IHSS Blog 2019-2020

Gabriel Han Sep 9 IHSS Anthropology Terms Reassessment Acculturation The process of culture changing due to parts of other cultures being adopted into the culture. Examples of acculturation include a large portion of the history of the US, due to the fact that European citizens were going over to a completely foreign continent, and mingling with previously unknown people. A hypothetical example would be if Mexico became part of the USA. Unlikely or impossible, but it would cause huge amounts of change in the culture of both the US and Mexico. For example, Mexico would become much more American in culture, and there would be a massive infrastracture change, but Mexican culture would still remain, and it would definitely be affected by American culture. Diffusion The transfer of cultural ideas from one to another. Examples include signs in Texas near the border commonly being written in Spanish and English, the French Quarter in New Orleans, and the various cultural hubs li

Gabriel Han Sep 16 IHSS Cultural Anthropology Blog I read an article about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a study around them conducted by MIT. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a series of ancient Hebrew texts that were discovered in 1947. The study was focused on one scroll known as the Temple scroll, out of the 900 or so scrolls. The scrolls were hidden in jars on hillsides north of the Dead Sea, often under debris. The reason the Temple scroll was chosen was because it is the largest and most well preserved of the scrolls, despite the fact that the material is incredibly thin, at only 1/250 of an inch thick. The study was to investigate how the parchment was made, and what it was made of. Results showed it was processed in a strange way, and made of odd ingredients like evaporates that differed from the normal ones. This raises questions such as how did they make it, or come up with the idea for it? Scientists believe that understanding this parchment could provide insights into the cultur

Gabriel Han IHSS Sep 30 Sociology Blog The article I read was about a social experiment called the Asch Conformity Experiment. Developed by Solomon Asch in the 50s, it seeks to gather data about human conformity. The way it works is there are multiple subjects, and all except one are already aware of the experiment. Two cards are given to each subject, one with a black line, the other with three lines labeled A, B, and C. The line on the first card matches a line on the other card, while the other lines are visibly different. They are then asked which lines are the same length, with the unaware subject being asked last. The aware subjects would give purposefully incorrect yet constant answers, and when it came to the unaware subjects, one-third of them gave the same incorrect answer as the aware subjects at least half the time, despite the lines being visibly aware. Forty percent gave some wrong answers, while only one fourth gave correct answers. This study shows just how much h

The article "Deviance and Strain Theory in Society" from ThoughtCo. argues that the norms of a society consists of "culture" and "social structure." culture being the goals and values of the people and social structure being the process that has been constructed as the typical procedure to achieve their goals. If the social structure of the society makes it very difficult for people to maintain their culture, they will find ways to go against the values to reach their goals, resulting in what is described as "deviant behavior." The responses to the societies norms are classified into several variations, including conformity, innovation, ritualism, rebellion, and retreatism. Conformity involves the acceptance of the culture and social structure of the society and the engagement of both. Innovation rejects the social structure and creates new means of pursuing the goals. Ritualism rejects both the goals and the means of attaining them, but contin