Are we all in pursue to acquire high statuses, to impress people around ourselves and to self advertising when we travel through cultures and religions of the world?

"Despite these structures, there is often the effort to bring into one's social world what Pierre Bourdieu terms 'cultural capital': knowledge from the cultural supermarket that one can display to one's social credit, justifying and bolstering one's social position. One's interest, at least within some segments of American society, in Indian ragas as apposed to top 40 hits, or in Tibetian Buddhist writings as opposed to evangelical Christian tracts, is a way of advertising cosmopolitan discernment: my far-flung tastes may well be the servant of my local strategy of impressing the people around me. The matter of what from the cultural supermarket can provide status in a given social milieu is highly complex. Each social milieu has its rating system for information and identities from the cultural supermarket; individuals seek to attain maximum credit and credibility, not only through consumption within the existing cultural rating system, but also through bringing in new information and identities, whose high status they seek to establish. The criteria for the establishment of such status are thus highly specific and flexible. Individuals play the game with an extraordinary acute sense of its implicit rules and strategies.

But all this is not to claim that there is absolutely no room for individual choice from the cultural supermarket. Why does one person thrill to Bach, another to juju? Why does one person become a Christian, another a Buddhist? Why does one person revel in their ethnicity, while another spurns that ethnicity? Why does one person travel the world while another stays at home? Much can be predicted about our choices by considering such factors as social class, educational level, income, gender, and age, as well as personal histories, but not everything can be predicted. We are not slaves to the world around us, but have (in a social if not philosophical sense) a certain degree of freedom in choosing who we are. This freedom may be highly limited, but it cannot be altogether denied.

From Intercultural Communication: Identity by Holliday A, Hyde M and Kullman J, p.99