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### Understanding Culture and Ethnocentrism When I show these films in class, students often react with surprise and shock (aka culture shock) at the values and behaviors within these communities. Since fundamentalists tend to remain segregated from more mainstream society, many people are unaware of the subcultures that surround them. As described in the chapter on Culture, we "other" people that are perceived to be different from ourselves as a means to reify and legitimize our own culture. This ethnocentric perspective helps us to establish what our culture views as "normal" and to reject anything that deviates from that. Given that humans "made it all up," the idea of "normal" is subjective—meaning determined by the position. Imagine the shock, for example, of a child who grew up in a Hasidic enclave seeing two adults kissing in the street or for an Evangelical Christian child learning that our deep evolutionary connection to cannibalism as a ritual is what made Jesus asking his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood so powerful. Just as you may have viewed these fundamentalist subcultures as "strange," they likely view you the same way. Consider which one or more of the following things we do in mainstream American culture might be strange to someone outside our culture. 1. **Braces**: Attaching expensive and painful metal inside children's mouths to pull their teeth around inside their gums to make a particular shape. Done nearly always for cosmetic, not medical purposes. 2. **Earrings**: What to do with those extra little flaps of skin on the side of one's head? Poke holes and hang objects through them for decoration (but in our culture typically only those humans with a vagina — not related to ears at all — can do this mainstream). 3. **Consumerism**: Buying objects that make us look wealthier even though buying that object made us actually poorer even though we now look wealthy. 4. **Male circumcision**: Not medically advised, but makes the penis look like what our culture thinks it should look like— even though everyone in our culture pretends not to know what one looks like because they would be morally outraged if one appeared on television. Also strange since the US is the largest consumer of porn.

### Understanding Culture and Ethnocentrism When I show these films in class, students often react with surprise and shock (aka culture shock) at the values and behaviors within these communities. Since fundamentalists tend to remain segregated from more mainstream society, many people are unaware of the subcultures that surround them. As described in the chapter on Culture, we "other" people that are perceived to be different from ourselves as a means to reify and legitimize our own culture. This ethnocentric perspective helps us to establish what our culture views as "normal" and to reject anything that deviates from that. Given that humans "made it all up," the idea of "normal" is subjective—meaning determined by the position. Imagine the shock, for example, of a child who grew up in a Hasidic enclave seeing two adults kissing in the street or for an Evangelical Christian child learning that our deep evolutionary connection to cannibalism as a ritual is what made Jesus asking his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood so powerful. Just as you may have viewed these fundamentalist subcultures as "strange," they likely view you the same way. Consider which one or more of the following things we do in mainstream American culture might be strange to someone outside our culture. 1. **Braces**: Attaching expensive and painful metal inside children's mouths to pull their teeth around inside their gums to make a particular shape. Done nearly always for cosmetic, not medical purposes. 2. **Earrings**: What to do with those extra little flaps of skin on the side of one's head? Poke holes and hang objects through them for decoration (but in our culture typically only those humans with a vagina — not related to ears at all — can do this mainstream). 3. **Consumerism**: Buying objects that make us look wealthier even though buying that object made us actually poorer even though we now look wealthy. 4. **Male circumcision**: Not medically advised, but makes the penis look like what our culture thinks it should look like— even though everyone in our culture pretends not to know what one looks like because they would be morally outraged if one appeared on television. Also strange since the US is the largest consumer of porn.

Social Psychology (10th Edition)
Social Psychology (10th Edition)
10th Edition
ISBN:9780134641287
Author:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers
Publisher:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers
Chapter1: Introducing Social Psychology
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### Understanding Culture and Ethnocentrism When I show these films in class, students often react with surprise and shock (aka culture shock) at the values and behaviors within these communities. Since fundamentalists tend to remain segregated from more mainstream society, many people are unaware of the subcultures that surround them. As described in the chapter on Culture, we "other" people that are perceived to be different from ourselves as a means to reify and legitimize our own culture. This ethnocentric perspective helps us to establish what our culture views as "normal" and to reject anything that deviates from that. Given that humans "made it all up," the idea of "normal" is subjective—meaning determined by the position. Imagine the shock, for example, of a child who grew up in a Hasidic enclave seeing two adults kissing in the street or for an Evangelical Christian child learning that our deep evolutionary connection to cannibalism as a ritual is what made Jesus asking his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood so powerful. Just as you may have viewed these fundamentalist subcultures as "strange," they likely view you the same way. Consider which one or more of the following things we do in mainstream American culture might be strange to someone outside our culture. 1. **Braces**: Attaching expensive and painful metal inside children's mouths to pull their teeth around inside their gums to make a particular shape. Done nearly always for cosmetic, not medical purposes. 2. **Earrings**: What to do with those extra little flaps of skin on the side of one's head? Poke holes and hang objects through them for decoration (but in our culture typically only those humans with a vagina — not related to ears at all — can do this mainstream). 3. **Consumerism**: Buying objects that make us look wealthier even though buying that object made us actually poorer even though we now look wealthy. 4. **Male circumcision**: Not medically advised, but makes the penis look like what our culture thinks it should look like— even though everyone in our culture pretends not to know what one looks like because they would be morally outraged if one appeared on television. Also strange since the US is the largest consumer of porn.
Transcribed Image Text:### Understanding Culture and Ethnocentrism When I show these films in class, students often react with surprise and shock (aka culture shock) at the values and behaviors within these communities. Since fundamentalists tend to remain segregated from more mainstream society, many people are unaware of the subcultures that surround them. As described in the chapter on Culture, we "other" people that are perceived to be different from ourselves as a means to reify and legitimize our own culture. This ethnocentric perspective helps us to establish what our culture views as "normal" and to reject anything that deviates from that. Given that humans "made it all up," the idea of "normal" is subjective—meaning determined by the position. Imagine the shock, for example, of a child who grew up in a Hasidic enclave seeing two adults kissing in the street or for an Evangelical Christian child learning that our deep evolutionary connection to cannibalism as a ritual is what made Jesus asking his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood so powerful. Just as you may have viewed these fundamentalist subcultures as "strange," they likely view you the same way. Consider which one or more of the following things we do in mainstream American culture might be strange to someone outside our culture. 1. **Braces**: Attaching expensive and painful metal inside children's mouths to pull their teeth around inside their gums to make a particular shape. Done nearly always for cosmetic, not medical purposes. 2. **Earrings**: What to do with those extra little flaps of skin on the side of one's head? Poke holes and hang objects through them for decoration (but in our culture typically only those humans with a vagina — not related to ears at all — can do this mainstream). 3. **Consumerism**: Buying objects that make us look wealthier even though buying that object made us actually poorer even though we now look wealthy. 4. **Male circumcision**: Not medically advised, but makes the penis look like what our culture thinks it should look like— even though everyone in our culture pretends not to know what one looks like because they would be morally outraged if one appeared on television. Also strange since the US is the largest consumer of porn.
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