How does chapter 4 define the self

Feral Children, Do They Exist? The deaf-mute mother did not interact with the child at all. When she was discovered, the child only made croaking noises and could not interact.

It would take two years after her rescue for her to acquire language and learn to interact with others, demonstrating that without socialization, we are almost totally devoid of the qualities we normally associate with being human. During her years of isolation, no family member had spoken to her, nor could she hear anything other than swearing. She also had no television or radio. She was virtually non-verbal. After being discovered, she was exposed to intensive speech therapy. In one year, she had the speech capabilities of an 18 month old.

Today, Genie lives in a home for mentally disabled adults. However, she never reached her full language ability. This suggests that without socialization, our mental development could potentially be stunted; as we also know that our ability to learn certain things begins to narrow as we age…language being one of these examples. It is our distinct identity that sets us apart from others.

For example, a child might bang on a piece of wood while a parent is engaged in carpentry work, or throw a ball if an older sibling is doing so nearby. As a result, during this stage, they begin to pretend to be other people.

At this point in development, children grasp not only their own social positions but also those of others around them. The child can now respond to numerous members of the social environment. Rather, the child comes to understand that courtesy is a widespread social value endorsed by everyone.

They now understand specific occupations and social positions. Mead: The Stages of the Self The Preparatory Stage Children imitate significant others to learn meaning behind symbols, gestures, and language.

The Game Stage Children are now aware of their position in relationship to the other numerous social positions in society. This consensus allows us to coordinate our actions with others and realize goals. Emotions vary from status to status, role to role. Instant messaging, texting, Facebook, etc.? This is another reason why the media is a controversial agent of socialization. Total views 6, On Slideshare 0. From embeds 0. Number of embeds 1, Societies with rudimentary technology are at the mercy of the fluctuations of their environment, while industrialized societies have more control over the impact of their surroundings and thus develop different cultural features.

This distinction is so important that sociologists generally classify societies along a spectrum of their level of industrialization, from preindustrial to industrial to postindustrial.

Before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of machines, societies were small, rural, and dependent largely on local resources. Economic production was limited to the amount of labour a human being could provide, and there were few specialized occupations.

The very first occupation was that of hunter-gatherer. Hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate the strongest dependence on the environment of the various types of preindustrial societies. As the basic structure of all human society until about 10,—12, years ago, these groups were based around kinship or tribes. Hunter-gatherers relied on their surroundings for survival—they hunted wild animals and foraged for uncultivated plants for food.

When resources became scarce, the group moved to a new area to find sustenance, meaning they were nomadic. Changing conditions and adaptations led some societies to rely on the domestication of animals where circumstances permitted. Roughly 7, years ago, human societies began to recognize their ability to tame and breed animals and to grow and cultivate their own plants.

Pastoral societies rely on the domestication of animals as a resource for survival. Unlike earlier hunter-gatherers who depended entirely on existing resources to stay alive, pastoral groups were able to breed livestock for food, clothing, and transportation, creating a surplus of goods. Herding, or pastoral, societies remained nomadic because they were forced to follow their animals to fresh feeding grounds.

Around the time that pastoral societies emerged, specialized occupations began to develop, and societies commenced trading with local groups. While many different tribes of Bedouin exist, they all share similarities. Members migrate from one area to another, usually in conjunction with the seasons, settling near oases in the hot summer months. They tend to herds of goats, camels, and sheep, and they harvest dates in the fall Kjeilen N. In recent years, there has been increased conflict between the Bedouin society and more modernized societies.

National borders are harder to cross now than in the past, making the traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouin difficult. The clash of traditions among Bedouin and other residents has led to discrimination and abuse.

Bedouin communities frequently have high poverty and unemployment rates, and their members have little formal education Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada The future of the Bedouin is uncertain. Government restrictions on farming and residence are slowly forcing them to integrate into modern society. Although their ancestors have traversed the deserts for thousands of years, the days of the nomadic Bedouin may be at an end.

Around the same time that pastoral societies were on the rise, another type of society developed, based on the newly developed capacity for people to grow and cultivate plants. Horticultural societies formed in areas where rainfall and other conditions allowed them to grow stable crops. They were similar to hunter-gatherers in that they largely depended on the environment for survival, but since they did not have to abandon their location to follow resources, they were able to start permanent settlements.

This created more stability and more material goods and became the basis for the first revolution in human survival. While pastoral and horticultural societies used small, temporary tools such as digging sticks or hoes, agricultural societies relied on permanent tools for survival.

Around BCE. Farmers learned to rotate the types of crops grown on their fields and to reuse waste products such as fertilizer, leading to better harvests and bigger surpluses of food. New tools for digging and harvesting were made of metal, making them more effective and longer lasting.

Human settlements grew into towns and cities, and particularly bountiful regions became centres of trade and commerce. This is also the age in which people had the time and comfort to engage in more contemplative and thoughtful activities, such as music, poetry, and philosophy.

Craftspeople were able to support themselves through the production of creative, decorative, or thought-provoking aesthetic objects and writings. As agricultural techniques made the production of surpluses possible, social classes and power structures emerged. Those with the power to appropriate the surpluses were able to dominate the society.

Classes of nobility and religious elites developed. Difference in social standing between men and women appeared. Slavery was institutionalized. As cities expanded, ownership and protection of resources became a pressing concern and militaries became more prominent. In Europe, the ninth century gave rise to feudal societies. These societies contained a strict hierarchical system of power based around land ownership, protection, and mutual obligation. The nobility, known as lords, rewarded knights or vassals by granting them pieces of land.

In return for the resources that the land provided, vassals promised to fight for their lords. These individual pieces of land, known as fiefdoms, were cultivated by the lower class of serfs. In return for maintaining and working the land, serfs were guaranteed a place to live and protection from outside enemies. Power was handed down through family lines, with serf families serving lords for generations and generations.

Ultimately, the social and economic system of feudalism was surpassed by the rise of capitalism and the technological advances of the industrial era. In the 18th century, Europe experienced a dramatic rise in technological invention, ushering in an era known as the Industrial Revolution.

Within a generation, tasks that had until this point required months of labour became achievable in a matter of days. Before the Industrial Revolution, work was largely person- or animal-based, relying on human workers or horses to power mills and drive pumps.

In , James Watt and Matthew Boulton created a steam engine that could do the work of 12 horses by itself. Steam power began appearing everywhere. Instead of paying artisans to painstakingly spin wool and weave it into cloth, people turned to textile mills that produced fabric quickly at a better price, and often with better quality.

Rather than planting and harvesting fields by hand, farmers were able to purchase mechanical seeders and threshing machines that caused agricultural productivity to soar. Products such as paper and glass became available to the average person, and the quality and accessibility of education and health care soared.

Gas lights allowed increased visibility in the dark, and towns and cities developed a nightlife. One of the results of increased wealth, productivity, and technology was the rise of urban centres. Serfs and peasants, expelled from their ancestral lands, flocked to the cities in search of factory jobs, and the populations of cities became increasingly diverse.

The new generation became less preoccupied with maintaining family land and traditions, and more focused on survival. Some were successful in acquiring wealth and achieving upward mobility for themselves and their family. Others lived in devastating poverty and squalor. Whereas the class system of feudalism had been rigid, and resources for all but the highest nobility and clergy scarce, under capitalism social mobility both upward and downward became possible.

It was during the 18th and 19th centuries of the Industrial Revolution that sociology was born. Life was changing quickly and the long-established traditions of the agricultural eras did not apply to life in the larger cities. Masses of people were moving to new environments and often found themselves faced with horrendous conditions of filth, overcrowding, and poverty.

Social science emerged in response to the unprecedented scale of the social problems of modern society. A new cadre of financiers and industrialists like Donald Smith [1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal] and George Stephen [1st Baron Mount Stephen] in Canada became the new power players, using their influence in business to control aspects of government as well.

Eventually, concerns over the exploitation of workers led to the formation of labour unions and laws that set mandatory conditions for employees. Although the introduction of new technology at the end of the 20th century ended the industrial age, much of our social structure and social ideas—like the nuclear family, left-right political divisions, and time standardization—have a basis in industrial society. Information societies , sometimes known as postindustrial or digital societies, are a recent development.

Unlike industrial societies that are rooted in the production of material goods, information societies are based on the production of information and services. Digital technology is the steam engine of information societies, and high tech companies such as Apple and Microsoft are its version of railroad and steel manufacturing corporations. Since the economy of information societies is driven by knowledge and not material goods, power lies with those in charge of creating, storing, and distributing information.

Members of a postindustrial society are likely to be employed as sellers of services—software programmers or business consultants, for example—instead of producers of goods.

Social classes are divided by access to education, since without technical and communication skills, people in an information society lack the means for success. While many sociologists have contributed to research on society and social interaction, three thinkers form the base of modern-day perspectives.

To Durkheim, society was greater than the sum of its parts. Society acted as an external restraint on individual behaviour. Durkheim called the communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society the collective conscience. Durkheim also believed that social integration , or the strength of ties that people have to their social groups, was a key factor in social life. Following the ideas of Comte and Spencer, Durkheim likened society to that of a living organism, in which each organ plays a necessary role in keeping the being alive.

Even the socially deviant members of society are necessary, Durkheim argued, as punishments for deviance affirm established cultural values and norms. That is, punishment of a crime reaffirms our moral consciousness. As an observer of his contemporary social world, particularly the fractious late 19th century history of France, Durkheim was concerned with indications that modern society was in a process of social disintegration.

His primary concern was that the cultural glue that held society together was failing, and that people were becoming more divided. In his book The Division of Labour in Society , Durkheim argued that as society grew more populated, more complex, and more difficult to regulate, the underlying basis of solidarity or unity within the social order needed to evolve. Preindustrial societies, Durkheim explained, were held together by mechanical solidarity , a type of social order maintained through a minimal division of labour and a common collective consciousness.

Such societies permitted a low degree of individual autonomy. Essentially there was no distinction between the individual conscience and the collective conscience. Societies with mechanical solidarity act in a mechanical fashion; things are done mostly because they have always been done that way. If anyone violated the collective conscience embodied in laws and taboos, punishment was swift and retributive. This type of thinking was common in preindustrial societies where strong bonds of kinship and a low division of labour created shared morals and values among people, such as hunter-gatherer groups.

When people tend to do the same type of work, Durkheim argued, they tend to think and act alike. In industrial societies, mechanical solidarity is replaced with organic solidarity , social order based around an acceptance of economic and social differences. In capitalist societies, Durkheim wrote, division of labour becomes so specialized that everyone is doing different things. Instead of punishing members of a society for failure to assimilate to common values, organic solidarity allows people with differing values to coexist.

Laws exist as formalized morals and are based on restitution rather than retribution or revenge. There are no clear norms or values to guide and regulate behaviour. Anomie was associated with the rise of industrial society, which removed traditional modes of moral regulation; the rise of individualism, which removed limits on what individuals could desire; and the rise of secularism, which removed ritual or symbolic foci.

During times of war or rapid economic development, the normative basis of society was also challenged. People isolated in their specialized tasks tend to become alienated from one another and from a sense of collective conscience. However, Durkheim felt that as societies reach an advanced stage of organic solidarity, they avoid anomie by redeveloping a set of shared norms. According to Durkheim, once a society achieves organic solidarity, it has finished its development. Karl Marx — offered one of the most comprehensive theories of the development of human societies from the earliest hunter-gatherers to the modern industrial age.

Each type of society—hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agrarian, feudal, capitalist—could be characterized as the total way of life that forms around different economic bases. Marx saw economic conflict in society as the primary means of change.

The base of each type of society in history—its economic mode of production—had its own characteristic form of economic struggle. This was because a mode of production was essentially two things: the means of production of a society—anything that is used in production to satisfy needs and maintain existence e. Marx observed historically that in each epoch or type of society, only one class of persons has owned or monopolized the means of production.

As a result, the relations of production have been characterized by relations of domination since the emergence of private property.

Throughout history, classes have had opposed or contradictory interests. The most recent revolutionary transformation resulted in the end of feudalism. A new revolutionary class emerged from among the freemen, small property owners, and middle-class burghers of the medieval period to challenge and overthrow the privilege and power of the feudal aristocracy. The members of the bourgeoisie or capitalist class were revolutionary in the sense that they represented a radical change and redistribution of power in European society.

Their power was based in the private ownership of industrial property, which they sought to protect through the struggle for property rights, notably in the English Civil War — and the French Revolution — The development of capitalism inaugurated a period of world transformation and incessant change through the destruction of the previous class structure, the ruthless competition for markets, the introduction of new technologies, and the globalization of economic activity.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation…. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society….

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind The proletariat were made up largely of guild workers and serfs who were freed or expelled from their indentured labour in feudal guild and agricultural production and migrated to the emerging cities where industrial production was centred.

The new labour relationship was based on a contract. However, as Marx pointed out, this meant in effect that workers could sell their labour as a commodity to whomever they wanted, but if they did not sell their labour they would starve. The capitalist had no obligations to provide them with security, livelihood, or a place to live as the feudal lords had done for their serfs.

The source of a new class antagonism developed based on the contradiction of fundamental interests between the bourgeois owners and the wage labourers: where the owners sought to reduce the wages of labourers as far as possible to reduce the costs of production and remain competitive, the workers sought to retain a living wage that could provide for a family and secure living conditions. In the midth century, as industrialization was booming, the conditions of labour became more and more exploitative.

Some may talk about acting like an aunt that they have never met. Others may give examples of acting just like a sister—even though they were adopted from different biological families.

Hopefully this will illustrate how difficult it is to tell which factor is influencing the behavior. The socialization process begins in infancy and lasts throughout the lifetime. Language facilitates socialization. We know that culture is passed from one generation to the next through language and communication, and socialization happens in a similar way.

We are often told how to act or behave, which is how language facilitates this process. If people are deprived of socialization for example, if they are raised in isolation , they may not exhibit behaviors that are typical of human beings.

Children reared without much socialization are referred to as feral children, because their behaviors are almost similar to those of a wild animal rather than a child. Sociologists believe the self is created and modified through interaction in our lives.

In other words, when we get a positive response from other people, we might like the feeling we get and so will try to replicate that feeling. This might even help to shape our personality or our sense of self. Our interactions with other people may shape our own sense of self. Sigmund Freud is usually associated with psychoanalysis, but his theories have also helped sociologists gain a better understanding of social behavior.

Freud developed the idea of the subconscious and the unconscious mind, which he believed control most of our drives, impulses, thoughts, and behaviors. It is widely acknowledged that Freud was among the most important social thinkers of the twentieth century. Many of his ideas, from the Freudian slip to the ego trip, have become part of the common vernacular.

Freud was interested, not only in individual minds, but also in the way that mental processes have influenced the whole of history and culture. In other words, we like getting a positive response from people, so we try to replicate our actions when the response we received was positive. Mead also believed that the self was created through social interaction and that this process started in childhood.

Mead believed that the self develops through several stages, including the preparatory stage, the play stage, taking the role of the significant other, and the game stage. Mead believed that children began to develop a sense of self at about the same time that they began to learn language. The particular or significant other demonstrates the perspectives and expectations of a particular role, which the child learns and internalizes.

Did that have an impact on their current values, goals, or aspirations? The acquisition of language skills coincides with the growth of mental capacities, including the ability to think of ourselves as separate and distinct and to see ourselves in relationship to others. At that point, they want to express their own ideas and want to be heard as an individual. Erving Goffman believed that meaning is constructed through interaction. His approach, called dramaturgy, compares social interaction to the theater, where individuals take on roles and act them out for an audience.

Goffman saw social life as a sort of game, where we work to control the impressions others have of us, a process he called impression management. According to Goffman, we work hard and go out of our way to present a favorable impression to the people around us. Because we encounter ambiguous situations every day, many meanings are possible. The way we define each situation, then, becomes its reality. What are the possible meanings of that situation? It could be a fight or spousal abuse; it could be a joke or a friendly greeting, depending on how hard the slap is.

It could be that he has just passed out and she is hoping to revive him. Or the participants could be actors shooting a scene from a film. Each of these definitions leads to a different set of potential consequences—you might intervene, call the police, stand by and laugh, ignore them, summon paramedics, or ask for an autograph, depending on which meaning you act upon.

Each definition of the situation lends itself to a different approach, and the consequences are real.