Sociology
First Partial Notes to Study for First Partial Test
The concept
of culture is one of the most important notions in sociology. Culture refers to
the ways of life of the members of a society, or of groups within a society. It
includes art, literature and painting, but also ranges much more widely. Other
cultural items, for example, are how people dress, their customs, their
patterns of work and religious ceremonies.
Culture is
a large part of what makes us human. A theory about us humans is that we
evolved and that as a species we emerged as a result of a long process of
biological evolution. However, this is still a theory and not a scientific law.
Forms of
behavior found in all, or virtually all, cultures are called cultural
universals. Language, the prohibition against incest, institutions of marriage,
the family, religion and property are the main types of cultural universals –
but within these general categories there are many variations in values and
modes of behavior between different societies.
We learn
the characteristics of our culture through the process of socialization.
Socialization is the process whereby, through contact with other human beings,
the helpless infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable human being,
skilled in the ways of the given culture.
The work of
Sigmund Freud suggests that the young child learns to become an autonomous
being only as she or he learns to balance the demands of the environment with
pressing desires coming from the unconscious. Our ability to be self-aware is
built, painfully, on the repression of unconscious drives.
Socialization
continues throughout the life course. At each distinct phase of life there are
transitions to be made or crises to be overcome. This includes facing up to
death, as the termination of personal existence.
Course:
Childhood –
babies, toddlers, infancy. Before all seemed as just infancy and then little
adults who had to do adult things such as work and behave as such. History has
shown child labor as young as 7 or 8 in coalmines. Children before had no
rights in either labor or treatment. Societies are now more child-centered and
now parenting and childhood have become more clearly distinct from other
stages. A child-centered society emphasizes children experience love and care
from parents or other adults. With this attention given to childhood it has
become a commonplace feature of family life in present-day society the
existence of physical and sexual abuse in children.
Adolescence
– this concept of teenager is relatively recent. The distinctiveness of being a
teenager in current times is related both to the general extension of child
rights and to the process of formal education.
Mature
adulthood
Old age