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EVERY DAY THINGS
Training Handout
Much of Sociology is looking at things about which we already know something, but in a different way
Sociology usually looks at events and situations of every day life.
It interprets them
through the sociological perspective (way of looking at them).
This is because they are as much
a part of the observer’s interpretation as they are something intrinsic
in themselves.
While the way we are brought up gives
us at least one lens to see them, sociology gives us another lens through
which to see them.
Furthermore, sociology gives us several
perspectives through which to observe those every day events and
conditions.
Unlike how we usually see things
and are taught to see things, which tend to be prescriptive (how we should
do things or judge things), sociology teaches us to look at them in a scientific
(descriptive) and non judgmental way.
There are many examples of how we
see things differently in sociology than in our everyday life.
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Society is not people, for example, because
people are biological organisms who pass their characteristics on through
genes, while society is cultural, being sets or systems of behaviour and
beliefs (actions and understandings) that are passed along via symbols.
Society is "carried" by people.
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Technology is as much a part of culture as is
ballet or symphony. It is transmitted by symbols rather
than by genes.
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The same situation can be viewed in radically
different ways, even within sociology, such as the conflict approach, which
sees competition and dynamics, versus functional, which sees stability
and seeks purpose.
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Sociology is like all scientific disciplines
which have models that differ from everyday understanding, such as the
sun
rising in the morning,* or models of atoms.
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In almost every class in this course we looked
at differences between every day common sense assumptions and scientific
observations.
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The idea of a model, orthodox, monolithic or
"natural" family is a myth. No society has a practice that isn’t
full of variation.
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To be human is to be biased, because learning
a language means making assumptions and categorizing a wide variation in
senses into boxes (eg words).
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External social forces are as important as internal
processes (including psychological) in the internal
dynamics of every family.
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To be objective and scientific, we need to be
descriptive rather than prescriptive.
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To be objective about culture would require
knowing and experiencing the absence of culture. We would be strange fish,
out of water, if we did so. Experiencing a different culture would
give us binocular vision about culture, but not genuine objectivity. We
cannot escape culture to look at it.
-
A member of any culture is likely to be the
least objective about it. To say that only xxxs are qualified to
teach about xxx culture is essentially racist.
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To be human is to have culture and to be social,
but that does not guarantee that we understand culture or society.
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We learn that our characteristics, which we
might have thought were "in our blood," are passed on to us as we are socialized,
ie by symbols.
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Facts do not speak for themselves; meanings
are not intrinsic, but are imposed on us as we observe what
we call facts.
-
There is a resistance to learning to see things
though a sociological perspective, because we think we know them already,
and it is more difficult to unlearn something we already know than to learn
something we accept that we do not already know.
Footnote:
There
is a difference between rotate and revolve. It is the earth rotating
on its own axis that provides us with the illusion that the sun comes up
very morning. The earth revolving around the sun does not produce
sunup; it produces seasons of the year (combined with the 23o
angle of the earth).
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2011.08.16
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