i am really enjoying sociology for some reason. the discussion are great and the ideas are all mentally stimulating. ack, goodbye math, hello common sense and humanity.

still kinda bored. and to remedy that i have to force myself to study math, starting next week. yeah. hopefully my mind is not impaired from 3-4 weeks without it.

the admin building of quesci, the freshmen building, was reconstructed. well, good for the school.

i really enjoyed watching Philip DeFranco, a vlogger who talks about things. and not just talk about them, he approaches them like semi-debate questions, and it’s fun to hear his comments and what side [or the nonexistence] he is in. a good one was the video where he talks about “The Vicious 8″,  and i have to say that i would also not shed a tear if for some reason they all got shot in the head accidentally. the media is just it, a medium; you can’t blame that aspect, because it’s the people’s doing. age and race is not an issue, because you did something that is, to me, disgusting and just plain and seriously wrong on all levels of meaning.

i hate abercrombie and fitch. that store is for people without boobs. i tried on a shirt, it wouldn’t fit me. so i got it a size larger, and it still wouldn’t, but the thing is, i only had a problem with my chest, everything else fits ok. so i got another size larger than that and it still wouldn’t fit that particular area!!! i’m like a freak show, everything else is loose while the chest part looks like it’s suffocating. ARGH! i just got really really frustrated.

i’m starting to feel apathetic. i need to do more stuff. even now, i can’t think about more stuff to write about. so i’ll just post my sociology paper, which questions that society featured in the film “The Village”. for me, the film kinda sucked, but the concepts presented are very interesting, and it brings to mind [well, at least mine] fairytale. i’ve been a fan of fairytales, especially the REAL fairytales, the gory ones, since gradeschool. and they are just so fascinating. i’ll write about that in another post. so on to the village…………

“THE VILLAGE”: Societal Construction of Belief

1. In your life today, what forces do you think are acting on you, molding you to be the kind of social person you are right now? Are you aware of them? Explain.

The main force would probably be the culminating experience and events that happened from a person’s birth to his current situation. It is this history that helps mold one’s understanding of things and the consequent beliefs that come with it, as well as other matters that that particular someone integrates in his day to day life.

Of course, with these experiences come the people that one associates with as he/she goes through his/her life. For some, they say that their parents are the prominent figures of influence to them. Others would probably say their friends or cultural and media icons that made them who they are. But, regardless of its importance or prominence, each and every single one of these affects you, whether directly or indirectly, in one way or another.

One might be aware of these ‘forces’ surrounding them since most of them would probably be seen as the ones that are expressed explicitly in one form or another, like a motivational/reprimanding talk from a parent or a sermon of an authoritative figure. However, the implicit ones tend to affect a person more, maybe because he is used to it and regards it as a cultural or social norm, or he is unaware of it completely. Unawareness is a big factor regarding the actions of a particular person; it is as important as an obvious element for understanding things. Even things that we consider normal, like the act of taking a bath every morning, or anything that we can consider “normal” in our social setting, are greatly important aspects of our personal development; although minute and simple, the fact that these social norms might not be present in other social groups is a concrete evidence of the difference in perspectives and upbringing of different people.

In “The Village,” no one questions as to why they are living that particular life: that is the way they are told to live. And the way they live their everyday lives give way to what and how these individual lives pan out and their unique way of thinking.

2. In the film, the villagers’ ways of life, their belief system and traditions are based on fictitious stories created by the Elders to protect their “innocence.” Do you believe that our culture today is also “lies that were not meant to harm?” Explain.

How should a person know that he/she is living a “lie” if he/she is living it? We don’t know exactly how to pinpoint these ‘irregularities’, but some of these supposedly ‘lies’ are more sheer that the others. We might not acknowledge the existence of these, but we eventually can’t deny the indicators, often considered invisible or false, that surround us.

A good example of this is the belief in Santa Claus. Although we are not sure of St. Nicholas’s way of life, we can be certain to some extent that the mythical Santa Claus, who delivers toys to children around the world each year on Christmas Eve, is not true. Even if he is, you have to take into account all believers of the myth, factor in time zone, rotation of the earth and assume Santa travels east to West: he would have to approximately make 822.6 visits per second to reach every child. Why do we continue this belief, even we know that we’ll eventually find out the truth? Children are led to believe this myth so as they can cherish the “innocence” of their childhood, and they can ultimately overcome the harshness of reality when they grow up.

A bigger example of this is religion. Everyone constantly asks “is there really a higher power governing all of us”, whoever He/She is? We are like the rest of the villagers in the movie, afraid to go to the woods because of what the Elders say.

And what is, to our society, the definition of “innocence”? In the dictionary, innocence is defined as “the condition of being chaste or of being uninformed or unaware”. In some cultures, what we consider immoral is normal conduct to them. Even back then, when men are led by their (our) baser desires, like eating and procreating – the essential definition of survival – their behaviour and manners are very different from what we have today, when we are led by sociological means, more than our basic instincts of survival. To us, the definition of survival is more than the physicality of it. Do we limit ourselves to the definition of the term “innocence” in our societal context or do we consider others’?

The Elders in the movie are overwhelmed by their lives that were guided by the harshness of modern reality and this led them to form this ‘society’ of their own making. They want to return to the kind of life that is simpler, in both method and interaction, when the complexity of societal structure is direct and not at all complicated, because they are jaded by their experiences in the ‘outside world’. They imposed their own rules, made their own way of life, and with that bring the self-defined belief system of that particular society. The society dictated the reality of their belief system and this is where line between the true and untrue is blurred. The lie becomes the truth, like a fairytale in a bigger and real context.

3. In what ways is the social construction of reality manifested in Philippine society? Are these rules that you believe all your life to be true, right and good? What are these? How did these come about?

Everything, what we see and feel around us, is a result of centuries of development that can be traced through past events. In our case, our history brought about the progress and standing that we have today. The Spaniards gave us Catholicism, while commercialism and predominant Western ideas was given by the Americans. We exist amongst the mixing of these two with other pre-colonial concepts that we have.

Filipinos are known to be very superstitious people. What started as a means of reprimanding or warning children turned into a cultural image, much like the fairytales of the Germans; a simple intent branched out into complex web of stories. Our superstitious tales can even rival the Greek myths, in terms of magnitude and connection to reality.

There are a lot of other seemingly preconceived notions that actually came from socially constructed beliefs. The idea that men are the ‘breadwinner’ of the families while women stay at home to take care of the children and the households is a good case. It came from a long-standing history of treatment of women as the weaker sex, but nowadays, women in the professional world contradict this fact.

All of these notions are conceived for a purpose: every one of them is a device used by the society to help them cope with the fast and raging waters of reality, as well as to keep the members in line. These are ways of teaching lessons without lecture.

4. What is the fundamental utility of the sociological imagination in your life as Ateneo students?

Once someone enters a university, he would find himself amidst different people; the diversity inside an educational institution like Ateneo is a complex one. The social triumvirate – class, race and gender – is at work at every corner of this world. Being educated in the idea of sociological imagination helps students and members of the staff and faculty recognize position of every person in terms of these three and be able to practice open-mindedness and compartmentalize intellectually, socially, politically and structurally. In an establishment like Ateneo, the socioeconomic difference is vivid and clear. Sociological imagination helps everyone to see things not in the context of their own experience and learning, but to be able to relate to the other side in their terms. The lack of this kind of knowledge leads to rash assumptions and other unpleasant matters.

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