Christmas Gift

On that Christmas morning in 2011, I was given the best gift; it was an envelope with a plane ticket to visit my aunt down in West Palm Beach, Florida. I was only thirteen years old and this was going to be my first time going on a vacation without my parents. I would be flying down with my friend from work and we would go our separate ways once we arrived down in Florida. I could not wait for that day to come; it was exactly one month from Christmas Day. When that day finally came I could not…

Relationships, social networking, social media, society, all terms that imply cooperation, and a willingness engage with other people. Several researchers across multiple disciplines have studied these interactions and proceedings. Some looking to gain insight into why social interactions take place, and why relationships exist. Others seeking to explain that only certain types of interactions have value and what those values are. However, no single discipline focuses solely on cooperation,…

1) The Austronesian languages are spoken throughout Southeast Asia, Madagascar and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. I believe the language started to spread in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and the Philippians and made its way to Madagascar. Because most of these countries are islands the language would have distributed by traveling, trading, and immigrating 2) Participant observation has both its pros and cons. One of the strengths of this approach is that the researcher who does the…

Mauss in the Gift and Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation can ultimately be aligned with Adam Smith’s claim, which is that individual desire to attain more material goods is the natural cause of exchanges between people. In this point of view, Polanyi could be criticized for associating economic self-interest exclusively with market transactions instead of considering the various ways economic self-interest could be displayed in different cultures. Mauss also uses the word “gift” to…

The Gift of Mauss is about an economic system based on gifts and reciprocity that was common, under different forms, in many “archaic” societies. The author used various ethnographies to develop a new economic theory different from the barter theory and called gift economy. An important compound of this new theory is the reciprocity, but in order to understand what is it for Mauss, the gift economy need to be explained. First, this new kind of economy is based on the exchange of services. This…

(http://www.today.com/money/black-friday-madness-its-not-always-about-deals-2D11650352) So we ask ourselves “why do people shop on Black Friday”? There are so many people that have used this day as a tradition to get ahead of the game with buying Christmas presents. There are friends and family that get together this day every year to shop but it’s more than just shopping. It’s a time to enjoy the time with friends and family. It sometimes is a bonding time for family’s that might live…

Billy Stevens was just a regular teenage boy. He went to school, had friends that he consorted with, had parents who loved him. Life was normal for him. Until the war started. Hundreds of thousands of boys his age enlisted to fight for the cause. Despite his mother’s wishes, Stevens did too. He was hoping to find action, adventure, and glory on the battlefield. What he found instead was a trauma that he would never get over. Billy Stevens experienced many forms of trauma during his service in…

up even longer periods. During this time, the Vietnamese will partake in various traditions and activities including visiting their families and arranging reunions. It is considered a tradition that combines the western holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas,…

America has been the place I have been raised and born at. I was born in Chicago and all my life been living here as well. I have been raised in a Mexican culture. My father and mother both came from Mexico. The culture that they have taught my siblings and I have been from the Mexican culture. My parents make sure we had an enculturation. At home my siblings and I were always told to speak spanish.There was a big change in adaptation within my parents when coming to America. I was born on May 1…

Does watching the news make viewers laugh? Do they understand what the news show is trying to explain? Airing Monday through Thursday at 11:30pm, The Colbert Report, a television show, is a satire news show that displays an easier to understand form of news. The Colbert Report is a parody of the news show The O’Reilly Factor which takes on current controversial political issues. The star of The Colbert Report is Stephen Colbert. He plays a character on the show who is silly and sarcastic. The…