LESSON 2: SOCIO-ANTHROPOLOGY: THE SELF AS A PRODUCT OF MODERN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Sociology study of societies and social relationship

Anthropology scientific study of human culture

- Biological characteristics
- Physiological
- Evolution

Nativism emphasize on being born with certain inmate traits

Empiricism state that all knowledge is derived from experiences

Society is a group in which individuals live and interact

Culture came from the Latin word cultura or cultus meaning care or cultivation.
Identity refers to who the person is. It is also known to be the quality or traits of an individual that makes him or her
different from others.
Cultural identity refers to the feeling of belongingness to a certain cultural group. It is an individual’s perception of the
self that is anchored on race, gender, nationality, religion, ethnicity and language.
National identity is the feeling of belongingness to one state or nation.

Material culture represents culture or nationality (ex. national flag)

Non-material culture is the shared understanding of a group such as norms, beliefs, language, traditions.

It also requires the process of self-categorization such as the following:

1. Individual self reflects the cognitions related to traits, states, and behaviors that are stored in memory.

2. Relational self reflects cognitions that are related to one’s relationships.

3. Collective self reflects cognitions that are related to one’s group.
PHILOSOPHERS

1. George Herbert Mead

I - represents the unique, free and subjective part of the self (who we are without too much consideration of external
influences)
ME - represents conventional and objective part of the self (assumes roles, learned behavior, and internalized attitudes
of others)
GENERALIZED OTHERS - an organized community or social group which gives an individual his/her unity of the self
(internalized behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes). How you act with others.
2. Vygotsky
A child may internalize values, norms, practices, and social beliefs, and more through exposure to these dialogs that will
eventually become part of his world.
Sociocultural theory of development emphasizes the crucial influence that social interactionsand language, embedded
within a cultural context have a cognitive development
3. Charles Horton Cooley
The looking Glass self – Imagine how we appear to other people
Cooley’s looking-glass self is a social psychological concept which explains that the self is developed as a result of one's
perceptions of other people's opinions.
The looking glass self is made up of feelings about other people’s judgments of one’s behavior.

4. Henri Tajfel

Social Identity theory – Perception of self and others based on the social groups that one belongs to.
Social Identity by Henri Tajfel is defined as the person’s sense of who he or she is according to his or her membership in
a certain group.

Three mental processes:

Social Categorization- This is similar to how people categorize things.

Social Identification- After learning their category, people adopt the identity of the group in which they have categorized
themselves.

Social Comparison- This is where they tend to compare that group with other groups.

5. Michael Foucault

The self is shaped by outside forces. In traditional society, a person’s status isdetermined by his or her role;
in modern society by his or her achievement and by postmodern society by fashion and style.

6. Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman’s presentation of everyday life is also known as the dramaturgical model of social life. For him, social
interaction may be compared to a theater and people to actors on a stage where each plays a variety of roles.
The self is a product of the dramatic interaction between actor and audience. The self is made up of the various parts that
people play, and a key goal of social actors is to present their various selves in ways that create and sustain particular
impressions to the different audiences.

7. Kenneth Gergen
The saturated self is a constant connection to others, a self that absorbs a multitude of voices.
People establish multiple selves through the absorption of the multiple voices of people in their lives, either in real life or
through the media.
Through mediums such as the internet and video games, people can construct idealized versions of who they are by
selectively representing various aspects of their selves like self- promotion.

8. Marcel Mauss
According to Marcel Mauss (French Anthropologist) that every self has two faces:

Moi - a person's sense of who he/she is, the body, and basic identity or biological composition.
Personne - composed of the social concepts of what it means to be who he is, what it means to live in a particular family,
institution, religion, or nationality, and how to behave in the given expectations and influences of others.

Self in the Family

Basic aspects that can be taught in the family are the following:
language

ways of behaving

attitudes
confronting emotions

basic manners of conduct