Subculture & You Are What You Eat

This week in sociology, I found a lot of the things we learned very interesting! I never really thought about Barrington High School as its own subculture and how something as little as the rules we have in our student handbook separates us from any other school out there. When we were talking about our school being its own subculture, we also discussed some of the positive and negative sanctions we see happen when we’re at school. Sanctions are expressions of approval or disapproval given to people for upholding or violating norms. An example of a negative sanction I commonly see is when teachers give a student four detentions for having their phone out during class. I noticed an example of a positive sanction in the beginning of this semester of this class. My teacher gave us all coupons that we can use for late assignments so we don’t get points taken off for it being late and if we don’t use the coupons, it would boost our grade up by a percentage point.  

It was really interesting to me thinking about how people identify themselves through food and how we judge people through eating habits. I’m not the kind of person who judges someone by the way they eat because I know I’m not perfect and I know at times I can be a really sloppy eater, slow eater, don’t eat much, pig out on food, and so on.  When I thought in depth about it, I see where people would be judgmental about someone who’s a sloppy eater because they would probably think that they are a sloppy and messy person in general, or when a girl is on a date with a guy and the girl orders only a salad to eat, the guy would probably assume she’s nervous and is masking what her real eating habits may be.  

Ethnocentrism & Cultural Relativism

This week in sociology we began learning about culture. Culture is defined as the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next. The first thing we started discussing was how ethnocentrism judges another's culture as in terms of ones own norms and values. I thought it was interesting that what we believe is normal to us is different in other cultures. For example, we think our food is normal and smells good, but food in other cultures is wrong and smells bad, or how we think it's normal to sit on a toilet when we go to the bathroom, but in japan they think it's normal to squat because it's more sanitary. We also learned about the alternative to ethnocentrism, which is cultural relativism, and what that is, is understanding unfamiliar values and norms and suspending cultural standards we've known all our lives. In my opinion, I feel like most people should stay open-minded about other cultures and not be judgmental about the way they do things differently because it can decrease competition and limit peoples opinions of another culture due to race.