SOCCUL6

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You are required to number your responses, submit your work as a PDF, and to be detailed and thorough in all your responses. I expect it will take at least one paragraph to answer each question.

Expectations for Written Work

1. Number your responses if the questions/prompts are numbered. 2. When completing any writing assignment, keep in mind the point of all the assigned tasks in this

course: to demonstrate knowledge about the subject, to demonstrate your ability to think critically, to demonstrate the use of your sociological imagination, and to demonstrate your ability to write clearly and effectively. Before submitting your work, be sure that all your responses do each of these things.

3. All written work should be well-written and well thought-out meaning it should utilize full sentences with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation and demonstrate critical thinking skills and subject knowledge.

4. Longer responses on written work typically receive higher scores because they usually demonstrate deeper thought, more critical thinking and analysis, and better content mastery. However, lengthy "fluff" responses that don't actually say anything meaningful will result in a loss of points.

5. Skipping a question or questions on any assignment will result in a significant drop in your score for that assignment because it shows a lack of effort. You should always attempt to answer every question.

6. Similarly, be sure you fully answer all the questions asked. Often there are multiple parts and it is critical that you do everything that is asked of you and fully answer all questions.

7. Neglecting to follow directions may result in a 0 for the entire assignment.

On Artificial Intelligence (AI) Specifically:

In this course, we will utilize an AI detection tool when we score your written work and this tool is incredibly accurate. The chances of anyone getting away with using Artificial Intelligence (AI) are essentially nil. Students who utilize AI or who engage in any other form of academic dishonesty -- plagiarism, collusion, etc. -- will first be given a 0 on the assignment. NO CHAT GPT

Assignment 6 instructions on PAGE 2

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Assignment 6: Read the following articles and external links

1. Read Slides: a. 8 - Culture and Power.pptx b. 5 - Culture and The Body DE.pptx c. OA12a - Zikala - Body Size and Culture.PDF d. OA11 - Fisher - Tattooing the Body, Marking Culture.PDF

Questions:

1. Write a one paragraph summary of "Tattooing the Body, Marking Culture." How is it relevant to the course material in this unit?

2. What is the most interesting thing you learned from the "Body Size and Culture" slides and article? Why did you find it interesting?

3. Think of the micro-politics, the power struggles and attempts to get one's own way, of a romantic couple. Think of a couple you actually know and describe the categories each member of the couple belongs to (such as their sex, gender, age, class, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.) to the best of your ability and anything else pertinent about the couple or the individuals. Which of these two people do you think has the most power? Why? Now imagine a conlict between these two people. How do you think each person would use their own culture(s) to gain power and get their way during a conflict? Be specific and detailed.

J E N N I F E R L . G R A V E S , M . A .

Culture & The Body

Culture & The Body

Humans are cultural as much as biological beings, and this fact has profound ramifications for how we live our everyday lives.

Cultural forces are at work in how one uses one’s body, how that body feels to one, and how others respond to one’s body.  Ex: Human ideas of what counts as sexually attractive are not fully

determined by biology. How one’s body is perceived is a matter of culture. How one’s body shape and look are culturally defined can have large ramifications.

 Can you think of other examples of the influence of culture on the body?

Thus the body is as much a cultural phenomenon as a biological one.

Culture Against Nature

Hobbesian View: Human nature is anarchic and unruly. Left to our own devices, without the guiding constraints of

culture, each of us would run riot. Without culture, life would be nasty, brutish and short.

By regulating and controlling our emotional drives (which are potentially violent and always unpredictable), culture works to ensure that everyday life is possible by allowing for regularity, predictability and order.

Proponent  Sigmund Freud (1957): Civilization relies on a renunciation of instinctual gratifications… and urgencies.  Cultural norms and values make humans give up their

natural dispositions towards promiscuous sex, unregulated defecation and urination, and random acts of violence.  Primary Method: Shame

Toilet Culture An Example of Culture Taming Instinct

Excretion of waste has become culturally regulated. All societies have a toilet culture that dictates ways of thinking about and enacting the excretion of waste.

Western society has a particularly strict toiletry culture in which we are disgusted by defecatory materials and have stern rules about the legitimate times and places for excretion.

Cultural Definitions Are at Work: It is only because cultural contexts have decreed things one way that we see them that way (ex: feces as dirty).  Ex: Hygiene and Symbolism  Ex: Colored TP  Ex: Terminology for Bathrooms

Are you familiar with different toilet cultures?

Toilet Culture An Example of Culture Taming Instinct

Example: Capitalism and Toilet Rules – Cultural Norms  Impose Upon Bodies  The capitalistically organized workplace is centered around a

search for profit, and workers’ bodies are controlled accordingly. The natural rhythms of their bodies (like need for a toilet) do not fit with the required tempo of work, because the body must keep working in the pursuit of profit, no matter what.

 Point: In everyday life there is as antagonism between cultural expectations and bodily capacities and desires.

 Other examples of this antagonism?

The Cultured Body

Cultural forces do not just control the human body (see above), they also shape it.

Cultural contexts profoundly shape how we make use of our bodies – walking, talking, running, throwing, lifting and so on.

Primary Theory: Mauss’ Body Techniques & Habitus

Examples: Gender & Class

Body Techniques

There is no completely ‘natural’ way for a person to use their body.  Ex: Positions of the arms and hands while walking.

We learn how to use our bodies.  Mostly through imitation.  Each generation passes on a body culture to its offspring

comprised of a number of body techniques. Each human body is sculpted by the particular

cultural context a person is brought up and lives within.

Body Techniques

Body Techniques – forms of bodily movement and action that are expressive of the cultural life of the group  Experienced and enacted unconsciously.  Felt as natural, but actually created by the culture of the

group.  Body techniques involve both activities and what we think

about those activities.  Expressive of cultural norms.  What is acceptable in one culture may not be in another. The

same is true within a culture in different social contexts.  Ex: Belching at a Meal  Other examples?

Habitus

Body techniques are part of a group’s habitus or distinctive lifestyle, which is produced by the particular social conditions of the group.  The habitus is made up of particular ways of thinking,

feeling and acting that are characteristic of the group.  The habitus is embodied – culture is instilled into the

minds of group members and onto their bodies. Put simply, culture shapes how we move,

how we act, and how our bodies look.

Gender & Body Techniques

We all must learn to be male or female (DeBeauvoir 1972).  People conform to the cultural norms regarding male

and female behavior set by the social context in which they live.

 We see our gender norms as natural, but they are entirely culturally derived and are thus mutable.

 Corporeality is one aspect of this – the ways in which we move and experience our bodies.

Gender & Body Techniques

Cultural forces shape bodies in specifically gendered ways.

Culture socializes women to move in certain ways and teaches men to move in other ways.

Thus boys learn different bodily skills and capacities for movement than do girls.  Shapes the way people experience their bodies.

Examples:  Hillary vs. Bill Throwing First Pitch  Sports (Young 1990)

 Males are defined and trained to be physically competent; female are not.  So through socialization the female has been discouraged from reaching

out in a confident manner toward the space around her.  Ex: Expectation of Daintiness

Gender & Body Techniques

Meeting (or not meeting) cultural expectations about the body can have profound effects on people.  People who do not operate in ways congruent with the

norms of bodily behavior generally experience the disapproval of others who think that a departure from these norms is unnatural.

 Examples? Thus body values and norms are both enabling

– in that they teach us to move in socially acceptable ways – and restricting – in that we must conform to them or risk social sanction.

Class & Body Techniques

Bourdieu (1992) investigated how a particular habitus (Mauss) and set of corresponding body techniques shape the life-world (Husserl) of people in particular class groupings.

Three Class-Based Groups:  Working Class  Lower Middle Class  Upper Middle Class

Each has its own habitus and thus its own distinctive set of body techniques (e.g. ways of eating drinking, walking, talking, etc.).

The habitus of each class is derived from the social conditions of each class.

Class & Body Techniques

Upper Middle Class – Life of Ease  High Economic Capital – financial resources  High Cultural Capital – knowledge about highly

respected forms of culture  Outcome: distance from practical urgencies, at ease with

themselves, unshakable confidence, no one is superior to them

 Body Techniques: ideals of ease and elegance  Orients them toward certain types of sporting activities like

fencing and polo.

Class & Body Techniques

Lower Middle Class – Highly Aspirational  Look up to and admire the upper middle class.  Look down on and despise the working class.  Outcome: Want to distinguish themselves from the

working class and be more like the upper middle class.  This desire is doomed because the UMs will always look down

their noses at the LMs.  Thus they have a contradictory social position.

 Body Techniques: less elegant and authoritative  Sports: Jogging and Yoga

 These are aspirational in nature, attempting to make the body better.

Class & Body Techniques

Working Class – Taste of the Necessary  Low Economic Capital  Low Cultural Capital  Outcome: faced with the pressing problems of existence  Body Techniques: unpretentious and straightforward;

functionality; bluntness  Sports: physical strength and aggressiveness via sports like

weightlifting and boxing Critiques of Bourdieu:

 Tending towards caricaturing.  Now out of date.

What are your thoughts?

Conclusion

Central Theme: The ways in which people use, display and understand their bodies in everyday contexts are far from being reducible to biologically determined behaviors.  Examples: tattoos/piercings; eating disorders; obesity

Apparently natural phenomena – like toilet behaviors – are thoroughly bound up with cultural forces.  Other examples?

Social hierarchies – like gender & class – are culturally inscribed onto our bodies.  Other examples?