Egocentrism & Justice - Lec 6 Flashcards
We tend to judge people and society based on our own..
understandings and experiences (be these religious, social, cultural, or historical)
Egocentrism
being uninterested in other people’s beliefs, interests, and attitudes. It is being self-centered, and applying one’s own experiences as the standard that everything else is judged by.
Ethnocentrism
belief one’s ethnic or cultural group is superior to others; and to judge everything from that prism.
3 TOOLs to destabilise our certainties
- Sociological imagination: moving from personal space to social space.
- Cultural ethnography: moving from our place to other places.
- History: moving from our time to other times.
Sociological Imagination
Moving from personal space to social space.
We are unable to understand the ‘social world’ if we only use our own experiences.
We have to move out from our ‘individual space’ into the ‘social space’ – using the sociological imagination – moving beyond one’s own experiences
C Wright Mills 1916-1962: The Sociological Imagination (1959)
Promoted sociology not as a science, but rather as an imaginative way of thinking and understanding the social world.
The sociological imagination was a type of intellectual craftsmanship.
Biography and society are connected to each other.
Private problems can be understood through larger processes and as a public issue - personal (character and environment), public (social institutions and history)
“No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their interactions within a society has completed its intellectual journey.” - C Wright Mills.
Examples of Sociological Imagination
Divorce – high rate of divorce suggests something is happening in the ‘ordering of society’
The social institution of marriage seems to have issues that are leading to divorce – broader social phenomenon in the way society is ordered
Study of suicide by Emile Durkheim (1897) - something individual is linked to social relations o Rates of suicide change with different times of the year.
Different religious groups have different rates of suicide, even though there is often congruence of acceptability of moral views about suicide (ie. a sin).
Suicide rates are affected by times of crisis, economic change, and war
We need to look at how individual actions are integrated into society and regulated by it.
This also goes back to criticisms of Liberal theory – which posits that perceptually, an individual exists prior to any connections to social life – but is this a vacuous idea?
We don’t look at individuals outside their social connections.
Cultural Ethnography
Moving from our place, to other places.
Thinking about the ‘natural differences’ between people, and the extent to which this relates to culture, rather than nature
Culture may include institutions, art, literature, and other tangible/material things.
Things like language and ways of doing things may be described as intangible or non-material cultural artefacts. Ie. Skills.
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) argues that…
‘non-cultural’ human beings do not, never have, and never will exist.
We are all bearers of culture – we exist in the context of culture.
Marcel Mauss (1872-1950)
French and English soldiers – digging holes (different tools), and marching (different pace and patterns).
Swimming – methods of teaching changed over time (early swimming education involved taking water into the mouth and spitting it out).
French women and American movies – influence on walking style in France.
Women in Convents – walking with fists closed (from a young age)
Mauss described these actions as ‘prestigious imitation’: ‘the individual borrows the series of movements which constitute it from the action executed in front of him or with him by others.’ – use of human body requires a social and cultural education throughout childhood by those in authority over the child and in whom the child has confidence.
Cultural Ethnography and Social Justice
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) – argues sexual division of labour is not natural or universal – a cultural device to create dependency among sexes.
Anne Oakley argues against the classical hunter-gatherer mentality; Mbuti Pygmies in Congo; differences between men and women in gathering food.
Men gather honey, women collect veggies.
Lele - in Southern Congo - geographical division; men work in the forest, women work in the grassland
How are punishments affected by culture? Purpose and methods.
Imprisonment - most serious punishment because depriving of freedom and liberty is seen as a very harsh experience to go through.
Is this the same in all cultures? No .
Some cultures focus on restitution rather than harming the offender – remedy the damage caused.
In summary, some cultural influences are obvious while others are not so obvious
For example, French woman changing their walking style after watching US movies.
French and English soldiers digging trenches at the same time – not so obvious until they are side-by-side.
A history of the present
Moving from our time to other times.
The purpose is not to understand the past, but to put a lens on the present – show how things might be done differently.
We look to the past of our civilisation, not to show progression, but to show difference.
Challenges the cultural superiority we may feel about being 21st century citizens.
Why a history of the present?
Need an understanding of the social structures that have appeared and now exist in world history.
Eg. colonialism, criminal justice system, financial system, welfare, etc.
In our history of the present, attention should be paid to political and economic, military, kinship (family), religious, and educational structures.
How are they different to what we have had in the past?
Why do we look to the past of our civilisation?
Not to show progression but to show difference.
We want to see how ‘strange’ our reality is - similar to cultural ethnography.
Challenges the cultural superiority we feel.
Take family for instance, what were the roles of husbands and wives?
Women said to have maternal instincts - nuclear family (2-parent family) in the West.
Assumed that because women bare children, they should also look after them – discriminatory practices in employment.
In the 1950s and 1960s, general view that once a woman married (or had children), her employment was terminated.
Childcare outside the household was not common at that time.
Has this constantly been the case in the past?
Thinking of the idea of a nuclear family, and of a woman’s ‘desire’ to care for children:
1780 France - wet nurses (1,000 of the 21,000 children born in Paris were breastfed by their own mother) – this often happened outside the city, where 5% to 15% died on the way to the rural location (en route), and 25% to 38% within the first year.
Challenge to the universal maternal instinct.
Women’s roles were different - rich women had different reasons to that of women who were less financially advantaged.
Wet nurses often looked after many babies – lower nutritional milk.
The value of mother love is challenged (ie. natural and universal).
