Introduction.
What creates the personality? Which are the factors that help in the process of forming the personality? The aim of my paper is to find the answers for these and many other questions. If they would be asked directly to me, my answer would be something like this: “ It is very hard to answer, but it depends on the education that I have received (along with other personal matters like family, friends, interests, etc. But undoubtedly, it is of course the cultural background, sociological characteristics of my nation and so on.”
But you would ask what does it have to do with the subject this paper is about. Of course you are right, I am going to try to find out the answers to the previous questions in connection with Danish society. What is the cultural and educational background of Danish people? What are the stereotypes of the nation? These are the questions that I will concentrate my attention on.
Everyday culture.
“Typical” is a word that crops up in all European languages. Without thinking, people use expressions like “that’s just typical”, “typical of a man” or “typical of a woman”. You can hear these expressions in the street in the club. We use this word to describe particular, frequently recurring ways of behaving, which we may find either endearing or irritating, but which appear to us to be characteristic of a situation, person or gender. We use the word to describe the cultural practices and, at the same time, to classify or identify them according to type. This is a way of carrying out everyday cultural analysis, in which we use our own experiences and perceptions as the standard by which we then judge the characteristics and peculiarities of others. This is not a completely arbitrary or subjective process since, in most cases, it involves an unconscious reference to certain rules of everyday life which we take for granted and to which we expect our own behavior and that of others to conform. So “typical: used in that sense means that we have recognized, or believe we have recognized, a specific social, personal or gender-related variant within framework of general rules.
These two elements – our attitude towards everyday life itself and the manner in which we observe and classify it – represent basic guidelines, as it were, by which we define “culture”. This is not culture in the traditional sense, transmitted through the work of artists, but rather in the broad, anthropological sense: the social organization of everyday life with its various systems of significant rules and values and the way in which the individual comes to terms with them.
The word “typical” seems to be on our lips particularly often when we cast a classifying eye at the behavior of people of other countries and nationalities.
We say “Typically American!” or something of the sort when we see somebody who looks foreign to us. The deciding factor in calling somebody this way is the cultural differences between them and us.
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