Coming To America

Pierre Bourdieu�s description of culture as a lens for daily life is applicable to the experiences of Akeem, the main character in the movie Coming to America. Because of the experience that Akeem had, his cultural understanding of America and other parts of the world has changed, and expanded. This movie also serves to disprove the widely held cultural belief in American culture that in order to make it with a young attractive woman, a man must not take the nice guy approach but instead remain distant and controlling as described in Anita McDaniel�s article �Young Women�s Dating Behavior: Why/Why Not Date a Nice Guy?�. This seemingly innocent comedy movie is great on many levels of an intellectual nature that otherwise may be overlooked.

Pierre Bourdieu proposes his idea that �a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence [to analyze it]� (2). A statement that, at face value does not mean much to the lay man, however, this concept can easily be mapped to a myriad of other topics. For the purpose of this essay, it will be interpreted to mean that if a person is culturally ignorant of a foreign society�s norms and traditions, they will inevitably misinterpret many otherwise obvious cultural stimuli.