Essay on Analysis of Desmond Morris' Article Territorial Behavior

Davies (1982) proposes that social and geographical as well as moral (acceptable and unacceptable behavior) are the two sets of boundaries that distinguish between insiders and outsiders to a group. Our interpretation of how a person acts may be originated in one’s membership in a certain group; this interpretation might also affect our behavior or reaction toward that

Throughout “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Pratt uses many real life situations to exemplify how contact zones create conflict and separate people and cultures; but she also examines ways to use the contact zone to our advantage in order to unify society. Sometimes people are led believe their differences are too great to overcome, so they remain isolated from the rest of society. People shouldn’t be trying to isolate themselves, but rather incorporating their culture into the community around them. This incorporation of cultures can often cause conflict, but Pratt explains that conflict can be avoided if people abandon their biases and pursue knowledge about the cultures around them. This idea “will read very differently” to people on opposing sides of the contact zone

As a young man, while living and working with various ethnicities, I learned that certain elements of social location cannot be altered and this can affect our reality. It has been my personal experience that the social location of a particular group of people may generate a very different set of values and beliefs for them to a group in a different social location. Thus, this principle can help us to better understand our worldview and its effects on the way we view and interpret other cultures.

In this theory, there are two components which he states, “People have gut-level intuitions about the ideology of different enclaves, and when the ideology if a community matches people’s personal ideology, people infer that they would fit into that community. Second, when people have the opportunity to do so, they will selectively migrate into enclaves that share their ideology” (Motyl, 2014). He then further breaks down the theory to the consequences that emerge from this division in three categories which stem from the idea of belonging through the self such as migration, well-being and cognitive style and Intergroup through cooperation, Social capital trust but also hostility dehumanization and violence (Motyl, 2014). Through his research and others which he states he believes that people decide to stay or create groups based on their own ideologies and migrate away from communities where they believe they are unwelcome and not belong in the community.

In his article, “People Like Us”, David Brooks sheds light on a topic that many Americans overlook. Brooks suggests that, as humans, we tend to self-segregate and congregate with people of similar backgrounds and cultures. Brooks provides several pieces of evidence that support his claim. In my short eighteen years on this Earth, I have to say I have seen examples of “self-segregation” myself, whether it be around my community, school, or elsewhere.

Our society is ruled by several social norms that most people in most places try to follow. As we grow up, we are taught to behave in certain ways depending on the situation. For instance, my parents would always tell me and my little sister to be in our best behavior when we were at church or when we went to someone else’s house. All in an attempt to get us used to comply with social norms and teach us proper conduct. Violations of social norms will trigger a negative response from those around us and depending on the severity of the violation, it could even make a person seem unfit to be part of a society. In this essay, I will analyze human territorialism as a social norm and I will explain the importance of spatial

He begins to live for himself and his own. He begins to crave for an identity and he does his best to carve it out. Man’s identity is strongly influenced by his surroundings. In order to preserve this identity, Man begins to take measures to safeguard it. To protect all that he has learned and accumulated over the past centuries. A strong nation is indeed built by strong borders and a strong army. Good fences make good neighbours. That is true. But one has to begin questioning the limits of such culture preservation. Would culture preservation be culture intrusion to the other communities? For Man, has since time immemorial adopted the belief that the best form of defence is offense. In order to preserve and propagate his culture, Man has set out on a quest to annihilate any other existing culture. The theory of ‘The survival of the fittest’ determined the setting of borders in the medieval times. Civilisation has come a long way since then. But only the ways and strategies of remapping the world has changed; not the intent behind it. Man’s allegiance to his nation can be described as an innate quality. His ability to identify himself with certain cultural, religious or

Segregation has been a tool of protection and exclusion since man erected the first wall, perhaps before. People have used spatial segregation to separate their populations from those surrounding, such as the Greek polis; to set aside special “holy” spaces, such as, monasteries and temples; to separate the wealthy and powerful from those they rule, such as Roman forts and medieval castles; and to separate ethnicities, such as South African apartheid and indigenous reserves. Humanity has a long history of segregation, developed for security, social and material dominance, and strongly held beliefs.

Ethnic signatures and territoriality are data on the reorganization and release phases of the Denesųłiné adaptive cycle. Territories are social constructions for use, occupancy and control of lands. Tobias (2000:3) defines “use” as activities in an area and “occupancy” as the area that a group inhabits. Territories are a pragmatic representation of daily activities across the seasons. They are at distinct odds with fixed and often lineal borders common in Euro-Canadian cadastral systems of land tenure. Indeed, territories are patchworks mediated by social action. They are often constructions of usufruct. This is a loose concept of land management in which cultural use dictates control and relevance of decision-making (Tanner 1986:26-28).

This study examined the predictors of repeated aggression on a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital by conducting a sudy, approved by the Institutional Review Board, in a 1,500 bed maximum-security forensic hospital located in the Los Angeles area. The subjects of the study were patients committed due to their inability to stand trial or found not guilty due to insanity.

The development of personal identity and a sense of place are concepts that are influenced by abstract ideology such as nationalism, fictitious history, and personal meaning. Anderson talks about the nature of how nationalism shapes a person and a community in his book, Imagined Communities. According to my first blog entry, Anderson defines a nation as an “imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” He claims that its imaginary aspect is due to the fact that individuals of a nation will never meet the rest of the nation. I state how, “This limited circumstance only allows for a subjective interpretation of a community that is not based on factual knowledge.” It is intriguing how a concept that can extensively shape the individual is an abstract illusion of a community. It illustrates how although the development of an individual may be seen as a private, even insignificant affair—it is influenced by a number of variables that exist in society. One could argue that the development of the individual is more public than private, and could shape and influence the development of a society as well as vice versa.

A distinctive characteristic of human beings is their ability to inhabit a culturally organised environment. Relationships

Secondly, he warned that sometimes it becomes unclear to detect when the boundaries lose their importance and values. This uncertainty state about the tight closeness between confinements and the society members can be confusing, since one can never know how deep the bound is and a slight mistake can be the origin of complex difficulties in the society. Tilly clarifies the doubts becomes easier to understand when people are unified after being divided either through wars, conflicts and attacks (Tilly 2005: 213-229).

William and Walton-Roberts (2013) defined homelands as places that people have strong feelings about and are recognized with. Schnell (2000) argued that homelands involve the emotional bonding of a self-conscious group to a particular area of land, attachments that buttress a person’s identity as a member of a group and such attachments are immensely rooted in the visible landscape of the homeland. William and Walton-Roberts (2013) explained that homelands involve typical ethnic characters, recognizable self-consciously aware groups, cultural regional landscape, emotional connection of the group with the region and a level of institutional control of the region. William and Walton-Roberts (2013) further discussed that homelands are mostly ethnically based regions with recognizable cultural landscapes that are best understood as dynamic results of specific human and environment relations. William and Walton-Roberts (2013) discussed that cultural regions were initially used as a means of establishing some semblance on a supposedly diverse cultural phenomenon.

In this essay I will attempt to show that social “fences”, although a necessary part of social life, can lead to conflict and the need for resolution if they are too rigid or too unclear, particularly within larger communities.