Linguistic anthropology

Introduction Sociologists have developed three main perspectives to decipher the social world. Each perspective evaluates the society, social patterns, and behaviors through a different lens. These traditional paradigms include structural-functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. The structural-functional theory focuses on the interdependent role of each part that works collectively to stabilize the complex machine of society. The conflict theory considers the inevitable…

Symbolism is ubiquitous in your everyday life, whether it’s during work, at the gym or even in a cafeteria. Symbols are everywhere where you least expect them. Most likely they are hidden symbols with a even deeper meaning than what you might observe at first glimpse. Many stories involve symbolism for a specific reason , whether it's to make a point or to give a overall meaning. For example, In the story “The Lottery”, symbolism is one of the main ideas that the author gets her point across.…

Emile Durkheim, world renown French sociologist, has developed through his career the scientific study of social systems and phenomena in our world. The use of the scientific method to examine culture and society produced crucial differences with his predecessors or colleagues such as Herbert Spencer or Max Weber. Trying to know if society is something tangible or a social construct, Emile Durkheim wrote his famous book The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) that laid down the guidelines to…

What exactly is a social imaginary? A social imaginary can be defined as the interpretive understanding of the world, what a good life looks like, and how we can attain it. A Social imaginary encompasses the creative and meaningful dimensions of the real world, the dimensions through which people in our society create their ways of living and the rules by which they live on earth. Growing up in an African American household, my parents taught me that life is tough and I would have to work two…

Sociology is known to be the study of society itself, the relationship between people and the community; this is used to understand how our actions shape everything around us. They investigates social causes or issues such as the effects of a community on a person, gender identity, as well as race. To do so they may design research projects, collect data through observation or surveys, and collaborate with sociologist all around the world to seek help to test their theories out. To look at the…

Violence, an integral part of modern society, constitutes the lives of individuals that lead to reactions in the sociological perspective. In terms of sociology, violence grasps the control one’s realities. Sociological impact of violence is so intertwined with side factors that individual get derailed in conducts transforming personalities, emotions, thoughts, world views. This study deals with violence in the sociological view and its implications as depicted in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.…

identity. This creates conflict in her life because she has to figure out an object to bring that represents her culture. Also on page 13 she expresses her confusion on her cultural identity through the statement, “what were the flavors, accents, and linguistic trills that were passed down to me over the ages?” This is just another quote that shows how her cultural identity lead to a difficult internal situation in her life. She doesn’t know what her ethnicity is but she has to figure it out so…

“Stranger in the Village” by James Baldwin explores the ideas of racism in earlier and present societies. This topic is of current interest, especially in today’s time; America and other nations are presently partaking in many social and racial justice movements. Baldwin opens his story by describing the first time he went to a small village in Switzerland. Due to the town’s inaccessibility, a person with black skin had never set foot in this remote village before, so Baldwin became a spectacle…

My Personal Worldview Influences Worldviews are beliefs that affect how someone views and responds to the world. Everyone has different worldviews shaped by many factors such as how they were raised, their cultures, experiences and education. Along with attempting to assess where the worldview stems from, evaluating the worldview is also significant in discovering what is blindly followed and what parts of the worldview makes rational sense. Worldviews are defined by the nature of humans, the…

In Between: An examination of three anthropologists’ moments of liminality Liminality is a term used in anthropology to describe a period of transition concerning social structure and understanding. Liminality consists of a pre-liminal state, a liminal period, and a communitas state. The pre-liminal state is characteristically defined as a time when events occur under specific conditions that start to press against an individual’s normal social structure and thought process. The liminal period…