Pre understandings are all I have. We process the things we observe via our pre understandings in order to place and cathegorize them in order for the world to make sense to us.
Today we talked about cultural meetings and how all people are prejudice in some way or another. We did a pretty funny exercise where we were to guess some random things about 5 persons of our choice e.g. he's good at football or She's a good cook ect. Actually some of us guessed right and I guess some of our prejudice is right if we don't give it much thought and just let our subconscious or 6. Sense do the work:-) but if we think about our prejudices, like when you say a general thing about the Spanish people it can be a bad thing. To provoke Alvaro a Spanish student I said that one of my prejudices was that Spanish people liked killing bulls. And actually this is a very big topic in Spain that almost divide the Spanish people in half. A lot of young people in Spain don't like the bull fights, but I guess it's about 50/50 and In some areas they are trying to make bullfighting illegal.
I think that we can try very hard to be non- prejudiced individuals(even the word has a pejorative connotation but having preconceptions on things and ppl is not forceably bad)but it is rather difficult to be opinionless. I guess it is more comforting to have a view even on things we have little knowledge about. What is more important(to my mind) is first to be consicous about the prejudices and don't fall in the easy trap of generalising but we should enable ourselves to discover new things and afterwards have an opinion abt them. Because before considering something to be the 'absolute truth' we should have a minimum level of knowledge on it.
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