Blog Eight

Georg Simmel analyzes what he calls ‘the stranger.’ He structures society in three categories.

1.      Psychological aspects of social life

2.      Interpersonal Relationships

3.      Spirit of the Times

He describes the first category as internally what the brain thinks, what’s inside of your mind as a human being. Category two discusses the interactions with others that you have. Category three is essentially culture and society. He describes a two way flow. If you start at number one, the brain affects how we interact with people and also influences larger cultural patterns. It can create culture essentially, like norms or values. On the flipside, culture can influence interactions in society, but also affect one’s personal beliefs.

I see the two way flow mostly in one direction. Culture and society’s values directly affect one’s own beliefs and values. In our society, most people are raised to believe in God. Most people are raised to believe that they should strive to make a lot of money. Our culture emphasizes higher education. We have distinct societal norms. We all drive cars, probably can be wasteful with natural resources, and underappreciate what we have. We enculturate as young children and base our ideas in life off of the culture we take on. In a developed country such as the United States, our culture emphasizes certain traits or characteristics. It’s interesting to look at people who reside in an underdeveloped country. Their culture can be drastically different than ours and a lot of their beliefs contrast with ours. If we look at the emphasis of higher education, we have this emphasis due to the opportunity of higher education. Underdeveloped countries might not have these opportunities, so work and family is emphasized instead. This emphasis of their culture affects their beliefs just like our cultural ideals affect our psychological aspect. Also, I think it’s interesting because the U.S. GDP per capita is roughly 48.3 thousand dollars, while a lot of underdeveloped small African countries are in the hundreds, such as Zimbabwe which is roughly 350 dollars. Such small countries have a great emphasis on culture because it had been constructed many generations before their time. On the flipside, someone could assume leadership easily in a small country so their individual beliefs could affect society/culture, so I wonder if people’s internal thoughts affect larger cultural patterns and interactions more in a small country.

I found a video on youtube called “What is Culture?” where people were asked to define what it means. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57KW6RO8Rcs) I think after all the classes I’ve taken in college, I still don’t know a concrete definition of culture, but I do know that culture has an effect on social interactions and one’s own mind/beliefs/values. I feel like we strive to comply with societal norms and to mingle into our own culture, thus why our brains base a lot off of our culture.