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In chapter one, a general introduction of the Chinese and American wedding culture is offered. In chapter two, the theory of culture and wedding culture is offered, and then the cultural differences between China and America are discussed. In chapter three, the Chinese wedding ceremony and the American wedding ceremony are offered by comparing and contrasting. In chapter four, the reasons for differences in wedding ceremony between China and America are discussed, so are phenomena of Cultural Hegemony and Cultural Americanization. Finally, chapter five gives a conclusion of the whole paper.源'自:优尔`!论~文'网www.youerw.com
2. Literature Review
2.1 Culture and Wedding Culture
There is no easy way to define the term “culture”, since people just try to give it definition based on their own knowledge, academic position and social environment. In the 20th century, some famous scientists of culture have list more than 160 species in the definition of culture. They use some “basic theme” to classify and draw nine basic fundamental concepts of culture, that is, philosophy, arts, education, psychology, history, anthropology, sociology, and ecology. Culture is a highly complex and somewhat ambiguous concept of the phenomenon, and also because of the daily life, it shows a wide range of subjects in different aspects of culture or even of different factors. Thus in the actual study, there have been different things in different definitions. (Storey, 2007: 2) Therefore, the definition of culture and the principles of the definition is the key to the problem.
Larry, Richard and Lisa make their definition in their book Communication between Cultures:“ We definite culture as the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, actions, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and artifacts acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through inpidual and group striving”.(Samovar, Porter & Stefani, 2000: 57)
The so-called culture, in the West original refers to the land reclamation and the cultivation of plants, and later refers to the cultivation of person’s body and mentation, especially in the ability and talent of arts and the moral. In the 18th century of Germany, didacticism thinker Herman told us in his famous book The summary of the history and philosophy of mankind. First of all, culture is a kind of social life, it is a unified concept, a concept of homogeneity, whether as a whole or as various aspects of social life, every word and action of people is the essential part of the culture; Second, culture is always a culture of a nation, it represents the essence of a nation; Third, there are clear boundaries in the culture, as a regional culture, it is always significantly different from the other regional cultures. This is a authoritative conclusion of the culture by Herman.(Ye Zhiliang, 2001: 9)
Encyclopedia Britannica has also made a similar definition of culture: in the broad sense, culture contains the ability of the production of human’s material and spirit. In the narrow sense, it refers to the spirit of cultural and spiritual capacity of products, including all social ideology, and sometimes refers to education, science, art, health, sports and other aspects of the knowledge specifically. It differs from the view of the world, moral, political ideology and ideology. (Lin Xiansheng, 2007: 1)