Time=Money?

“Time is money and money is time.” This is just one of the many American values that we discovered this week in class as we began observing our culture with a more critical eye. Values are defined as socially shared ideas of what is right. Some American values include achievement and success, freedom, material comfort, and democracy. One of our first assignments was to identify some of these cultural values and how they were presented in advertisements and commercials. It never struck me how most, if not all of our advertisements are built around these values. For instance, in the “Five Hour Energy” commercials I watched they had several people with different occupations and all of them were people who had gone through eight hour work days, but still had to take care of their children or do other work. After watching this commercial from a sociological perspective, I realize how much stress our society places on achievement. Achievement is measured in our day to day live; it doesn’t necessarily have to be measured in terms of one’s life. In the “Five Hour Energy” commercial one woman had the pressure of successfully completing several things in one day: an eight hour work day, a workout, and making dinner for her family every night.

Values are supposed to be a good aspect of culture, but they can have negative effects. For example, our country places such a high level of importance on achievement that we put necessities like rest and time with family on the back burner. There are millions of people in America who have weak relations with their family because they are always working. In that way precisely I see our values affecting my day to day life. I’m a busy person; between my extracurricular activities, community service, honors and A.P. classes, and college applications I rarely have time for family or rest. However, I can’t just stop partaking all of those activities because then what would I have achieved in high school? Such a situation seems like the ultimate paradox. Which is more important achievement or leisure time and family? This question continues to follow many Americans. We are not sure of the the answer, so I guess in the mean time we’ll all just drink our “Five Hour Energy”.

Culture Shock

            This week as we continued to follow the documentary film  the Lost Boys  where we saw the boys go through culture shock.  Culture shock is when someone enters into a different culture and they have to deal with the trauma of everything being different from what they had grown up with and learned. A great example of this was when Santino complained about time being money in America. In Sudan there was no such thing because time didn’t really matter in the first place and they were never lonely because they always had someone close by to speak to or visit; in America we’re  always busy and concerned with ourselves that no we don’t have much time to make friends and visit.

            Similarly, in Doing Fieldwork Among the Yanomamo Napoleon Chagnon experiences culture shock repeatedly throughout his stay. For instance, the villagers always wanted him to eat with them and share his food, but he constantly sought privacy. The culture of the Indians was to share food but Chagnon is used to not having the obligation of sharing with others at meal time. Both scenarios are related to ethnocentrism, because the Lost Boys as well as Chagnon were judging othe cultures in comparison to their own. We learned that culture is the basis of our reality, and if that reality is shaken like in the case of the Lost Bpys or Chagnon, it can be extremely difficult emotionally. We can see this as Chagnon, Peter, and Santino frequently mention their loneliness. I have been through cultural shock to a certain extent. Although I ethnically consider myself Nigerian, I have been raised in America. As a freshman my family took a three week vacation in Nigeria. While we were in Nigeria, there was virtually no garbage system and I had to get used to throwing the garbage out into the back yard. It was really hard for me to do at first because as a student here in America I had learned quite a bit about the negative effects of pollution. However, in Nigeria they have little to no care for how much pollution happens. In fact, nobody understood my refusal at first. I would have to explain myself, but in the end I had no choice but to throw it out in the yard like everyone else.

We also mentioned how foreign exchange students may experience culture shock. I found this image interesting in that it showed what may go on in the mind of a foreign exchange student while they’re here as well as when they return home.

How Culture Changes Perception

How Culture Molds Habits of Thought was the article for this week. The author starts off by describing how many social scientists have always believed that logic plays the different roles in different cultures. The article followed Dr. Nisbett as he carries out experiments to examine how people of different cultures think differently. The experiment that I found most striking was the experiment about describing the fishes in the tank. Whereas the Japanese tended to point out the fish compared to other objects, Americans would point out the largest fish or the shiniest rock. I know that our culture place stress on being the biggest or the best, but I never realized how something like that could affect how we describe a setting. Another experiment that stood out to me was experiment where the argument between mother and daughter were presented. Americans tended to choose a side quickly, but Chinese subjects took into both arguments consideration and decided that both sides had misunderstandings. This also made me realize how opinionated Americans are. Once we’ve developed our beliefs it’s substantially difficult to persuade us otherwise. Reading this article heightened my awareness of how much our culture influences our perception of the world around us.

Similarly, in class we talked about our perception of other cultures and how they may perceive us. We read about the “Nacerima” and “ Racs”. When our class began to talk about these cultures we pointed out how peculiar the different aspects of their cultures were in comparison to ours. We didn’t realize it at the time but not only were we being ethnocentric, the article was actually a description of American culture from an ethnocentric stand point. In retrospect it seems as though the culture of the author of the Nacerima may have put a stress on religion or the supernatural because they continually described different aspects of the culture in respect to religion. For instance, the author describes bathing as a shrine that humans must got to daily. On the other hand, we thought it was strange that the people of this tribe had to go through so many strange religious rituals because our culture doesn’t necessarily place that much stress on religion. In all this, one can see how cultural background plays a huge role in our perception of the world around us. Ethnocentrism can be seen on a day to day basis. For instance, a few days ago I was talking to one of my Nigerian guy friends about attractive guys. He was giving his opinion on which ones were attractive and which ones weren’t. However, later when I asked one of my American guy friends he said he didn’t know and that judging another guys appearance would be “really gay”. Both guys were heterosexual, the only thing that changed was their perception due to cultural differences.

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Eating Your Friends is the Hardest

    
    This week our article was Eating Your Friends is the Hardest: The Survivors of the F-227. The article presented the story of how the starvation of the survivors of a plane crash drove them to the point of cannibalism. The story really emphasizes the idea of social construction of reality. It allows the reader to see how the behavior of the survivors went from being what we consider normal to what we consider barbaric.  As Henslin points out, our society gives different objects arbitrary definitions through social construction of reality, but we're very capable of changing these definitions. Usually changes in the circumstance make our society more accepting of changes in the definition of these objects. This is precisely what happened to these survivors. A critical point in the story is when the survivors hear on the radio that the search for them has stopped. Before this point many of the people thought the Canessa's idea of eating the corpses as purely wrong, but as they grew weaker and weaker the meaning of the human body changed from a being a person that deserves respect to being a means of survival and food.
   There are several less extreme examples of this in our day to day lives. This week in class we talked about social construction of reality and we witnessed a few examples of it in Freaks and Geeks. For instance, when Sidney gave Sam his jacket his friends began to construct meanings from him receiving the jacket. They arrived at the conclusion that the jacket must mean she likes him. This was on a much smaller scale than what happened in the Andes, but the three geeks constructed a pretty arbitrary meaning to a simple act. Another example of social construction of reality is demonstrated by the growing number of people in the senior class who ditch class. Though many seniors previously considered skipping class as something only lazy students who care little about their education do, circumstances have changed as we've become seniors. Most members of the senior class are taking several honors or advanced classes, participating in extra-curricular activities, working a job, and trying to finish college applications. For many this has already become too difficult to handle, so they sleep in and skip a class or two. The meaning of skipping class has therefore transformed from a bad thing to a good thing. Skipping is justified because it's viewed more as an important factor in maintaining good health than pure laziness.

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What's Sociology?

   The article What is Sociology? dealt with the difficulties in pinpointing the definition of sociology. THe author described natural sciences and social sciences before further exploring the different types of social sciences. The article presented other types of social sciences in order to help the reader understand how sociology was similar as well as different from other social sciences.
         One of the main sections of the article that stood out to me was the section describing juvenile delinquency. By describing how the different types of social scientists would conduct their studies and what they would focus on, I grasped a stringer understanding for the definition of sociology. For instance, a psychologist would try to to explore the characteristics within the delinquent  whereas a sociologist would focus on something such as social class and routines of the police. I thought it was interesting that the article further went into describing how sociologists would push the study of juvenile delinquency to tho point that they would be asking what being a juvenile delinquent is. Our definitions and preconceptions of delinquents are very different from people who were born and raised in earlier generations. Our definition of delinquency can even differ from state to state. I also learned that there are also two types of sociology: structural/interactional and quantitative/qualitative. Structural/interactional studies are done more through interviews, while quantitative/qualitative studies read deeper into the meaning of peoples behavior. In all of sociology, however, the question remains "What external forces push people to behave the way they do and why?".

Week of 8/29-9/2

   This week we further explored the differences between sociology and psychology and what the definition of sociology is. The most interesting activity we did this week was the story of Ted and Zelda. The story somewhat solidified the definition of what sociology was by portraying how the couple's external issues led to their depression. As we talked about in class, the amount of people depressed in an area have as much to do with the sociological characteristics as it does the psychological issues of the individual. Ted and Zelda's end was mostly the outcome of several negative sociological affects such as not being able to pay the bills and being in an abusive workplace.

    After talking about suicidal rates in class, I believe that suicides are much more of a result of sociological issues. We identified the most important indicator of suicidal rates as the level of human/family connections. So, it only made sense that an urban area such as California would have a higher suicidal rate than Iowa. Historically speaking the suicide rate in America has risen and continues to rise. I think the continued push for urbanization has everything to do with it. However, as I began to read more about the psychological vs. the sociological factors I began to realize that some studies say that people in rural areas commit suicide just as often, if not more. Nevertheless, I think this still has a great deal to do with urbanization as children growing up in rural areas idolize living in urban areas. But many may not be able to do so because of their economic class or their parents being farmers.

 Is there a rural mental health crisis?