Colinares, Shiara Camille A.

PSYCH031 BSN-1 24 Jun 2023

Sociological and Anthropoligical Perspectives of the Self: Reflection Paper

I recently read a speculative fiction dystopian book about a group of 40 women being kept
isolated in a cage underground for years, and one of them was a child born during those
years. Unlike the other women who had attachments to their past, she is a person raised
without societal constructs, without knowledge, and without culture. She had to learn stuff
that she had to know from these women.

In this alien world, the women were able to escape their prison and they discovered the
ground above them for the first time. Totally barren and isolated, this world had no
infrastructures, no rules; completely stripped away of everything. So they wandered
through the wilderness for years and found absolutely nothing except another bunkers of
dead bodies inside of groups just like them. During their expedition, they invented tools.
All of them gathered together to invent houses and looked for ways how to get their food
and water. However, they all died one by one because of old age and because they
weren’t ever able to find civilization.

Reading this book left me scared of being alone and made me wonder what would
become of me if I were to live in a completely deserted world with a future I could never
imagine. It is a profoundly strange yet so familiar of a story about a person who is
experiencing the world for the first time, navigating it with the only knowledge she could
have. It is a story of self-discovery, hope, loss, and above all, friendship—what it means
to be human with humans.

In the words of Aristotle, “Man is by nature a social animal.” Our world is completely
different from the story I told above. It operates differently; having had invented order with
our own sets of rules, principles, organizations, and cultures. The self can be understood
in this way too—when we look at the individual and the collective as a whole. In order to
truly understand our self, we also have to look at the world around us (its past and
present), why it works the way it works and how it has come to affect our very own ways
of thinking. Indeed, sociology and anthropology have contributed a lot to this collective
feat, and will continue to do so.

What is amazing about our humanity is its ability to reinvent itself time and time again.
This can be seen in people like Oksana Malaya herself, who experienced an
unimaginable pain there is, got neglected and completely stripped off of everything, she
was able to transcend that and rebuild herself. Surely, we can apply this not only
individually, but also as a whole, living in a society that is ever-changing.