3/10/11

I think that teachers are out to get students this week ( students beware of your teachers). A lot of kids are saying how they have a ton of HW and how they've taken a test just everyday this week, it makes me wonder if teachers this week formed their own interest group, just for a week  leaving the kids with a lot of test and HW ( what a nightmare ).  Well anyways, this week seems really long.  
              
 This week in sociology we learned about the different types of culture and the components of a culture.

I think that the most important thing that we learned this week in sociology were the norms that a culture could have.  I think that norms are the most important because they put a boundary on the members of a culture on how they are suppose to behave. Every culture has their own norms.
    For example............................
         One of my uncles was brought to America from Mexico, when he was really little ( a couple of months old) . He spent his whole life in America, so he is accustomed to the American culture rather than his birth culture ( Mexican ).  Not so long ago, he got divorce from his wife.  After he got divorce, it took him a long time before he told his parents that he got divorce because he knew that they wouldn't take it lightly and he was scared of what they were going to think.  His parents lived in Mexico and they were not used to divorces, in their eyes a divorce was like a big sin. Getting a divorce, to them was like breaking a taboo.  To them the consequences for breaking a taboo of that magnitude were severe ( I don't know what were the consequences).  When my uncle was ready to tell my grandparents that he was divorce, he bought a ticket to go to Mexico and decided to tell them in their faces what had happen rather than giving them a call them and telling them the whole story. When my grandparents heard what happen, they were shock and they didn't know what to say. He was the first member o the family to get a divorce.
     In the American culture, divorces aren't viewed the same, they don't fall under the same norm.  Maybe to Americans, a divorce would be more like a folkway instead of a Taboo. Every culture has different boundaries as to where something falls in the norm system. In the American culture, woman aren't made to cover their body. In India woman are made to cover their entire body because they think that its bad for a woman to show her body for the public eye.For America, this example might just be a folkway ( depending ) and on India it could probably be a Taboo or a Law.

A Taboo is a norm in a culture, where if someone breaks this kind of norm, they would get severe consequences.  The example of my uncle breaking a Taboo norm that was view as a big no no by grandparents culture, brought great consequences for him.

Sociology so far is really fun and I'm really learning a lot. :)