I don't understand in your blog how sociologists can see how materialistic a culture can be from it's toilet? I suppose when sociologists look at the gold plated culture yes, but the Japanese one, all I see is cleanliness. What would sociologists say about us and our toilets? I honestly don't think I could make a good judgement from that. I understand the analogy with the culture shock from fishbowl to fishbowl. We'll probably experience that with the 10 hours of volunteering, I'm actually pretty nervous for that, I don;t think I wanna do it alone.
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ReplyDeleteI do not mean to say that a toilet reveals everything about a culture. What I meant to say is that material culture (things) is different around the world. And sometimes that material culture reflects other aspects of culture like non-material culture. In this particular case, the Japanese toilet has something to tell us about their culture.