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Essay on Cultural Differences and Similarities Between Nigeria and United State
Several calls have been made for intercultural researchers to focus on both cultural differences and similarities. In the designation of countries, objective and subjective criteria cleave the notion of country into two quite different entities: Nigeria and America. Nigeria is marked by a tangible, observable, recognizable set of facts. Nigeria has borders, a central government, a population, an economy, and a bureaucracy, all of which act to maintain and perpetuate continuity. Nigeria, on the other hand, constitutes itself through the will and the imagination of the citizens of Nigeria.
The health of Nigeria depends on each citizen's desire to identify with the entire population of Nigeria despite racial, ethnic, or religious differences. This idea of loyalty to Nigeria above and beyond individual differences is known as nationalism, and often competes with fervent loyalties to subnational groups. Yet within each nation those loyalties differ, and thus no one determined course of action can be employed in the name of nationalism. In effect, rather than molding itself on universal terms, nationalism shapes itself to fit the particular needs of each nation.
With few exceptions, the preponderance of nations are necessarily invented, consisting of diverse groups whose loyalties must be bent toward Nigeria through psychological means other than family or clan affiliation. For the reality of Nigeria, broad in both geographic and cultural terms, is that no one citizen will ever know the majority of his or her compatriots, and so a figurative bond must be substituted in order to maintain the imagined community of Nigeria. Modern scholars thus consistently subscribe to theories of Nigeria as discourse; an invented or imagined, fictional construct.
Given the reality of virtually all African countries, their clinically induced birth at the Berlin Conference regardless of traditional ethnic boundaries, nationalism has had little to cling to in the sense of even vaguely natural, homogeneous affiliations, loyalty or trust......
