Cultural Aspects
Greetings will vary from culture to culture. Certain cultures, such as in East Asia, are seen as low-touch cultures, in which men are more likely to bow to each other. Other cultures, such as the Central Asian, the Middle Eastern, and the Mediterranean, are characterized by a marked physical intimacy between men. Still other cultures, such as the American, are an amalgam between the two, and the male hug is seen as reflective of those values.
Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University professor of black popular culture, states that when with men, he'll use a certain kind of hug - as long as the other guy also is black. "If I was greeting a white guy, I would probably never go for the hug, it would always immediately be the handshake," says Neal. "In the case of Black males, particularly around my age, 40, it's the hip-hop hug: a handshake, you pull yourselves together, and you bump."
Read more about this topic: Pound Hug
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or aspects:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
—John Simon (b. 1925)