Let's try to make sense of some of these observations about boundaries from the last two videos for the couple of diagrams. Here is an attempt to diagram the element of dinner table culture Karen acquired. In this diagram, A represents her family and B represents Karen. The back and forth there was represent the social interactions through which Karen acquires the element of culture under discussion. The moi pattern in which in her family's version of Vietnamese custom, people at the dinner table begin eating after the father, the family patriarch invites them to eat. Her acquired culture provides the basis for our expectations when she interacts with her boyfriend's family. Now let's take Karen out of her own family's context and put her into her boyfriend's family. Remember that the boyfriend's parents like her own parents are also from Vietnam. So her expectations are that the interactions should proceed in the same way they do in her own family. She is expecting that everyone is invited to eat. But the expectation on the part of the boyfriends father is that she should be asking permission to eat. There is a mini-boundary here and the clash of expectations is upsetting to her. Notice that the same analysis could be given of my own experiences encountering a different pattern of morning tooth brushing, among some of my fellow college students. While I didn't have an emotional response to the experience of the mini boundary, it clearly made an impression on me. Such boundaries potentially disrupt the smooth functioning of teams, even if they didn't in my case. Another observation. Had Karen noticed the different pattern operative in her boyfriend's family, and tried to conform to it. This would be a situation in which culture moves across a boundary. The same is true of my own experience of tooth brushing in college. The final unit of this class will focus on the phenomenon of cultural emotion, and I will try to tell you what I think I've learned about it in the course of my research. But the important takeaway here is that culture can move between people, but that movement can also be resisted. Now, let's look more closely at the situations in which a social boundary exists. A boundary that is actively policed. A social boundary, as we are using that term, is an actual line and physical space that is guarded. I'm using the same diagram here as in the case of Karen's experience, or of my own, but there is an important difference. Well, maybe there are at least two important differences. The first is that in the case of the museum or movie theater, the movement is not resisted by the two actors. If A represents the museum, or the movie theater, and B the potential museum or moviegoer, A wants B to cross the boundary, and interact with the culture starred in the museum or theater. B wants to cross it as well in order to access the culture present inside the museum or theater space. In the case of the mini cultural boundaries the actors themselves resist the movement of culture not here. The desired result on both sides is one in which the interaction takes place as in the bottom diagram in this slide. The second key difference is that the physical boundary is there before any interaction takes place. Its purpose is to prevent that interaction. Now we may ask. Why prevent the interaction in the case the museum or movie theater. The answer is on those cases usually in order to be able to commoditized the culture and charge emission fees. Of course the social boundary does not have to be present in order to make a profit from it's crossing In the case of Boeing company's gape. The boundary is there to genuinely prevent those who are not wanted from getting in. Why? To prevent the information contained inside the plant from getting int he hands of competitors. The social boundary is there to prevent the outflow of culture. In the case of a national boundary, the matter is more complex. It is generally there to prevent the culture inside the nation from becoming disrupted. And perhaps modified by too much interaction with those who do already share that culture, prevents the culture from getting watered down or changed. However we analyze the last case, boundaries whether of the actually physically policed type or the merely resisted are about the motion of culture. They're about channeling or controlling that motion. We should keep this general principle in mind as we begin to examine cases starting with the very next video.
