UTS

• Sociology


  The scientific study of social group and human relationship that generates new insights into the interconnectedness between self and other people
• Anthropology


  The study of what makes us human, taking a broad approach to understanding the many different aspects of the human experience (holism)
• What Anthropologists do


  1. Consider the past through archaeology to see how human groups lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and what was important to them

  2. Consider what makes up our biological bodies and genetics, as well as our bones, diet, and health

  3. Compare humans with other to see what we have in common with them and what makes us unique
• Self


  Separate, self-contained, independent, consistent, unitary and private
• Jon


  • Professor in Private Catholic School - strict and serious
  • Sweet and clingy husband to his wife, Jane
  • Disciplinarian father of two children
  • All smile and charismatic to churchmates
• It is normal, acceptable and expected to shift our self to fit into any circumstances and to adapt to his social situation
• Moi

  A person's sense of who he/she is, his body, and his/her basic identity, his/her biological givenness
• Personne


  The social concepts of what it means to be who he is, such as what it means to live in a particular institution, family, religion, nationality, and how to behave given expectations and influences from others
• More than a person's givenness, one is believed to be in active participation in the shaping of the self
• Language


  An aspect of social constructivism
• Mead and Vygotsky


  • They saw the way that human persons develop is with the use of language acquisition and interaction with others
  • They treated the human mind as something that is made, constituted through language as experienced in the external world and as encountered dialogs with others
• Mead


  • Saw this on children's conceptualization of the self through "role plays" and their scripts
• Vygotsky


  • Saw children's conceptualization of the self through real life dialogs with family, caregiver, or playmate
• Family


  • The most prominent institution and power at play in the society, according to sociologists
  • Disposition from the child's parents' genes and general condition of life, the impact of one's family is still deemed as a given in understanding the self
  • The kind of family, the resources available, and the kind of development will certainly affect us
  • Human beings are born virtually helpless, and the dependency period of a human baby to its parents for nurturing is relatively longer than most other animals
  • Learning is critical in our capacity to actualize potential of becoming humans
  • Babies internalize ways and styles that they observe from their family, either consciously or unconsciously
  • Without a family, biologically and sociologically, a person may not even survive or become a human person
• Gender


  One of those loci of the self that is subject to alteration, change, and development
• Sonia Tolstoy


  • Wrote about her contradictory feelings about her gender and identity when she was 21 and a few years later
• The account illustrates that our gender partly determines how we see ourselves in the world
• Nancy Chodorow


  • Argues that because mothers take the role of taking care of children, there is a tendency for girls to imitate the same and reproduce same kind of mentality
• Often times society forces a particular identity unto us depending on our sex and/or gender
• The gendered self is then shaped with in a particular context of time and space
• The notion that an individual should fit in a particular environment is dangerous and detrimental in the goal of truly finding one's self
• Gender has to be personally discovered and asserted and not dictated by the culture and society