GRE写作素材SectionFive:Society

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:21

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1. The Function of Art

Art has an effect on the individual and on a particular culture in a society. Psychologically, art enhances life by adding beauty to our surroundings. It is a source of pleasure and relaxation from the stresses of life. Socially, art plays a number of different roles by virtue of its capacity to embody symbolic significance to its audience.

Art fulfils a number of important social functions. It is used to communicate the various statues people hold. It can play a role in regulating economic activities. And it is almost always a means for expressing important political and religious ideas and for teaching principles that are valued in society. These and other social uses of art function to preserve the established social organization of each society.

Status Indicators

One of the social functions of art is the communication of status differences between individuals. For instance, gender differences in body decorations and dress are typical of cultures throughout the world. Age differences may be similarly indicated. Puberty rituals often include tattooing, scarification of the body in decorative designs, or even filling of the teeth to between children and adults. Social class differences in complex societies also involve aesthetic markers such as the clothing people wear and the kinds of artworks they use as decorations of their homes. According to Sahlins, social and economic class, age, and gender differences are noticeable even in the kinds of fabrics people’s clothing is made from. For instance, silks in most societies are predominantly worn by women, especially those who are part of the upper classes and those who are middle-aged.

Economic Functions

Economic life, by virtue of its practical importance to our survival and to our standard of living, can sometimes be a source of conflict between groups that must carry out exchange with one another. Sometimes art, perhaps because it is valued for its nonutilitarian qualities, can play a role of maintaining harmony in such settings. This was one of the functions of the Kula Ring exchange of ceremonial necklaces and armbands among islanders such as the Trobrianders and Dobuans.

Religious Functions

Much of the dramatic and emotional impact of religion derives from its use of art. Religious rituals everywhere include song and dance performances, and the visual arts function to heighten the emotional component of religious experience in all parts of the world, by portraying important scenes and symbols from religious history and mythology. In some cultures, art and religious ritual are inseparable. For instance, among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea, all art is produced for use in rituals.

Didactic Functions

Art is often employed as a means for teaching important cultural ideas and values. For instance, hymns in Western religious express theological concepts and encourage the support of specific religious values. Daniel Biebuyck has analyzed the use of art to embody moral and ethical principles by the Lega people of Central Africa. Lega ethical ideals are codified in figurines of humans and animals made of ivory, pottery, bone, wood, and wickerwork. The figurines are used in the initiation and training of men into prominent positions within Lega society. Each of these statues is associated with one or more aphorisms, a concise statement that alludes to a general ethical concept. For instance, one figure is a carved stick whose top is slit so as to suggest an open mouth… The object illustrates the saying, “He who does not put off his quarrelsomeness will quarrel with something that has the mouth widely distended.” (In other rites this idea may be rendered by a crocodile figurine with widely distended jaws.) The aphorism alludes to the disastrous effects of quarrelsomeness and meddlesomeness.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:22

Thus, Lega figurines were not only works of art; they were also devices for teaching important moral principles to each new generation. At the same time, their ownership by older men who had achieved initiation into the highest levels of society functioned to perpetuate respect for the moral wisdom of the leaders in the established social hierarchy.

Political Functions

Art often functions to legitimize the authority of government. Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota, memorializes four American presidents who were selected for their symbolic association with messages about values of individualism and democracy. The statue Mother Russia commemorates the enduring will to survive of the Russian people. The British Crown Jewels, by virtue of their artistry and the symbolism of precious stones that originated throughout the Commonwealth, celebrate the value of the institution of the monarchy. And the ornately carved Golden Stool of the Ashanti of southern Ghana, with the distinctive myth of its supernatural origins, reinforces the legitimacy of the Ashanti king and the unity and stability of Ashanti society.

As a statement about the legitimacy of governmental authority, art is a conservative force in society. In this role, it is intended to elicit loyalty and to stabilize society and its political system. Governments also sometimes deliberately employ this aspect of art as propaganda urging public action that supports official policy. Thus, propagandistic art embodies both didactic and political functions.

2. Intercultural Prejudices

When culture meet, people may have little understanding or appreciation of groups whose ideologies and adaptive strategies differ from their own. People grow up under the nurturance of their group and learn to fulfill their needs by living according to their group’s culture. As people learn their way of life, they generally identify themselves as members of the group that has cared for their early needs and has taught them the rules for living. Simultaneously, they generally develop positive feelings toward this reference group and its behaviors. Often, the training of children in the ways of the group is communicated expressly by contrasting them with the supposed behaviors of outsiders: “Other parents may let their children come to the table like that, but in our family we wash our hands before eating!” such expressions teach children the patterns of behavior expected of group members, but they also communicate a disapproval of outsiders.

In complex societies with large populations and many competing groups, prejudices between groups within the society may become a common element of daily experience, varying from good-natured rivalry to direct antipathies. In the United States, we may think of our own state as “God’s own country,” our politics as the only rational way of doing things, or our religion as the only road to salvation. Even such group symbols as hair length and style of clothing have served as grounds for suspension from school, unified those in public demonstrations, and caused interpersonal violence.

The attitude that one’s own culture is the naturally superior one, the standard by which all other cultures should be judged, and that cultures different from one’s own are inferior is such a common way of reacting to others’ customs that it is given a special name by anthropologists. Ethnocentrism, centered in one’s ethnos, the Greek word for a people or a nation, is found in every culture. People allow their judgments about human nature and about the relative merits of different ways of life to be guided by ideas and values that are centered narrowly on the way of life of their own society.

Ethnocentrism serves a society by creating greater feelings of group unity. When individuals speak ethnocentrically, they affirm their loyalty to the ideals of their society and elicit in other persons of the group shared feelings of superiority about their social body. This enhances their sense of identity as members of the same society and as bearers of a common culture. A shared sense of group superiority—especially during its overt communication between group members—can help them overlook internal differences and prevent conflicts that could otherwise decrease the ability of the group to undertake effectively coordinated action.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:23

For most of human history, societies have been smaller than the nations of today, and most people have interacted only with members of their own society. Under such circumstances, the role of ethnocentrism in helping a society to survive by motivating its members to support one another in their common goals has probably outweighed its negative aspects. However, ethnocentrism definitely has a darker side. It is a direct barrier to understanding among peoples of diverse customs and values. It enhances enmity between societies and can be a motivation for conflict among peoples whose lives are guided by different cultures.

Ethnocentrism stands in fundamental conflict with the goals of anthropology: the recognition of the common humanity of all human beings and the understanding of the causes of cultural differences. To many students, much of the appeal of the field of anthropology has been its intriguing discussions of the unending variety of customs grown out of what, from the viewpoint of the uninitiated, may seem like strange and exotic, unexpected, and even startlingly different values. A people’s values generally make perfectly good sense when seen and explained in the context of their cultural system as a whole. Yet, it is often difficult to make sense out of another cultural tradition because its symbolic meanings may be so different from one’s own. While negative reactions to the customs of another society may, therefore, be expected, they should be guarded against by the student of anthropology.

3. Culture Shock

Anthropologists who engage in fieldwork in a culture that differs from the one in which they grew up often experience a period of disorientation or even depression known as culture shock before they become acclimatized to their new environment. Even tourists who travel for only a short time outside their own nations may experience culture shock, and unless they are prepared for its impact, they may simply transform their own distress into a motive for prejudice against their host society.

4. Groups

Every human society is a group, whose members perceive their common identity because of the culture that binds them together. All human societies that have been studied subdivide into smaller groups that coalesce from time to time for specialized activities. Such groups have geographical boundaries, specifiable members, a common activity engaged in by members, and a division of labor. Basketball fans, for example, when scattered across the country are not a group, but spectators at a specific game are. When a group is formally organized, it may have an explicitly formulated ideology, a goal-oriented, game plan or set of procedures for carrying out the activity that brings its members together.

The members of social groups generally identify themselves symbolically with a name or some other emblem of their group identity. Commonly, the identifying emblem indicates the activity that draws the members together or represents some other important aspects of the group’s characteristics. Thus, the group identity of the United States of America is symbolized by a flag that portrays the political unity of that society’s 50 states by a group of 50 stars. The Great Seal of the United States of America contains the image of an eagle clutching an olive branch and arrows, symbols of peace and war, which suggest that the major purpose of the nation as a political entity is to maintain internal order and to defend the group. A smaller, more face-to-face group, such as a basketball team, may identify itself as a unified body by naming itself and by symbolizing its athletic purpose with some symbol of its prowess, such as a charging bull or a flying hawk.

There will also be structured relationships between groups in every society. Interactions by groups are culturally patterned, and may involve hierarchical ranking, with each group having different degrees of honor and social power. Group relationships are sometimes called the social structure of a society, to distinguish this aspect of social organization from other aspects such as individual statuses and roles.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:24

5.    Authority

It will not come as a surprise that a society that admires independence and progress does not have an automatic respect for authority. What deference people in authority do command is based on their actual powers rather than on their age, wisdom, or dignity. Old people are often seen as behind the times. It’s the young who are expected to have some special insight into the modern world.

After all, it was by overthrowing the King of England that the United States was born, and suspicion of authority has remained a pillar of American life. This attitude has helped establish the USA as the birthplace of innovations that have changed the world. If a better way of doing something comes along, we unsentimentally jettison the old way. But we also jettison people. In a society that changes as fast as ours, experience simply does not have the value that it does in traditional societies.

6.    The No-Status Society

In a status society, people learn their places and gain some dignity and security from having a place in the social order. Americans, however, are taught not to recognize their places and to constantly assert themselves. This can manifest itself in positive ways—hard work, clever ideas—but also in ongoing dissatisfaction.

As an American is always striving to change his lot, he never fully identifies with any group. We have no expressions such as in China where “the fat pig gets slaughtered,” or in Japan, where “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” Here, everybody is trying to stick out, which limits closeness between people. We say, “It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.” According to Alan Roland, author of In Search of Self in India and Japan, in the United States” a militant individualism has been combined with enormous social mobility,” leaving very little group identity.

Roland psychoanalyzed Americans, Indians, and Japanese and discovered that the two Asian cultures had no concept of the strong inner separation from others that is characteristic of Americans. Because our society is so competitive, we feel in the end that we can only rely on ourselves.

This freedom from the group has enabled the American to become “Economic Man”—one directed almost purely by the profit motive, mobile and unencumbered by family or community obligations. It’s a personality type well suited to national development, but one that leads to identity problems for the individual himself.

“Identity is the number on national problem here,” writes Eva Hoffman, the Polish-born author of Lost in Translation.” Many of my American friends feel they don’t have enough of it. They often feel worthless or they don’t know how they feel.”

But to someone who feels oppressed in another culture, American life can look wonderful. “Americans have a blank check, on which they can write anything they want,” concluded one foreigner after ten years here.

7.    Conformity

To an American, what the world thinks of him is extremely important. Only through the eyes of others can success have significance. The theory of culture analyst David Riesman is that Americans are no longer primarily governed by inner values handed down through generations. Instead, he thinks Americans have become outer-directed people—guided not by their own consciences but by the opinions of others. To be liked is crucial.

Although individualism is central in America—in the sense that the self comes first—Americans are not individualists. Actually, persons in status societies who are secure in their niches are allowed more eccentricity than Americans, who rely heavily on signals that other people like them. In America, popularity is a sign of success and terribly important. Nobody can have too many friends—as long as they don’t take up too much of their valuable time.

8.    Debating Moral Questions

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:25

Nowhere is modern thinking more muddled than over the question of whether it is proper to debate moral issues. Many argue it is not, saying it is wrong to make “value judgments.” This view is shallow. If such judgments were wrong, then ethics, philosophy, and theology would be unacceptable in a college curriculum—an idea that is obviously silly. As the following cases illustrate, it is impossible to avoid making value judgments.

Raoul Wallenberg was a young Swedish aristocrat. In 1944 he left the safety of his country and entered Budapest. Over the next year he outwitted the Nazis and saved as many as 100,000 Jews (he was not himself Jewish) from the death camps. In 1945 he was arrested by the Russians, charged with spying, and imprisoned in a Russian labor camp. He may still be alive there. Now, if we regard him as a hero—as there is excellent reason to do—we are making a value judgment. Yet if we regard him neutrally, as no different from anyone else, we are also making a value judgment. We are judging him to be neither hero nor villain, but average.

Consider another case. In late 1981 a 20-year-old mother left her three infant sons unattended in a garbage-strewn tenement in New York City. 2 Police found them there, starving, the youngest child lodged between a mattress and a wall, covered with flies and cockroaches, the eldest playing on the second-floor window ledge. The police judged the mother negligent, and the court agreed. Was it wrong for them to judge? And if we refuse to judge, won’t that refusal itself be a judgment in the mother’s favor?

No matter how difficult it may be to judge such moral issues, we must judge them. Value judgment is the basis not only of our social code, but of our legal system. The quality of our laws is directly affected by the quality of our moral judgments. A society that judges blacks inferior is not likely to accord blacks’ equal treatment. A society that believes a woman’s place is in the home is not likely to guarantee women equal employment opportunity.

Other people accept value judgments as long as they are made within a culture, and not about other cultures. Right and wrong, they believe, varies from one culture to another. It is true that an act frowned upon in one culture may be tolerated in another, but the degree of difference has often been grossly exaggerated. When we first encounter an unfamiliar moral view, we are inclined to focus on the difference so much that we miss the similarity.

For example, in medieval Europe animals were tired for crimes and often formally executed. In fact, cockroaches and other bugs were sometimes excommunicated from the church. Sound absurd, doesn’t it? But when we penetrate beneath the absurdity, we realize that the basic view—that some actions are reprehensible and ought to be punished—is not so strange. The core idea that a person bitten by, say, a dog, has been wronged and requires justice is very much the same. The only difference is our rejection of the idea that animals are responsible for their behavior.

Is it legitimate, then, for us to pass judgment on the moral standards of another culture? Yes, if we do so thoughtfully and not just conclude that whatever differs from our view is necessarily wrong. We can judge, for example, a culture that treats women as property, or places less value on their lives than on the lives of men. Moreover, we can say a society is acting immorally by denying women their human rights. Consider the following cases.

In nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a theatrical producer shot and killed his wife because she insisted on taking a walk in the botanical gardens against his wishes. He was formally charged with her murder, but the judge dismissed the charge. The producer was carried through the streets in triumph. The moral perspective of his culture condoned the taking of a woman’s life if she disobeyed her husband, even in a relatively small matter. A century later that perspective had changed little in the same city, in 1976, a wealthy playboy, angry at his lover for flirting with others, fired four shots into her face at point-blank range, killing her. He was given a two year suspended sentence in light of the fact that he had been “defending his honor.”

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:26

Surely it is irresponsible for us to withhold judgment on the morality of these merely because they occurred in a different culture. It is obvious that in both cases the men’s response, murder, was out of all proportion to the women’s “offenses,” and therefore demonstrated a wanton disregard for the women’s human rights. Their response is thus properly judged immoral. And this judgment implies another—that the culture condoning such behavior is guilty of moral insensitively.

9. Art as Nonverbal Communication

Like language and social organization, art is essential to man. As embellishment and as creation of objects beyond requirements of the most basic needs of living, art has accompanied man since prehistoric times. Because of its almost unfailing consistency as an element of many societies, art may be a response to some biological or psychological need. Indeed, it is one of the most constant forms of human behavior.

However, use of the word art is not relevant when we describe African art, because it is really a European term that at first grew out of Greek philosophy and was later reinforced by European culture. The use of other terms, such as exotic art, primitive art, and so on, to delineate differences is just as misleading. Most such terms are pejorative—implying that African art is on a lower cultural level. Levels of culture are irrelevant here, since African and European attitudes toward the creative act are so different. Since there is no term in our language to distinguish between the essential differences in thinking, it is best then to describe standards of African art.

African art attracts because of its powerful emotional content and its beautiful abstract form. Abstract treatment of form describes most often with bare essentials of line, shape, texture, and pattern intense energy and sublime spirituality. Hundreds of distinct cultures and languages and many types of people have created over one thousand different styles that defy classification. Each art and craft form has its own history and its own aesthetic content. But there are some common denominators (always with exceptions.)

African art is functional. Its function is its purpose, whether it is economic, magical, or religious. There is, though, some art for its own sake such as in the embellishment of pulleys used in weaving. The carving on the pulley may not make for a stronger pulley (a metal hook would be cheaper and stronger), but when asked why another kind wasn’t used, the weaver answered, “One does not want to live without pretty things.”

African art is a way of experiencing the world. All its forms, whether masks, sculpture, houses, fabrics, poetry, music, or dance, render the invisible visible and reveal the meaning of the confrontation between life and death (It was Paul Klee, influenced by African art, who said that the task of art was to make the invisible visible.)

The African artist works from the force to the form that embodies it. Until the twentieth century, European artists, inspired by Greek traditions, started from a concrete form, usually that of the human figure, to express the divine. The African artist, however, begins with a sense of a spiritual presence inside him, which he then expresses through art, in a concrete form.

The African artist is not considered an artist. He may be a farmer who carves or a smith who is endowed with magical powers. The responsibility for understanding the operation of forces issuing from the divine power, and of controlling them in a meaningful way, lies in the medicine man or priest. It is the priest who communicates the need for a certain form to the carver if it is to have some spiritual endowment. (That is why carvers don’t see anything wrong in copying another carver’s work. Copying is just another form of flattery.)

The African conception of art is a communal conception as compared with European individualistic expression. To the African, community existed prior to the individual, and the individual is just a small part of a long tradition. The sense of unity extends to nature and to the earth—earth belongs to ancestors.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:27

Secret societies, supporting the medicine man, maintain standards of behavior by special initiation tests, rituals for many occasions, oaths of secrecy, and the like. They supervise morality, uphold tribal traditions, and dispense justice. They set standards for art forms from birth through puberty, marriage, and death. Masks, sculptures in the form of ancestor figures, fetishes, and ritual implements (rattles and drums) conform to these traditions. Fetishes are objects endowed with magical powers for a special purpose and are usually crudely fashioned by the medicine man.

African art gives form to the supernatural and invisible. Its abstract imagery does not even attempt to imitate concrete appearances. How does one represent the power and virtue of an ancestor or the rhythm of an animal concretely? From this emerge a rhythmic unity and a reduction of every formal element to its eternal geometry.

African art is one that is in equilibrium with nature and forms a communion with nature. To the African, sculpture can be receptacle of the ancestor’s spirituality and has the ability to transmit that spirituality when necessary. Its message or meaning becomes its presence.

African art is closer to life than the art of other countries. Its art forms are within every man’s reach. They are a necessity, an integral force, and part of living. As functional forms, they invite direct participation in their use. This is the vitality of African art.

In summary, African art explains the past, describe values and a way of life, helps man relate to supernatural forces, mediates his social relations, expresses emotions, and enhances man’s present life as an embellishment denoting pride or status as well as providing entertainment (such as with dance and music).

10. Turtle Island

I am a poet. My teachers are other poets, American Indians, and a few Buddhist priests in Japan. The reason I am here is because I wish to bring a voice from the wilderness, my constituency. I wish to be a spokesman for a realm that is not usually represented either in intellectual chambers or in the chambers of government.

I would like to think of a new definition of humanism and a new definition of democracy that would include the nonhuman that would have representation from those spheres. This is what I think we mean by an ecological conscience.

I don’t like western culture because I think it has much in it that is inherently wrong and that is at the root of the environmental crisis that is not recent; it is very ancient; it has been building up for a millennium. There are many things in Western culture that are admirable. But a culture that alienates itself from the very ground of its own being—from the wildness outside (that is to say, wild nature, the wild, self-contained, self-informing, ecosystems) and from that other wilderness, the wilderness within—is doomed to a very destructive behavior, ultimately perhaps self-destructive behavior.

The West is not the only culture that carries these destructive seeds. China had effectively deforested itself by A.D.800. The soils of the Middle East were ruined even earlier. The forests that once covered the mountains of Yugoslavia were stripped to build the Roman fleet, and those mountains have looked like Utah ever since. The soils of southern Italy and Sicily were ruined by slave-labor farming in the Roman Empire. The soils of the Atlantic seaboard in the United States were effectively ruined before the American Revolution because of the one-crop (tobacco) farming. So the same forces have been at work in East and West.

A line is draw between primitive peoples and civilized peoples. I think there is wisdom in the world view of primitive peoples that we have to refer ourselves to, and learn from. If we are on the verge of post civilization, then our next step must take account of the primitive world view which has traditionally and intelligently tried to keep open lines of communication with the forces of nature. You cannot communicative with the forces of nature in a laboratory. One of the problems is that we simply do not know much about primitive people and primitive cultures. If we can tentatively accommodate the possibility that nature has a degree of authenticity and intelligence that requires that we look at it more sensitively, then we can move on to the next step.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:28

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[GRE写作] GRE写作素材SectionFive:Society