Culture Shock

Today in class culture, both material and non-material, was compared to a fish bowl. One of the things that stuck out to me in this metaphor was the idea of culture shock. I knew, from Human Geography, that culture shock is when people with one culture are brought into a different one and they experience "Culture shock" because everything is so different. But the fishbowl really got me thinking about it. The example used was the owner wanting the fish to swim into the castle, but that’s not what the fish wants because this wouldn’t have occurred out in the ocean that it is used to. This aggravates the owner. In real life thought I never thought about people being aggravated when others are confused due to them being new to the surroundings. Stevenson ahs exchange students all the time and most people are really nice about it. They treat the new students well because they know that these kids dot speak the language or aren’t used to the way things are. But then I thought about my new neighbor, she is an exchange student from Germany. She speaks English pretty well but she struggles with some words and concepts. I was talking to her about homecoming and she said they didn’t have anything like that back in Germany and she didn’t really know what to wear or how to act. Whets more I found it difficult to explain some things to her because she didn’t have the vocabulary to understand. This wasn’t really aggravating because I could see that she was trying really hard, but I could see how it would irritate someone if they really needed to get a concept through to her.

A Bronx Tale

We watched a Bronx Tale and one idea that really stuck out to me was the racism concept in this movie. The Italians had so many problems in their own neighborhood but yet they still went out and found trouble in the African American neighborhood simply because they were racist. But simply isn’t the right word. It wasn’t simple at all! The reason behind this really got me thinking, I mean this was the eighties people were more progressive then this, but then I realized something. It may not have been solely about race. The Italian neighborhood had a fear instilled in every member since birth about Sunny and the kind of people that surround him. They were scared of him but they couldn’t do anything about him. Which led me to think that maybe with the African Americans, the Italians finally felt they had some control. That they could attack someone and not know for a fact that they themselves would die after. It may have been a control issue since they themselves couldn’t control their own streets. I mean everyone needs some control in their life. if things go bad at school, for instance, I have had times when I come home really irritated and lash out at my family because I cant lash out at  a teacher who failed me or something. It’s the sense of control we all need over some aspect of our lives.

Where do i stand?

This week we did an exercise where we had to write down what groups we identify ourselves in, I had the basic: family, friends, Stevenson, sports; categories down but when we had to choose which ones represented us and influenced us the most I started to think. Most of us would identify ourselves in similar ways (sister, brother, son daughter, student, classmate ect.) so what makes something influence one of us more then it does another? Why am I so influenced by my friends while someone else who also has a lot of friends is influenced greatly by Stevenson? I mean isn’t this where society's influence is greatest? I came to the realization that while society is important and ties us all together, it’s our specific environments that change what is most important to us. I grew up in a house where a strong emphasis was put on having a healthy balance between everything you do. For instance I have a job and I watch my brother and I’m a fighter and i'm a student and I hang out with friends; all of these things shape who I am and make my role as a friend stand out because it is one that I need to always remember to make time for it. But someone else may have been told, since childhood, that nothing is more important then education. We were raised in the same society, but our environments are very different. I now see the difference between environment and the society. I then began to think about people who are strained to have more then one role as their main one. So they might be influenced by sports and school and strive to achieve there ultimate potential in both areas, I never had that problem but with this understanding i’m worried about these people! If it’s so hard to fit into one role, how can they always manage to fit into two?

social construction of reality

The spitting demo we did in class really interested me. I already knew that our environment shaped us but I didn’t really pay attention to how much it shapes our reality. If we had grown up seeing people drink the spit of others out of cups we would have seen nothing wrong in it. I don’t really like this. I don’t like the idea that society can change my views so much, that how I see things isn’t really how I see them, but how everyone else told me to see them. This made me think about my last year Human Geography class; we had a whole unit on different cultures of the world. Their was this one particular picture we saw that I felt was a perfect example of social construction of reality; it was this man in this one tribe who's bottom lip protruded several inches in front of the rest of his face because he had had a lip plate there for years to make it that way.  Everyone in my class instinctively said "eww" or "ouch" under their breathes because this was something so strange for us. It looked kind of gross to us, but in their culture that was a symbol of a great warrior and he was considered the epitome of an attractive man. If we had all lived in that society we would have seen that lip plate idea as normal an acceptable and found it weird that in America regular people and important people all look the same. Our social construction of reality would be different. I’ve realized from the first two sociology units that environment is everything.