Outsourced Blog #2

The film that I chose to watch for this blog post was Outsourced.  I decided to watch this movie because I wanted to watch a movie I had never seen before and this seemed the most interesting to me.    An interpretive approach is defined as “an approach to intercultural communication that aims to understand and describe human behavior within specific cultural groups” (Martin & Nakayama, 2012).  The cultural patterns that I found from the interpretive perspective while watching this movie were religion, class, and ethnicity. 

I found a lot of religious cultural patterns while watching this movie.  The first way I saw religion was when the streets were empty at first but they were filled with many different colors.  Later, we found out that this was because it was the celebration of color, Holi, which is celebrated by Hindus (Gorai & Jeffcoat, 2006).  At first, the main character Todd didn’t like this at all, but he ended up having a lot of fun throwing different colors at other people (Gorai & Jeffcoat, 2006).  A video is posted below if you want to see what the celebration of color, Holi, looks like (Ralsen, 2009).  Another way I found religion was in this movie was because the goddess of destruction, Kali, was all over India and Todd didn’t understand why the goddess of destruction would be found so many places, but later he learned that this was so that it would end one cycle so a new one could begin (Gorai & Jeffcoat, 2006).

 

The second pattern I found was class.  I found class because it was very evident that there was a big difference between the lower class and the upper class.  The house that Todd stayed at was really nice, but when he looked over the wall to the other side all he could see was slums (Gorai & Jeffcoat, 2006).  Todd and other people in the movie did give those people in the slums food, but they definitely had different lifestyles (Gorai & Jeffcoat, 2006). 

The last pattern I found was ethnicity. The first place I found this was when Todd first gets to India, and he gets asked if he’s married or has a girlfriend and Todd responds that him and his girlfriend broke up because he didn’t want to start a family yet.  The lady that was talking to him responds, “You’re old enough to be a grandfather”( Gorai & Jeffcoat, 2006). I thought this was funny because it is such a different culture in India than it is in the United States.  This has to do with ethnicity because ethnicity has to do with traditions, customs, values, and behaviors (Martin & Nakayama, 2012).   Another way that I found ethnicity was when some of the people in India were surprised that Todd didn’t live with his parents, or even see them at least once a week (Gorai & Jeffcoat, 2006).

This interpretive approach reveals the cultural patterns that were found in different cultural groups.  This approach fails to address the limitation that researchers are often outsiders to the communities under investigation, so this might not represent the actual communication styles of the people of that community (Martin & Nakayama, 2012).  This was the case in the movie because the main character Todd was an outsider so the other people in the movie might not have been doing their natural communication when he was around.  Moving forward, this shows us that the interpretive approach helps us learn, but it does also have its limitations so we should look at different ways of looking at things also.

Works Cited

Gorai, T. (Producer), & Jeffcoat, J. (Director).  (2006). Outsourced (Motion Picture). United States: ShadowCatcher Entertainment.

Martin, J., & Nakayama, T. (2012). Intercultural communication in contexts. (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ralsen, S. (2009, March 15). Holi festival india. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPTlfa5LYYE