Blog #3: Culture As the Windows Through Which We view Our World

Teenage wasteland is the story of a reporter who goes Bergen to investigate a historically unique case of four suburban kids who commit suicide together. She wanted to understand why this young people would choose suicide as the best course of action. She starts in Bergenfield where she finds out that there are specific socio-cultural patterns operating there through which a teenage suicide pact became objectively possible; she also finds out that there are particular conditions that made the town label kids like the ones who committed suicide ‘burnouts’ ‘greasers’ ‘hoods’ ‘beats’ ‘freaks’ ‘hippies’ ‘punks’. She spends the next two years learning about these outcast youth.

This reading was in conjunction with chapter 3 of Experience Sociology, which talks about culture. While reading this article, I kept thinking about the nonmaterial element of culture i.e. values, beliefs, standards, knowledge, behaviors and norms; when majority in the society share this elements, then it is the dominant culture. When a subset of a society does not conform, instead it has values, beliefs, standards, knowledge, behaviors and norms that are different from the rest of a society, then it is a subculture. The ‘burnout youth’ phenomena that Donna Gaines encounters in Bergenfield and beyond shared a subculture.

Culture can be seen as an onion. It has numerous layers to it. The outermost layer is what we can see. In the case of Teenage Wasteland, it can be physical like the description of how the teenagers looked: they wore lots of black and leather, had shaggy haircuts, and listened to thrash metal. The second outer most layer is composed of what our heroes are, and what they pass down to us. For many of us, it is the people we learn from, for others it is the people they admire. The teenagers’ heroes in Teenage Wasteland were rock musicians like AC/DC, whose music was found beside the corpses. At the center of it all are the core values – those deeply held principles or standards by which we make judgments about the world. These values are what led the community at Bergenfield to label some of its youth as burnouts.

When cultures and subcultures are too different from each other, then there will be conflict or consensus. In her research, the author of Teenage Wasteland finds that there are differences between what sets of a population expect of each other, for example, parents expected children to stay in school and get absorbed in legitimate, established routine of social activity; but this was not enough for the kids. They still got bored and occupied their time with worshipping Rock and Roll icons. One of the reasons that emerged to explain the burnout youth phenomenon was ‘teenage boredom’. As teenage boredom became a concern, because it was leading to alcohol and drugs and in extreme cases suicide, the town tried to remedy it with afterschool activities and part time afterschool jobs.

blog #2: Correlation Is Not Causation

One of the fundamental principles of sociology is that every theory has to be backed by research and evidence. A successful social science research focuses on observing and documenting identifiable, repeating patterns of human though and action. When empirical evidence suggests that there is a correlation between variable X and variable Y, it does not automatically mean that X causes Y to happen (Hoynes 36).

The essay association is not causation addresses the fallacy that alcohol and drugs cause violence. This fallacy comes from the theory that alcohol and drugs makes causes people to release their inhibitions thereby causing violent behavior. In the essay Gelles and Cavanaugh share the arguments and evidence against the theory that alcohol and drugs causes violence: Cross-cultural evidence shows that there is variation in drinking behavior based on what a particular culture believes about alcohol (Gelles 2), this cross-cultural evidence was put to laboratory test which further proved that drinking was related to aggression only as a function of expectancy; Blood tests of men arrested for wife beating showed that only 20% of the men were legally intoxicated, while a national survey showed strong links between alcohol and violent behavior, analysis of drinking behavior at the time of the violent incident clearly demonstrates that alcohol was not used immediately prior to the violent conflict in the majority (76 percent) of the cases (3). All this researches did not document pre-use personalities, which would support a causal relationship.

The essay highlights major problems that can happen when collecting and analyzing data. In studies linking alcohol and drugs to violence, the concepts are not clearly and universally defined, for example the terms family violence, domestic violence, violence, intimate violence, and abuse are often used interchangeably. This raises the question of validity of the data measured and compromises conclusions. An analysis of the research designs of the links between alcohol and violent behavior shows that most research designs do not have control groups, which helps determine whether significant correlation exists; data collection happens at one point in time which makes it hard to determine whether there is in effect causality between intoxication and violence. The key evidence against the disinhibition theory however is the absence of a theoretical rationale. This means that research undermines the theory that alcohol and some drugs chemically affect the brain and break down or reduce inhibitions, and thus cause violent behavior.

Blog Entry #1: Who am I

I come from a country in East Africa called Kenya. It is about the size of Nevada. I come from a tribe of pastoralists called Turkana. I grew up in my grandmother’s house until I was in second grade. She was a staunch Catholic, so church was very much a part of my upbringing.  Life with her was easy and fun.  Most mornings, she would ask me if I wanted to go to school or not; naturally my answer would be no, in which case I would accompany the goat herders. Perhaps the most influential person in my life has been my mother. By age 7 I still could not count numbers 1-20, write or recite the alphabet. She personally taught me how to read and write in under one week. It was worse than a military boot camp. But since then, I fell in love with books and learning. I also picked up my love for current happenings, and understanding social problems from her.

Through out school, all the children around me always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I never had an answer. I dilly-dallied with the idea of being a catholic nun and an English teacher for while.  The other ‘profession ‘ I have been interested in for a long while is working for an international non-governmental organization (INGO) or a non-profit as it is referred to here. They do a lot of good work helping people in dire circumstances and I want to be a part of this effort. So here I am in college. I know where I want to work in, I am still deciding what I want to do. These days I know that I want to understand how people think, make decisions and respond to change. In my head I imagine that this knowledge will make me a better development operative.

I look forward to exploring my interests and shaping my sociological perspective in this sociology class.