Culture, Norms, and Customs

       It was not requirement to post this page, but I love to write about culture because it is my job and, also, I see it is very important to talk about culture to change things toward better. In the United States, people don’t go outside country often, because they can get what they want here in America. People learn other countries’ culture from Hollywood or from friend. This kind of information generates assumption and stereotype which give us wrong ideas about other people.

      There are many definitions for culture, norms, and customs, but all these definitions are view of certain people. These definitions might be right or wrong, it is just opinion. I have my own opinion about all this. I believe there are two different things; culture and norms. Culture is anything that imposed on society by faith or historical significant, and norm is any human behavior that accumulated and become part of their daily life. Culture cannot change but norm can be change, but it will take a lot of effort and time to change some norms. The line between these two is blurred, things are overlapped and it’s hard to be separated.

     For instance, people in the U.S. celebrate Thanksgiving at November while people in the neighbor Canada celebrate Thanksgiving in October. My question is “can we go and tell people in Canada celebrate your Thanksgiving at November? The answer will be “NO”, but can we change whatever is served on their table, the answer is “Yes.” The time of the celebration is historical significant related, but the food that served on the table is human generated behavior and can be changed.

        I would like to talk about Yemen, the poorest Arab country in Arab peninsular. People in this country are drug addicted, 75% to 85% of the society consume drug on daily bases, and this is include men, women, children, and government officials. The country’s water supply will deplete by 2017 according to all expectation because all water goes to cultivate drugs “Qat”. The person spends 60% of his income to buy drug, live stops completely after 12:00 P.M. Many people call this culture; I don’t call this culture I called tradition or norm which means can be changed. To erase something that accumulated for all this years, will be very difficult and hard task, and it will not happen overnight.      

     

Stanford prison experiment

The experiment conducted by Professor Philip Zimbardo in Stanford University California 1971. Professor Zimbardo want prove that how people can be affected by the environment. Good people in evil environment. The experiment was mad for two weeks, but after six days the experiment was interrupted because of ethical issue. Please watch this documentary for more information about Stanford prison experiment;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkmQZjZSjk4

Also you can obtain more information about the experiment by clicking this link:

http://www.prisonexp.org

In Stanford prison experiment, Professor Zimbardo had used human to conduct his research. That was unethical side of that experiment. The line between experiment and real prison become fuzzy one day after the experiment had started. The prisoners had gone through real psychological abuse. In resent day, scientists are not allowed to use animal for medical experiment anymore, it is illegal, but in that experiment used human not animal. The author, in his interview, admits that he interrupted his experiment because those young students were in psychological pain and he can stop that.

Current environment affect person’s behavior, it is obvious, but not more than past environment. The environment that the person is grew up in. I think the past environment can affect person’s behavior more than current environment. This part had been ignored in the experiment and also when the Professor was trying to link his experiment to Abu Ghraib. I build my argument based on three year experience on the ground in Iraq with the armed force and I have been in many, formal and informal, discussion about that particular incident and many other incidents like Haditha killings. To satisfy my curiosity, nothing else, I approached many members of armed force, during the war, the solders with violence tendency. I noticed there was one common thing among all those people, it was their background.

The participant of Abu Ghraib, the guards, they all were members in military police unit. I will discuss biography of two of those people to see how they were affected by their background. Lynndie England, the female figure in the Abu Ghraib incident, she born and raised poor, low educated family from Kentucky, her father was railroad worker. Lynndie never attend any college. Another participant of Abu Ghraib is Charles A. Graner; Mr. Graner also was born from poor and law educated family at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he dropped from two year college. Charles was correction officer in 1994 at Fayette County Prison; he was accused of putting mace in a new guard's coffee as a joke, causing him to be sick. In 1998, a prisoner accused Graner and three other guards of planting a razor blade in his food, causing his mouth to bleed when he ate it. Lynndie England got pregnant and she stated that the father is Charles Graner, they were having sex in front of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and they were filmed.

These are the main characters of Abu Ghraib; my question for everyone is what kind of action is expected from these two characters?  What kind of girl allows herself to be videoed while she has sex? I hope that everyone will participate in the answer.

To obtain more information about Abu Ghraib please click the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ_Vxoyu8zY

To obtain more information about Haditha killing please click the link below:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/15/60minutes/main2574973.shtml

Interview with Lynndie England:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x03EYg_oq0

Introduction

Hello classmate, Professor, my name is Saman Ahmad but everybody calls me Sam. I am from Iraq originally. I have two BA degrees from Iraq, one in math and the other one in political science but as everybody knows that everything in Iraq has burn up and I don’t have paper to prove that. I decided to start again from the scratch and go back to school, this is a second year in the college trying to get my associate degree in IT and hopefully by the end of this year I will transfer to GMU. This class is part of my program.

I work as instructor in the United State Marine Corps, I teach foreign languages and culture. I stationed in Quantico VA, but I work in CA, NC, AZ, FL, on ships, as well as Okinawa Japan. I have very busy working schedule because I speak five different languages.

The goal taking this class, mainly, because it is part of my program but another reason I take this class because I am interested in learning about education system in America. I want to know what they teach and how they teach. I love to learn about other cultures around the world, I love to learn other languages and learn how people do things around the world.

 I wish everyone best in this class.

             
               Sam