The main idea behind Figuring Foreigners Out is how many cultures are not describable by one specific behavior and it is about the same with Hofstede’s Dimensions of Color. The only difference is how Hofstede scores them to see a difference based on the criteria of Power Distance Index (social structure/hierarchy basically), Individualism (same as in Figuring Foreigners Out and how solo people are to be successful in society), Masculinity (how conservative a country is in views/patriarchal ideas), Uncertainty Avoidance Index (amount of low/high context culture for communications and such), and Long Term Orientation (amount of loyalty to elders and traditional practices). They are a combination of multiple behaviors and ideas that help find where culture lies but I find Figuring Foreigners out more better to relate to cultures because it is harder to specifically identify Masculinity and Uncertainty Avoidance Index than the others because in Asian countries almost all stand by traditions and have masculinity (but they are changing )and they are gonna be compared against one another with a score which I believe will be hard to find differences between. The authors of this believe that cultures are on opposite poles of individualistic or collectivist and are separated by such (but can also be a certain degree of both). Individualism basically means that one doesn’t need to join groups but can choose to and not being affiliated is not at all necessary to “one’s identity, survival, or success.” Collectivist basically means the opposite and that the “survival and success of the group ensures the well-being of the individual.” They view these attitudes in cases regarding communication, how they view the concept of time, nonverbal communication, how they view the world (either internally or externally), and the use of direct or nondirect communication. I predominantly do agree with the assessment because korea (language and culture I want to learn) is a high context society and US (my culture and language right now) is more low context, the views of how many countries and cultures are more one pole of collectivist or individualist really shows easily. The time one I find sort of problematic because there are generally two types of people in all cultures and you cannot say that all people view time the same way. There is I think an even split in America of people viewing time as essence every second of the day but also a good balance of people who think there is always enough time to do things and it can’t be capped. These ideas related and sort of collide between the language I speak right now (English) and Korean (the language I want to learn) because Korean is more conservative and l know korean is more high context and based on social cues and a concept called “nunchi” most closely translated to sense compared to the lower context and expressive culture and embracing of more ideas in America. They ultimately just show the differences and show that there are many ways for society to work and be successful which is neat and nice to know.
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If nunchi, as you describe, is a kind of awareness of the sense of what someone is saying, a form of context in speech, then I would argue it is not necessarily unique to Korea (not that you say it is), but part of the nature of human interaction. The extent to which we can rely on context and the type of context on which we can rely depends heavily on what we share with those with whom we communicate. We can communicate with people we know better than with those we do not, even in the United States.
I am unfamiliar with life in Korea and the various contexts in which it is lived. I assume, however, that some people live in rural, others in urban, and others in some form of suburban environment--as populations are generally distributed. If this is the case, and it is also the case that people in rural environments are less likely to encounter people they do not know and people in urban environments are more likely to encounter people they do not know, it would follow, factoring the aspect of the nature of human interaction noted in the previous paragraph, that people in rural and less than fully urban environments can rely more heavily in their speech with others than people in urban environments can.
However, if we maintain that context-dependent interaction is a part of the nature of human interaction, we can also explain other social phenomena in the city environment, such as the forming of neighborhoods of like people and grouping based on various forms of identity. It seems that even in urban environments, social context is still an important factor of interaction. However, it being the case that people are more likely to need to speak to people with whom they share less contact in cities, city life, in general is less context dependent than rural life.
Further, one needs to account for urbanization. It was not always the case that such numbers of people were concentrated in cities. Various changes such as the mechanization of agriculture and privatization and centralization of the means of agricultural production have helped create this new environment. In some places, this happened earlier than in others. It may be the case that in places that have more recently urbanized people are more in touch with their rural culture and still heavily context-dependent. I think this accounts for people forming communities of people similar to them. In the US, there are still pockets of the country that are predominantly people of similar ancestry that settled near each other over a century ago in order to be able to retain this context. In Baku, Azerbaijan, people are usually happy to meet people from their families' villages.