being served in.
13. Formal culture dictates couches as the place where Americans sit, but in my family, despite having really comfortable couches, when we gather in the family room or just sit there reading / on the computer, you'll generally find most of us sitting on the floor leaning against the foot of the couch. We usually put a pillow behind our back, and I always have a pillow on my lap, too, and sometimes on my feet (when it's cold) when I'm relaxing in the living room. This is my family's informal norm as opposed to a formal norm.
14. A unique formal norm to our family, however, is that no one uses the table without a placemat or putting a tablecloth on it. Because it's a wooden table that we don't want scratched, you'll often find us throwing down a cloth placemat or pulling out a tablecloth to put on the table before we use it, even just for a bowl of cereal.
15. Another part of our culture is that shoes are always removed when you get into the house. If you enter from the garage, they're left in the mudroom. But one person is generally only supposed to have one pair of shoes in the mudroom so it isn't too cluttered. So we usually keep only a convenient pair of shoes in the mudroom if we need to run quickly outside for something and carry any other shoes we wear back to our bedroom rather than walking there to remove them.
16. Another value that is part of my culture, reflected here, is preparedness. We keep a year's storage in a cold storage room in the basement (that this is even a room still part of our architectural culture is significant), and this food, unlike the pantry food, is not to be taken freely.
17. Here is a great example of a culture of tensions between my, my father, and my mom. My dad is from a family who loves to hunt, and part of his culture is keeping trophies mounted on the walls. My mom's culture is that rustic, violent decor like that is unseemly. So they've compromised and my dad gets to put his trophies only in the basement recreation room. As a vegetarian, these things are offensive to me and my culture of passivity, so I include this photo as part of a room that I rarely visit, because I don't feel comfortable because of how it is decorated.
18. Americans generally value fitness and exercise, at least visually if not themselves taking part in it. But isn't it interesting that that culture isn't put on display. These workout machines aren't put in our living room upstairs where everyone who comes into the house can see them. Rather, we put them in a room guests are unlikely to see and where we can exercise privately. Some people work out in public or outside, but I grew up working out only in private, never at gyms (like I talked about last time), so this picture reflects that part of my culture.
19. Growing up we always used these... poofs to wash our bodies when showering. It wasn't strange to me. I figured everyone did. You put bodywash on the poof or on a loofa and use it to get clean. When I first moved away after high school and as a missionary, I realized that this is something many other men don't do! I was stunned that they thought they were cleaning themselves by just using a bar of soap and their hands to shower! How does that remove any dead skin?! They were just as surprised that I would use something that is cultural construed as more feminine to bathe.
20. These pictures of artwork in my bedroom represent more of my value culture, namely that religious art should be a part of our lives to remind us of God.
21. Finally, this picture represents one of my most prized cultural aspects: a bed is to be made when you wake up. I always keep my room very clean, and a room can be otherwise tidy, but if the bed is not made up, it will never look really clean. So when I wake up every morning, I immediately make my bed before praying. This morning routine displays the values of orderliness and spirituality that are essential to me.
I really enjoy these assignments because they help me be more humble about my success in school growing up. I can see how many things about my culture enabled me to do well in school. It wasn't all just about my natural intelligence or capacity. My family prized reading, being orderly, quiet (that's hard to show in pictures, but the only sounds ever in my home are if someone is practicing the piano or voice techniques), obedient, normal Mormon religious values, and healthy living, eating, and sleeping patterns that made school the sort of thing that would naturally be easier for me than for a child with a culture that was very different from what is found at school. My cultural and social capital, as bestowed on me by my culture, are as much part of me being 'smart' as actually having a good brain!
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