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All societies have cultures, and all societies overlap culture. Culture exists everywhere - in schools, in religious groups, in races, in neighbourhoods and states etc. Where there is a cause, or even as much as an opportunity for division, there is a different culture formed along the lines of that division. Culture bonds those within and blocks everyone else from the outside.

A different culture is all the basis one need for the formation of a stereotype. Like all laws of social sciences, stereotypes take a human phenomena and codify it into an inductive-logical theory or description. In fact, a stereotype would be a social scientific law by all accounts, if not for their occasional flaws and unenlightened connotations.

Examining the fundamental nature of cultures, we discover how it is constructed. In the 1978 work "Orientalism" by philosopher Edward Said, Said had written of how the West was created by defining it to be not-East, by Othering it. Eastern traditions and people were written of previously with a particular air of exoticism and mystery - the most popular modern example being the Hollywood rendition of "Memoirs of a Geisha". The truth was often further than what the ancient scholars of the East thought, and it was suggested that it was because of the need for an identity of the West, that caused the ignorant assumptions and nearly-ridiculous viewpoints of the Orientalists. In summary, the West stereotyped the East so that the former could then define their own culture as a total opposite of the Other.

Cultures and stereotypes therefore share a common relationship, to serve to Other some other culture. A culture by itself in isolation, though, need not necessarily call for the barbarisation of another as per se. It is when two societies cross, then the stereotypes come in to divide them into cultures, for prior to that, a culture simply did not exist. All that was was the collection of practices, norms and memories of that society.

Stereotypes are born to simplify that many differences between two peoples. In the knowledge transmission to another being, one incidentally rephrases it until it becomes simple to understand. For instance, to say that all Japanese are polite would be much more catchy than to properly study the Japanese culture and language to determine the truth of the statement. (By the way, the Japanese have no real swear-words that connotes the displeasure of one saying the English "f*") Eventually, stereotypes tend to stick for they connote a value judgement, like those advice we used to have as kids like 'never talk to strangers for they may not mean good', a general principle to follow or otherwise regret. Even so, the need to stereotype could be too an appeal to tradition, spoken of to kids who henceforth form their understanding of the world around them, and do not easily go away in adulthood like a birth religion.

Learn more about this author, Ajani Mgo.
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