User:RM395/Course/Manypedia/beauty

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Beauty (English and Chinese)

I chose to look at Beauty in English and Chinese. Different cultures have very different views of beauty that evolved over centuries. For example, some considered being very pale to be beautiful while some consider a tan to be beautiful. I thought it would be interesting to look at these differences, and I chose China because I wanted to keep the same two countries for all of my comparisons. Also, China has a very different culture from the United States, so I thought there would be a good chance of finding interesting differences. I thought that the articles may discuss different features that were beautiful and have different ideas on the use of makeup. However, I also thought that if the articles mentioned beauty in art that they would be relatively similar.

When I read the Chinese article on beauty, the first thing I noticed is that it mentions the United States multiple times. This makes me think that the Chinese view is that the United States puts more emphasis on beauty than China does. It also mentions how the United States looks at “concrete” things when thinking about beauty. This implies that beauty isn’t concrete in the Chinese culture. The English article cements this idea because the first sentence talks about how beauty is a characteristic of a “person, place, animal, or object.”

The Chinese article talks about the Chinese symbol for beauty and how it means “sheep” and “large”. The translation was hard to understand here, but I think it was trying to explain why those words are used as the meaning of beauty. It talks about beauty in aesthetics and different philosophers that have talked about beauty.

The English article is much longer than the Chinese one and does talk about certain qualities that are considered beautiful such as smooth skin and regular features. There is an entire section on human beauty, but even more interesting is that there are sections on ugliness and the effect of beauty in society. These two categories make me think that beauty is much more important in every day life in English speaking countries than in China. Maybe people notice it more or have been conditioned to care more about it, but the prevalence is definitely there.

Many of my assumptions about these articles were wrong. There was no mention of features in the Chinese article and there was no mention of makeup or art in either. The focus in the English article was the effect in society and the focus in the Chinese article was more of the spiritual meaning of beauty.