Culture
In Indigenous Mayan communities of the Americas, children learn how to partake in adult activities through nonverbal communication. Children are able to learn in this manner due to their exposure to adult activities at a young age. At a young age, children intently observe and listen in on adult activities, and this helps provide them with a running knowledge on how to participate. As a result, when children take on adult activities for themselves the first time they do not need verbal communication in the form of directions from adults. They can learn how to do the adult activity themselves through physically participating in it. In fact, talk acts only as a supplement to engagement in an activity. For instance, when a child engages in adult activities, spoken communication can be used to explore ideas or discuss need-to-know information. Otherwise, caregivers and adults primarily help guide their children through an activity using non-verbal communication such as visual demonstration, gestures, gaze and touch.
Read more about this topic: Nonverbal Communication
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It’s become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.”
—Malcolm McLaren (b. 1946)
“The first time many women hold their tiny babies, they are apt to feel as clumsy and incompetent as any man. The difference is that our culture tells them they’re not supposed to feel that way. Our culture assumes that they will quickly learn how to be a mother, and that assumption rubs off on most women—so they learn.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)