Anthropological Learning

During the term we have discussed various topics and concepts that will help me in understanding the social life we live in. Culture is giving meaning to experiences that are passed on and shared. Our culture affects how we perceive others and our beliefs. In my opinion culture is the basis of our moral conduct. The cultures we belong to or associate with are not permanent, they are constantly changing. As they get passed down people change their culture in order to accommodated the society in which they live in. Our culture maybe seen as natural from the inside but for outsider it seems arbitrary. Learning about culture is important because in order to understand other people you need to understand their culture.
It is important to understand other cultures because people need to empathize with other’s believes in order to understand their needs. For example when I work in hospital as a nurse, I must understand that someone may not believe in euthanasia because of the culture they come from. When you have an ethnocentric way of thinking it inhibits on how well you relate to others and it would inhibit me from helping and fulfilling their needs as a health-care provider. If I do not understand other’s culture and their set of believes, I will fail at my job. It is important that people have a relativist point of view because even though you may not agree with someone's believes you have to understand the culture that they live in is different, and therefore everyone’s believes are right.
The concept of personhood varies from society to society. Understanding these variations is important in my life because we live in a world where I will have to work with people that come from different personhoods. Even though our society has an egocentric self point of view, in order to work in the field of nursing you are expect to change from being egocentric to sociocentric. You are expected to do so because nursing is a career were you must learn how to work and rely on others. The concept of egocentrism also has it’s positive aspects. I feel that people sometimes need to focus on their on personal goals and be competitive in order to have motivation to succeed. The negative aspects of living in a egocentric society is that we become to worried about our individuals needs and we forget about our society. We are constantly competing against each other which causes us to never learn to develop our self in terms of how well we coexist with one another. The way we develop our self and our identity determines who we are and how we relate and communicate with others.
The social construction of gender is a huge part of how we develop our self. Instead of treating both females and males equally we differentiated how we socialize and treat them from the minute we know their biological gender. This also creates expectations and norms from society on how each gender should be. Our society teaches females to be helpful, submissive, and easy going. Males in our society are taught to be strong and tough. Males are discouraged to show signs of emotion and pain but females are almost expected to be more emotional and have little pain tolerance. In the American culture when people don’t meet these norms we don’t know how to address this “third” gender like other cultures do, this primarily because we focus and rely on gender roles instead of on preference.
For the most part we are just submitted into these gender roles without us being able to choose what we prefer. We assume that girls should wear pink, like dolls, and want to play tea party without giving her a choice of playing with cars and the color blue. We throw these gender roles at children without realizing that we are doing it. In some cases children are even perceived as being different or even unusual because they break the gender norms. People do not stop to think that males would be biologically attracted to playing with dolls because just like females, they are animals that have a need to look after their young.
Two other crucial aspects to developing our self are race and language. Race is often confused with culture. They are often connected but are not the same. Race is the biological difference in physical characteristics that humans have. Because race and culture are often seen as the same thing we associate and develop ourselves on the basis of race. We tend to develop into these stereotypical norms of race because that is what we have been taught to do. Some people are even proud to have these norms. Language is how we often emphasis these norms and stereotypical ideas. We relate the word “black” with being negative, while we associate “white” with being pure and clean. We also refer to things as being female or male in languages. Him, and her, el and ella, every languages makes this distinct point of differentiating between male and female.
In process of learning about how all these aspects create the self, I realized that once we stop making assumption about how people should be, we can then learn how to treat each other as equals. We can overcome racial and gender inequalities if we stop expecting people to fit into norms and expectations we have. All these concepts have made me realize my own preconceived notations about culture, race, and gender. I have been limiting my thinking to the assumptions I have of people. Now I will be more aware of not expecting people to be and act a certain way because of the norms that are implemented by society. All these concepts can be used in my personal life because how we socialize is affected by how we identify ourselves and how we identify others in our society. If we always expect people to fit into the norms we will never learn to appreciate the diversity our world has to offer.
The construction of social hierarchy also puts limits on developing a society. Like everything else social hierarchy has different levels in different societies. Social classes are used in the United States to rank people in our social hierarchy. The social class you are in is affected by your socioeconomic status, gender, age, and race. Race and gender are permanent, but even though people can change many of their other aspects most people will remain in the same class. I attribute this to people not having the same opportunities to move into a new social class. For example, we all know that in order to become established and be placed in higher ranking class you must go to school because that is how people make the most money. However, people who live in poverty can’t afford school therefore it is hard for them to move up in the social hierarchy the ranking of classes.
Ranking people in social hierarchies increases the gap of equality. People assume that social hierarchy is a biological principle, or they have an individualistic view that they worked for and deserve their ranking, and therefore they accept it as part of life. This also creates more inequality because it makes people think they are not smart and they accept this because they see it as being their fault. These hierarchies often lead to negative adaptations to survive in poverty. The book Cultural Anthropology: A Problem Based Approach, talks about Puerto Ricans building their own economic system that is supported by drugs in order to survive. This not only happens here in America but also in many third world countries. The gap between the rich and poor is so large in third world countries that people have no choice but to get involved with illegal things such as drugs, human trafficking, and corruption. Learning about social hierarchies is relevant to my everyday life because it is important to acknowledge that we still live in a society that is not equal and in order to change this we must acknowledged that it is a problem. As a nursing major social hierarchies will be addressed at work, with patients and staff. Knowing about these hierarchies will help me treat everyone fairly.
Throughout the class I learned about all the little aspects that contribute to us being a society. Even though societies see things differently I can still relate to aspects of their culture and now I understand why people have different believes and how they are acquired. I think our society has made huge progress when it come to inequality but there are still many improvement needed. After learning about other societies and the aspects that increase inequality, I believe we still have to overcome the less emphasized aspects that make a huge part of the inequality, such as gender, race and class, so that we can finally overcome it. Through the readings I also realized that even though people see America as being very diverse and open to changes, in some other societies the people have better developed ideas of how a society should work. For example with gender, women may be able to have the same jobs as men but in usually women still make less than men. In many other cultures gender roles can be overcome but in America those gender roles still exist and it’s unfortunate that it impacts our children. From now on I will try to view things like a cultural anthropologist would, be a blank slate, and learn from others with assumption of what they believe is true.