Self and Society: concepts to understand

• Unit 3 is about self and society
• Essential questions to consider are how one is created by the dynamics of culture, society, and politics, and how one constantly works within or against this framework.
• Another essential question is how to effectively interact with groups, communities, networks, and institutions.
• The enduring understandings are that using different perspectives is necessary for societal problem solving and cultural relativism and social inclusiveness will help to overcome prejudices and create world peace.
• The topics are self and society.

Concepts to Understand the Self and Others

• The Sociological Imagination is important
• Unilinear Evolution and Cultural Relativism are important
• Etic and Emic perspectives are important

Sociological Imagination

• Sociological imagination is the ability to see the link between society and self; this concept was developed by Charles Wright Mills in 1959
• Personal troubles are a private experience, while public issues affect the wider society from a structural, historical and cultural standpoint
• An example of sociological imagination is to consider homelessness and how the individual may view it as a personal trouble, while it is really a public issue like war.
• Awareness permits to learning and getting a fuller understanding of events
• Common interpretations of human social behavior should be questioned
• Critical thinking about social structures should be fostered, which then encourages a desire for positive social change.

Threats to Democracy

• As bureaucratic organizations become large and more centralized, more power goes to the small elite (Elwell, 2006).

Alienation

• Most workers are discouraged from using their own judgment
• Decision-making forces them to comply with the rules handed down by others.
• The average worker is alienated from their intellectual capacities, and work becomes an enforced chore through the loss of autonomy (Elwell, 2015).

Moral Insensibility

• People have lost faith in their leaders in government, religion, and the workplace and have become apathetic.
• This apathy is a spiritual condition that underlines many problems such as moral insensibility.
• Moral insensibility leads people within society to accept atrocities such as genocide committed by their leaders.

Unilinear Evolution

• All societies follow the same path of development
• The path of development goes from savagery (lower form) to civilization (higher form).
• Tylor (1871) stated some societies are more or less advanced, or more or less savage than others.
• An example can be seen in the evolutionary path of religion: animism leads to polytheism and from there to monotheism and finally to science.

Historical Particularism

• Historical particularism is culture defined as a set of ideas or symbols held in common by a group of people who see themselves as a social group (Darnell 2013: 399)
• An achievement of the historical particularists was succeeding in excluding racism from anthropology.
• Labeling is based on insufficient evidence, and societies cannot be ranked by the value judgment of researchers.