Where do you notice Social Constructs today?

Bonus assignment: Give 1-2 examples of other social constructs you notice between now and next class.

On Day One of the Spring 09 Semester, I introduced the concept of SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS using a map upside down. How did you learn that north was up? North is not UP in the physical universe, is it? Read a previous post explaining social constructs.

The definition I shared in class was "an idea (time), a concept (masculinity) or an artifact (money) that seems natural or obvious to those who accept it but in fact is an invention of a particular culture or society."

The most well-known example is the "earth is flat". While the earth may appear to be flat to our everyday perceptions, in reality we cannot see the whole earth and its curvature. Thus, the social construct is not the condition of the flatness we see, but rather the view itself that people share. This view affects people's behaviors, thoughts, feelings and actions. It is a context from which people may live their lives.

A more common social construct that seems invisible to us is money. Money is not real in the way we view it. It is worth much more than the material it is printed on but by social agreement in any country we assign it certain values.

"Mathematics is a social construct. Numbers are words and ideas, not physical laws. Math is used to describe the physical universe, so it is shaped into a form that matches the universe as well as possible, giving it a framework. All things we would call math use this same framework. But describing a Law and being a Law are different things. Math measures things that exist, and it does this very well. It can also do things that the universe that it is describing cannot. The truth in numbers is not fundamental. It is built by humans." (http://everything2.com/node/163462).

Here are definitions from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction):

A social construction or social construct any phenomenon "invented" or "constructed" by participants in a particular culture or society, existing because people agree to behave as if it exists or follow certain conventional rules. One example of a social construct is social status. Another example of social construction is the use of fiat money, which is worth more than the paper it is printed on only because society has agreed to treat it as valuable.

Pinker (2002, p. 202) writes that "social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist".

One of the main theses of gender theory is that genders and gender roles are mere social constructs, and that there is nothing natural about being a man or a woman, a heterosexual or a homosexual, or even a transsexual, since genders are mere social appearances and built-in ideas, not unlike men's clothes or women's clothes.

Prof. G - Just some thoughts on your posts of late

I have been really enjoying the comments and reactions to Majora Carter's TED Talk and the post on Social Responsibility. I wished more of you responded to my previous post about whether "individual" or "fear" are social constructs. I am very interested in leading you all to consider that if most ideas we live by are socially constructed, like myths we live by, and all human cultures have their own way of thinking, believing, behaving and feeling about this common humanity we share, why is it so difficult to change something we made up? How do we get stuck with these things? It has implications for economics, for how we talk about our times. "We are in a financial crisis" gives a particular point of view of life when we might have had the same amount of money or even more during the Clinton administration boom and been worse off. Why?

Daniela was responding to the TED talk about the South Bronx with Majora Carter who is an excellent and passionate non-profit leader for greening the ghetto. Daniela as well as Edwin made some AWESOME comments--go back and read them. But often we can talk about change and what's missing but because we live in the US more often than not we have the luxury of talking but not necessarily acting.

We have so many luxuries here in the U.S. The luxury of a democracy, of money, of our position in the world, of choice, of free speech. They are awesome and wouldn't trade em for the world.

“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind”

Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist, Poet and Philosopher, 1817-1862)

What do you think would have Thoreau say this and what about what you learned this semester from doing/reading/participating-observing/writing about anthropology, what aspects of what you have learned would you use as evidence for your answer?

AFTERTHOGHT: Hey what if "luxury" is something you can simply create (words create worlds)? What would you create in your speaking and how? Maybe it begins with simple pleasures.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY NOW, CORPORATE AND CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY 4 LIFE

All of your comments about the circumstances of sweatshop labor revealed a deep concern for your relationship as students to others who are less fortunate in the world. This is the start of becoming a student OF the world rather than IN the world. Your insight and awareness is something to be proud of. Don't undermine it with guilt or shame, blame or fault, or even regret.

Consider this re-definition from Landmark Education.

Responsibility is not about blame, shame, guilt, fault, or regret. It starts with a willingness to consider being cause in the matter.

No one else is coming to save us. Responsibility might be creatively responding using the resources you have as a college student (technology, the power of your institution--Baruch/CUNY, the radio station, blogs, etc. ) or the resources of your position (galvanizing other students or people with similar interests) to make a difference, to impact the world we live in.

Perhaps you all could be like the students in the video and organize Baruch students to explore what unfair labor practices we as a group of people are unknowingly supporting. Awareness is an important form of activism.

Perhaps this poem might be useful in being cause in the matter.
"Our Deepest Fear"
by Marianne Williamson from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

ABOUT MIRACLES AND FEAR
By the way, how would anthropologists study MIRACLES or even FEAR? Guilt, shame or blame? What etic category applies or would be useful? How, when or where would you participate and observe miracles or fear? Where would you conduct fieldwork? Better yet, what social construct is at work behind the perception/reality of MIRACLES, FEAR or SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY? What construct prevents us from seeing them/it?

One thought for me, because I don't have an answer for this, is the social construct of "the individual" (does it really exists in nature or is it merely a social discourse perceived in some cultures and not others?). Hmm? What a paradox. "Individual" is a social construct. That's something I've NEVER thought about before.

IN CONCLUSION
What I am learning from my own inquiry is that "noticing" is the most powerful tool in participant-observation and ethnography.

CLARIFYING Social Construct

I noticed a few of you have been using the idea of a social construct a bit too generally. Here is the definition again:

A social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. Social constructs are generally understood to be the by-products (often unintended or unconscious) of countless human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature.

People never see social constructs from an emic point of view. The insider never can see it. Like the fish never sees the water or humans never think about air. It's taken for granted. The etic view, the participant observer, the outsider (even insiders can become outsiders to their own culture from travel, migration, going away to college, etc.) the begin to see how people in a culture accept the invention as natural and obvious.

Anthropologists use interviewing inside of participant-observation to "expose the way in which a particular belief has been shaped by social forces" (Writes philosopher Paul A. Boghossian in WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1153/socialconstruction.pdf).

For instance, how did we/you learn the belief that North is up. One social force impacting that view was colonialism by the British Empire. They created a view through maps emphasizing the upper parts where they were located in their emic view. Reading importance from top to bottom is a social construction. Not all cultures read and have their views correlated that way. Others are equally valid in seeing things differently. "Another society, differing from us only in their social values [their learned ways of thinking, feeling, believing and behaving], would have arrived at a different and incompatible belief [or view]." Boghossian writes further:

There are certainly many things, and facts about them, that are socially constructed in the sense ... : money, citizenship and newspapers, for example. None of these things could have existed without society [or enculturation and acculturation]; and each of them could have been constructed differently had we so chosen

If a belief of ours were shown to be socially constructed ... it would follow that we could abandon it without fear of irrationality [the earth is flat; Muslims are evil; carbohydrates are bad for you; noticing skin color causes racism]

[I]f we have the belief not because there is adequate evidence in its favor but because having it subserves some contingent social purpose [Muslims are evil], then if we happen not to share the social purpose it subserves we ought to be free to reject it.

Much important work has been done ... most significantly, it seems to me, [on the] topics of gender and race. Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1953) and other feminist scholars since, have illuminated the extent to which gender roles are not inevitable but are rather the product of social forces. Anthony Appiah (Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, 1996, with Amy Gutman) has been particularly forceful in demonstrating that nothing physical or biological corresponds to the racial categories that play a pervasive role in our social lives, that these categories owe their existence more to their social function [stratification of resources and wealth affecting our views of who has wealth, power and prestige] than they do to the scientific evidence.

To clarify and be sure you are clear about what a social construct is, tell me what this says to you. How did you have the idea before reading this and how has it changed? If you get it, you can recreate it in your own words and even give an example back to me as if its yours.

Welcome to the Fall Semester of ANT1001!!

Our first class meeting was ... how can I say ... mind-bending! Learn more social constructs and the Peters Map, see other versions of maps including a "South up" map, and check out critiques of the Peters Map itself.

Get familiar with Web 2.0. We will be talking alot about it.
Here's a nifty image comparing Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. >>>>>

I will be posting any assignments under the tag "Assigments" in the Tag Cloud above starting next week.

Stay tuned. Prof. G

Diet as a Social Construct

As the semester draws to a close, I've stumbled on an interesting speech by Michael Pollan, entitled "In Defense of Food." He speaks about how the nutritionist movement, which is defined by the quest to quantify the content of food, is a failed one, and how (past) culture is a more reliable indicator of whether or not something is healthy to eat. He touches on many different problems with the current American diet, but one rule, "don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," stands out. After hearing this speech, I'm convinced that I need to pick up a copy of his latest book.



Blog By Abe Hedeya

Manliness in the US

When talking about male gender stereotypes, we should first take a step back and ask ourselves: what is manliness, anyway?  As we explore the answers to that question, it becomes obvious that definitions of manliness aren't always consistent between cultures.  More important, though, is the fact that the definition of manliness isn't a static one: it has a tendency to change over time.  As American society crosses into the 21st century, we are experiencing shifts in what gender stereotypes are socially acceptable.  Gone are the days when little Jimmy would go outside to play stickball with his friends every afternoon.  Today, the average male youth participates in a host of activities that transcend male and female lines.  He talks about his feelings.  He takes cooking as well as woodworking.  For many, manliness is less about eating red meat and watching football, and more about gentleman-liness, for lack of a better term.

As American men search for what it means to be male, it become obvious that gender equality is not exclusive of gender identity and role.  One blog, The Art of Manliness, embodies that new American male identity.  Its writers focus on contemporary interpretations of the core values of masculinity, using them as a path to becoming a gentleman.  I recommend the blog to anyone else in the class - it's often a great read.  Click here for The Art of Manliness blog.

Blog by Abraham Hedaya

Redefining Gender

It was clear from the quiz on Tue that most have been collapsing sex (a biologically determined attribute) with gender (a socially constructed and performative expression of identity significantly influenced by society's social constructs of gender stratification and difference. Why is gender so important in our society? Why does it continue to be important and to whom?

Here are a couple of definitions you might find useful:

Gender is the cultural definition of behavior defined as appropriate to the sexes in a given society at a given time. Gender is a set of cultural roles. It is a costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance. Unfortunately, the term is used both in academic discourse and in the media as interchangeable with "sex." In fact, its widespread public use probably is due to it sounding a bit more "refined" than the plain word "sex"....Such usage is unfortunate, because it hides and mystifies the difference between the biological given - sex - and the culturally created - gender. Feminists above all others should want to point up that difference and should therefore be careful to use the appropriate words.

2) From The Gift by Lewis Hyde found in Chapter 6: “Female Property" in Section II: “Big Men and Little Women,” p. 103:

By “gender” I mean to indicate the cultural distinctions between male and female—not the physical signs of sex but that whole complex of activities, postures, speech patterns, attitudes, affects, acquisitions, and styles by virtue of which a woman becomes feminine (a man “effeminate”) and a man masculine (a woman “mannish”). Any system of gender will be connected to actual sexuality, of course, but that is only one of its possible connections. It may also support and affirm the local creation myth, perpetuate the exploitation of one sex by another, organize aggression and warfare, ensure the distribution of food from clan to clan—it may, in other words, serve any number of ends unrelated to actual sexuality.

Im sick of Social Constructs too

The following is a poem about how society has manipulated what we see, think and do.

It's all about social constructs if you think about it.

Culture, Race and Universal Human Rights

Hi Folks,
Over the weekend I have been thinking about our conversation about whiteness and my slide show and thought I needed to sure up my awareness of what the American Anthropological Association is providing on its website about the issue of race as a social construct. I found some invaluable links. [CLICK ON ANY IMAGE FOR MORE ABOUT IT]

One is to the PBS website for the video we've been watching a segment of over the last two weeks: Race: The Power of Illusion. We've been watching the episode titled "The Difference Between Us" talking about genetics and difference. On that site was a great site I expect you to visit. It is called IS RACE REAL? Read the ten facts there and check out RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Race Timeline | PBS to see how the definitions of whiteness, Indianness, Asianness, and Blackness have changed since the 1700s. Check out this part of the site recreating the "doll test" among black children about their racial preferences.

Kottak's Chapter 3 on Culture reveals the complex ways anthropologists view the concept and practice of culture. On p. 52-53, Kottak discusses Human and Cultural Rights. I took a few of the items in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the U.N. that I thought might be interesting inside our ongoing conversation about whiteness, culture and the practice of doing anthropology--namely participant-observation (I'll say a bit more about Malinowski than how I left it "useful failures"), ethnography, emic-etic approaches, and working with cultural consultants.

Article 1.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 3.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

For more on white privilege from whites themselves take a look at this blog