Values, and Boys Who are Lost...and from Sudan

        Values are funny things. I don't know if we will ever know for sure why they vary from culture to culture, but as of now I am all in favor of the environment plus needs theory. Either way I thoroughly enjoyed going over the different American values in class. Two off of Robin Williams list startled me when I read them.         The first one is external conformity. At first I thought that I had misread something, then I thought that I misinterpreted something, then I laughed at the irony. For a long time I genuinely thought that uniquity was an American value. We place a strong emphasis on being one's own person, and taking personal responsibility, but typically we do discriminate against anything which is not mainstream. I've heard the phrase "be a leader, not a follower" so many times that I truly began to believe in it. It was almost my dogma at one point, but reflecting on society I realize that questioning and going against behavior is not something that we value at all. How pathetic.
       The second one did not necessarily surprise me, I just found it hilarious. Racism and group-superiority is much a lesser know yet extremely important value in our culture today. It creates things like violence, debate, and even change in many instances. I went through a day one time counting the amount of times that my peers, friends, and aquaintances used derrogatory racial slurs, and found that the number was to large to count without writing it down. This value is especially amusing because of the other value that it seemingly negates: equality. When one really thinks about it, it's actually not that surprising. It's not that we are naturally discriminatory creatures and think we are superior, it's just a burden to live under the opposite assumption. Darwinism one, society zero.
        The final thing that I would like to make a note of was the Sudan Lost Boys. I nearly died laughing at certain parts in the video. One of those parts was when the boys talked about American food, another was when Santino was fined for driving without a license, a third was when Peter didn't make the basketball team, and the last was after the video ended and I was on my way to eighth hour. When I thought back to the video and sort of ran through it in my head I had a realization that I found hilarious. I thought about who did better in the new society: Peter, or Satino. Now obviously one would have to be an imbecile not to say tha Peter did. He made friends, graduated high school, and had little difficulty supporting himself. Santino on the other hand, almost lost his house for not paying rent, almost lost it again because of the court fines he had to pay, and repeatedly stated that he was very lonely. Now the part that I found funny, was that they came from a village in which everyone was connected. Everyone had their place in the community, and aided each other in their struggles. Once Peter got to America all of that changed. His communal philanthropy became personal responsibility, his unscheduled life became a tight regime, and the funniest of all his ideas about remembering and aiding his culture back at his homeland became assimilation and greed. When his sister revealed that he hadn't sent any money home in a long time you really realized how self-centered and American that Peter had become.
        Moral of the story....Conformity is key
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/10/can_we_please_define_racism.html

Waking up, The Yanomamo, & Humanity's Practical Joke

            I was dumbfounded. No excuses. After doing the Nacirema and Rac activities I had remembered doing them before. They are excellent wake up tools. I didn't necessarily feel stupid after blatantly insulting my own culture, but embarrassed. I was a little annoyed that I failed to catch on to the point of the articles until after we were told, but looking back, there was no way that I would have. The thing that threw me off was the idea that there was seemingly no rhyme or reason to many of the "practices" as they were portrayed. This was primarily because the articles were written from the perspective of someone completely unfamiliar with American culture, and modern science for that matter. It did have an impact on how I perceive culture though. The articles forced me to realize that I need to view culture objectively and determine the function of all its parts before bringing my judgments into the mix. 

            The interesting thing is that viewing a culture objectively is impossible. No matter what culture that you are a part of, you interpret things with biases that can’t be overridden. In America there is a huge focus on rationality and logical reasoning. When Americans analyze other cultures they ultimately employ those biases as tools without even realizing it. When a scientist observes a shaman or a witch doctor performing a ritual in order to save someone from terminal illness, he may not view the ritual as stupid, because he understands that the people do not understand that their behavior is irrational, but he certainly does not believe that the ritual is the right way in which handle the situation.

            The article about the Yanomamo was appealing as well. The contrast between our two cultures that I found most interesting was the idea that beating one’s wife demonstrates one’s courage and ferocity, while in American society beating one’s wife is more of a demonstration of cowardice than ferocity. There are things in every culture, including our own that seem to puzzle me sometimes, and the wife beating was definitely that thing for the Yanomamo’s culture. They respect one another for their ferociousness and masculinity, yet they do so not solely by picking fights not with each other in a display of dominance (which is very common in nature), but also by picking fights with the sex that is least likely to fight back. I just wonder how nature and evolution ever allowed that to take place. I also wonder what the wives’ think about the idea of being beaten, because the article never really talked about the feminist perspective of the beatings. Do the wives view the beatings as a necessary evil? Do they resent this part of their culture? Or do they not care either way? Maybe it has been all that they have ever known, so they are completely desensitized to the behavior. I don’t know, but it reminded me of pre-modern American culture.

Although we did not acknowledge wife beating as a socially acceptable behavior, we did acknowledge they disparagement of women to be. Less than a century ago, women did not have the right to vote, before that they were unable to own land, or work. Their primary objective was to make babies, maintain the household, and nurture children. That was before our society uncannily adopted the idea that all people are created equal.

Going back to what I had stated earlier, I believe that viewing culture and societies objectively is overrated anyway. I believe the reason that we view cultures other than our own with reluctance, caution, and even animosity is because that historically, differences between cultures have been the main causes of wars and conflict. So our ethnocentrism is actually a survival mechanism.

            Take terrorism for example. Should we view cultures like Al-Queda and the
Taliban as misunderstood? Should we have let the Nazis and Hitler continue their mass genocide of the Jewish peoples of Europe? Of course we shouldn’t. The problem with cultural relativism is that it also implies moral relativism. A conflict of morals can be small and insignificant, such as the wife beating of the Yanomamo, or it can be vast and have global consequences, such as the genocides and terrorist efforts that consume areas of the modern world. Cultural relativism is just a mutiny of evolution, the one thing that has ensured the survival of humanity since the dawn of time, and we defeat it everyday.   

Perspectives, an Awkward Epiphany, and a Brilliant Show

   I've always favored the interactionist perspective without even realizing it. It only became clearer to me as we went over it in class; it was given a name. I've never taken things for face value. When you examine anything we as people do, it will all filter down to what we understand to be acceptable to society. When a man kisses his wife it is acceptable because they are married, but if he were to kiss a person at random the behavior would be percieved as foul and unacceptable because of the symbols we understand as a society. These symbols or connotations are the building blocks of social normalities.
   The conflict perspective doesn't make as much sense as interactionism or functionalism, because the meaning and importance of power is vague, and differs throughout different societies. It makes more sense in western cultures, and political society than it does in eastern, and individual societies and cultures.
   The functionalist standpoint makes sense in many aspects of society, but not all. Some peices of society are irrational, and serve no clear manifest functions. Social classes make little functional contributions to society other than to keep the low low, and the high higher.
   As I read the article "Eating Your Friends is the Hardest" I could help not but think about the progression of society over the last century or so. The Andes Mountains survivors changed their social perceptions of what was acceptable and what was not very quickly do to the adversity of the situation. It reminded me of the way in which society changes and adapts throughout history. Every generation is afraid of the next. The previous generation thoughts on things like drinking, premarital sex, and pop culture, differ immensely from that of the current generation. The survivors altered their social construct to stay alive, which is ultimately the strongest motive in all of human nature, and allowed the alteration to take place fairly rapidly. I believe that macro-society adapts in conjunction with the resources available to that society and the way in which the political structure allocates them. It would also explain why society has changed so rapidly in the past century or so. Our manufacturing and production booms along with our innovative drives and political systems has allowed us to catch up to other much older societies in nearly the blink of the historical eye. It would also explain why social norms are considerably different in third world nations, as well as nations in other hemispheres of the world.
   On a side note I enjoyed "Freaks and Geeks" so much that I began to watch other episodes. In an awkward and almost saddening way, "Freaks and Geeks" truly embodies the difficulties that high school students face ad the society that they clumsily become a part of. Four out of five stars easily, in account of the fact that some of the dialogue is absolutely terrible. (Thought the picture embodied the highschool mentality pretty well)

Introduction to Sociology Articles, and a Discouragingly Uninsightful Class Period

Upon reading these articles I made a very important and near life changing conclusion. I was born a sociologist. I have wondered about the factors that influence and affect human behavior ever since elementary school, when I pondered the reasons that my peers seemed to dislike me. I was confused by the idea that my behavior made them uncomfortable, so I constantly contemplated the reasons that my behaviors did not coincide with that of the majority of my peers. The sociological imagination has always been a part of my persona whether I had willed it to be or not.
    One of the articles spoke of this very imagination, and of how it played unimaginable, and sometimes unseen roles in all of our lives. This was sociology. Human behavior at it's core. What we do and what causes us to do so.
    The second article talked about the differences between the social sciences in order to explain them. One thing that I did not find exemplary about this particular article entitled "What is Sociology? Comparing Sociology and the Other Social Sciences" was the fact that it separated the different areas of social sciences into distinguishable parts in which they were not all contributing to the one inherent goal: to understand human behavior. Just as psychology has many perspectives, so does the study of human behaviors, but just like psychology, the egelectic approach is the best model. Looking at one aspect of human behaviors is flawed from the start, and bound to give one a flawed understanding. Only by viewing humanity through every aspect possible can one really develop a fully functional understanding of ourselves, and we can only apply this knowledge for our true benefit if we have a full and completed understanding. In my opinion, psychology and sociology go hand in hand.
    The author seems to hint that anthropology and sociology more closely related than sociology and psychology, but I would disagree. Anthropology seems to take more of a material and unapplicable approach toward human behavior. Anthropology seems to stress what behaviors are present more than their actual cause.
    Psychology and Sociology are more closely related in my opinion, because they are both more focused on what contributes and causes human behavior than the actual behavior itself. They are two halfs of the same puzzle in a respect. Sociology focusing on the external stimuli, while psychology focuses in depth on the internal stimuli that cause behavior. The main commonality that they share is that they both try to appy the data they gather formulating models and ideas that are applicable in predicting behavior.    
    The last thing that I would like to shed light on is the seemingly shallow insight of my classmates. During the Ted and Zelda activity they reached for the lesser, and more obvious sociological stimuli that contributed to the couples predicament, and those that sought out something less typical, ended up with forced ideas of terrible construction. No one in that class period really demonstrated strong insight, and that severely worries me...