Re: Goan Culture

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GOAN HISTORY AND CULTURE: 
In response to several requests to transmit this message to other Goan
websites, please feel free to do so! Please use our name and e-mail
address so that we can receive direct feed back from the readers; which
is welcome.
Those NOT interested in Goan History or Culture AND those who know it
all!
Please feel free to hit the DEL button NOW.

I invite Goans to review what they read, add their own views and use the
information to start a dialogue with their family as a Sunday dialogue
or a mid-week dinner-conversation. Or it could be a topic for
conversation of a Goan club meeting. Hopefully this will stimulate among
all of us, including our families, a discussion on the language of Goan
culture. It will also help us review some of our own personal
experiences and the practices of other native communities.

What is culture and why do we need it?

While culture is old, it continues to be a current subject in society.
Individuals proud of their culture may want to take to heart in its
definition:
 "Patterns of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it
solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration,
that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore to be
taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in
relation to those problems."  
One would think that the above was defined by an ancient guru or
philosopher. However it is the description as put forth in 1992 by Prof.
Schein of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in a book entitled
'Organizational Structure and Leadership'. Tradition defines a common
baseline and creates mutual understanding, consensus and alignment.
Ethos is thus a critical link between living, work, behavior strategy
and results. Culture is the language of inter-dependency of a society.
That inter-dependency may be within a nuclear family or between the
family and its first- and second- degree relatives and society as a
whole.
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Here is a quotable quote placed on the Goanet recently by Lawrence
Rodrigues. It aptly defines why Culture and Traditions are need.

Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.
-       Barbara Tober 
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Thus culture is not something that an individual or a few people
(however intelligent) can gather together and make up or decide to start
or discontinue. While for accentuating circumstances, cultural practice
can be modified, this adaptation is not the standard 'cultural language
of the community'. Unfortunately the revision can be carried to the
subsequent generations as the experience of their parents. Hence it is
important to revisit our own familiarity of the practice with the
traditions of the community we claim to belong to. 

Marriage and Family being the most important ritual and unit of the
society, next Sunday we will visit with the traditions of an Engagement
in a Goan community. 
Regards: Philomena and Gilbert Lawrence