Collectivist & Individualist

The Latino culture is a collectivist society. Collectivist societies are focused on the family or the group over one person’s personal ambitions and that what we as Latinos have been raised to be. Confucianism, the oldest reference guide to collectivist societies in existence, parallels perfectly with Latino collectivist culture.

In order to better understand the differences between collectivist and individualist societies we will need to study one of the oldest pieces of social literature, the Confucian Book of Rites. According to David B. Wong in 1992, a professor at Duke University and global authority on Confucian analysis, rights are understood with a different definition in collectivist societies than what we understand in our own individualist western culture perspective. Rights, in a collectivist society, are derived by mutual respect and understanding that every citizen has a responsibility or duty to carryout certain roles in society. These roles are listed in a hierarchy, based on a familial system. The father, head of the household, is responsible for providing financial and disciplinary roles. The mother follows the directives and commands of her husband and anyone else on the husband’s side of the family.

In collectivist societies name and reputation are key. Choice is made to uphold a family’s reputation. Any disputes or problems are considered private as any public display or rumor of trouble in a family can destroy its reputation; thus the social standing in that family could collapse and grave misfortune could quickly follow. However, if anyone in a family does not fulfill their duties or commits a shameful act against a family, that individual is then harshly punished. Collectivist societies focus their social structure on the philosophy that, sacrificing the individual’s ambitions for the betterment or success of the collective is not only honorable, it is paramount.

Individualist societies (Western Culture), on the other hand, believe that every citizen has certain rights that cannot be infringed or violated by any individual, group, or government body; for any reason. The individual person’s betterment or success is therefore paramount, not that of the family or group. This encapsulates the main difference between collectivist and individualist societies.

We as Latinos are plunged head first into this new type of society and we have clashes that cause us to be stuck between two worlds, the world of an American and the world of a Latino. The Latino struggle is to healthily meld the individualist and collectivist cultures into a win-win for the Latino that is an amalgam of these two cultures.