А meeting of the Youth Club of Oriental Cultures

10.11.2017

On November 9, a meeting of the Youth Club of Oriental Cultures took place. N.V. Fedicheva, head of the department of oriental languages, made a presentation «The cultural differences between East and West».

Fedicheva N.V. reported that in each culture people have both individualistic and a collectivist tendency of consciousness and behavior, but individualism is characteristic of the West, and collectivism of the East. Students were introduced to the theory of high-context and low-context cultures.

A high context culture is one in which the communicators assume a great deal of commonality of knowledge and views, so that less is spelled out explicitly and much more is communicated in indirect ways. In a low context culture, more responsibility is placed on the listener to keep up their knowledge base. A classic example of a low-context culture is the United States. A person is valued there solely on the basis of his own actions and achievements. Fedicheva N.V. drew students’ attention to the fact that among the extreme manifestations of the cultures of “high and low context” is the rest of most countries that demonstrate different combinations of the traits of both types of cultures. The meeting was attended by a guest from China, Li Yilin, dean of Lanzhou University. He joined the discussion and gave his own examples of cultural differences. He told students that he was very pleased that on November 8, the US President Donald Trump, who is in China, told PR President Xi Jinping about his grandson Arabella, who studied Chinese and even showed a video on which his granddaughter sings in Chinese. This, according to Li Yalin, is very good news for all the Chinese.