a) culture
Summary :
Culture is character of human besides biological meaning. The term includes various aspects like habit, religion, convention that human earn through social life. Past 18-19 century European use that term to recognize that only their ‘civilized’ things which originate from so-called ‘elite’ groups are culture. But, After appearance of cultural relativism, a stream of discriminating ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture was changed to a stream of respecting differences.
Culture can be changed or not by that group’s situation and choice. Causes of changing are environment, invention, and contacting other culture. According to Anderson’s investigation, a region where people are border of culture has many opportunity to exlpore cultural-conflicts. So we can know how interpersonal interaction happens. original groups and subordinate groups influence each other and be influenced. Also, groups and individual person influence each other because culture is not private creation.
Griswold said, function of culture is grasping shared-meaning of that society. Culture and society have existed since humanity enter into a social relation. So we can try to understand phenomena through cultural understandings.
Interesting point & Discussion :
When I read ‘high’culture section, suddenly an experience came to mind. In the old days, I had a chance to stay at Bangkok, Thailand. Actually, before going to that country, I had some prejudices like ‘Southeast Asian people are commonly lazy.’
at first arrived time, that seemed right. Thailand people took a week time to doing ground construction that may take one day in korea. But, a few days later, I could see another things. The whether of that country is too hot and humid to work hard, so if they did like Korean, they would had fell on the ground.
Before I went to that country, I had a think that ‘they have bad attitude.’ However, like this reading material, I realized that there is no ‘low’ culture. Their attitudes, habits, and conventions are just some kind of adaptation within their history and environment. How we could determine which culture is better than other culture?
b) religion
Summary :
The important thing on study of religion is not distinguishing right and wrong, but what is role of religion in society. Religion is explanation of supernatural phenomena, and the division of ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’, and the answer about existential questioning. having these definitions, religion divided to various areas like denomination, sects, cults, and so on.
At the section of functions of religion, Emile Durkheim devide that function to three part.
First, social-cohesion : making people feel social solidarity through sharing same rituals and beliefs.
Second, controllable methods of society : maintaining stable condition of society through religion moral rules.
Third, giving some purpose or meaning of life.
In other hand, also, there are dysfunctions of religion. Like first part, people who have strong solidarity can justify their wars, terrors or violences to not humane direction. At second part, according to Marx’s insistence, religion makes social inequality by providing a view that justifies oppression so the class of labors couldn’t get happiness themselves.
Interesting points & Discussions :
For a long time, humanity have thought philosophical questions : ‘why human exist?’, ‘why we are living?’ or ‘what kind of lifes are after death?’ Maybe religion is a result of these questions. Religion was a creation that humanity make in the process of finding these questions.
Today, we hear the bad news of terrorism originate from religion conflicts. But religion conflicts had been exist long time ago. For example, the Crusades made enormous the killed and wounded. Although that war was complex accident includes economic, political, and sociological things, the important thing is one of the reason of that big tragedy was religion. Also, many people advices us like “Don’t fight with other about religious things.” or “Don’t say any religious position at public station.” I think it because religion is sensitive part to general people.
In order to defend more tragedy, we could try finding solution concepts. And think about religious pluralism.
Your mention of the Crusades got me thinking about the reasons behind religious conquests, and in turn the reason for certain acts done in the name of religion in our times.
ReplyDeleteThe Crusades started on order of the Pope for Christian armies to go to war in Muslim lands, claiming to be fighting to "reclaim" land that was once lost. In this situation, religious war was fought as a way to take back what was once theirs.
In our times, I feel that certain groups claim to fight for religious causes, but are in fact using religion as a cover to fight for personal gain. Many would refer to this as religious extremism, but I would beg to differ. It seems to be more of religious misinterpretation; maybe it shouldnt even be considered religion.
In my experience interacting with various acquaintances of different religions and through some of the articles they share on social media, a majority of religions do not condone violent acts. They strive for peace, both within oneself and around oneself. They teach harmonious living and being good to one another.
Terrorism, I feel, may not be a case of conflicting religions, but just of a certain minority of people commiting atrocities. To associate those acts with religion will just cause more fear and inter-religious disharmony. The way we look at terrorism has to change in order for us to defeat it.
More information on the Crusades:
http://www.history.com/topics/crusades