Sociological Analysis : My Family 's Culture

Families in the world are very different. They come in different shapes and sizes, it can be based on different kinds of relationship, but what all families have in common that it is made of people you love and care. Over past 20 or more years families in the world has changed the most than it has changed in all history. Of course changes in the families are different among cultures and religions. It seems that United States, Canada and Northern Europe families has changed the most, now Nuclear families are dominating there, when in Asia Extended families still takes a greater number. In the richest places in the world numbers of same sex marriages,

Some of my family norms are the love of many sports such as Football, Baseball, Basketball, and Golf. America norms are choices that are not demanded by specific cultures. I believe they are choices you can make but will not be reprimanded if you do not choose one. Some of the frequent Cultural foods that were eaten with my family growing up as a child were rice and pinto beans. I believe this comes from the different cultures rooted within my family. My culture experiences many misunderstandings of who we are and what we stand for in society. Some examples of police brutality, racial profiling, style of dress, and the slang used when speaking. Historically, racism existed and continues to exist in today’s

Through my experiences with people of many backgrounds, as well as my education, I have learned to separate the idea of sex and gender. I still maintain certain traditional views regarding gender, however I’ve come to the realization that the social constructs of men and women are not, and should not, be as rigid. In my opinion, I have acknowledged that there are differences between ‘men’ and ‘women’, however these differences should be used to uplift one another, rather than to tear the other gender apart. For example, a family unit in which the man decides to take on the responsibilities of the

Families, as units, are extremely complex and vary drastically from one another. A person might be under the impression that his or her own family is nothing special, especially if they are accustomed to their family’s routines. After analyzing my own family through the sociological lenses of an assortment of scholars, it is now clear that it is not as simple as it seems. Sociologically analyzing my family through the divorces that have occurred in my life makes it clear that divorce can have an impact on a variety of family dynamics, such as my parents and their jobs and domestic duties, the amount of involvement they have with their friends and family, as well as my financial dependence on my parents.

Nevertheless, as we grew, my classmates and I no longer had the same attitude towards each other. These unaware toddlers, subliminally primed to perceive the world around them as their parents regard as fit, discerned the social ranking of each person in the room. I existed as the lonely piece in the puzzle box that didn’t fit anywhere, an estranged visitor who misplaced herself into their little bubble of friends. I hardly received any invitations to affairs, such as American Girl Doll parties and pool parties, as result of the monetary gap of what I could afford and the moral differences between my family and that of my peers. My mom pushed me to ask if I could attend and suggested I bring one of my stuffed animals instead, which of course came off as an atrocious idea to me at age 7. I did not desire the connotation that bringing a regular stuffed animal to a party with girls who had hundred dollar dolls would cause. Sour and ungrateful feelings began to plague my head due to what I had, in comparison to those around me, did not constitute enough. I only became increasingly alien to those around me as we all grew together and the separating factors in our lives were no longer shallow material attributes as in what plantations a person’s ancestors owned, how much money a person’s family had, or where a person had lived all their life. I could only imagine how unfathomable nonreligious views appear to those who have been

To the outside world, I appear to belong to the Traditional White Nuclear Family culture, but my family included co-cultures and subcultures that were rare in the suburban south.

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," the message about the preservation of heritage, specifically African-American heritage, is very clear. It is obvious that Walker believes that a person's heritage should be a living, dynamic part of the culture from which it arose and not a frozen timepiece only to be observed from a distance. There are two main approaches to heritage preservation depicted by the characters in this story. The narrator, a middle-aged African-American woman, and her youngest daughter Maggie, are in agreement with Walker. To them, their family heritage is everything around them that is involved in their everyday lives and everything that was involved in the lives of their ancestors. To

I knew college was going to change me in many ways. Yet, after my family and I restructured our collective and individual emotional reactivity over the three years that I was away at school, I believed my work in that department was done. I thought transiting into college was difficult, however, I found myself once again unprepared for the aftershock that rocked my family once I return from school. I left college a strong, independent, mature, and differentiated person, or at least I kind of did.

Me and my brother Silas were born a year apart . He was born in 1956 and I in 1957. Our families history is a dark past , where evil flows through our blood. They were all devil worshipers ,that went back to the 1800s till now. My family was known as scratchers back in the day , nickname for what they were . They would worship animals , then blend in with the outside world , in order to survive . They would let one woman conceive as many babies as they wished , in order to keep the bloodline and tradition going. The active worshipers would eventually get caught or die alone , keeping the bloodline going would make their work never end. By the time me and my brother Silas were brought into the world , the tradition was still going , but it wasn't a demanding ritual like in the past .

Michael Halloran (2004) proposes that culture as a diverse and complex system of shared and interrelated knowledge, practices and signifiers of a society, provides structure and significance to groups within that society which subsequently impact the individual’s experience of their personal, social, physical and metaphysical worlds (p.5). Halloran (2004) theorizes that cultural maintenance is key to increasing the health and well-being of Aboriginal Australians whereby he suggests that culture provides collectively validated ways to think of and value oneself, further arguing that culture helps to suppress fundamental human existential anxieties about social isolation produced by our mortality awareness. Emile Durkheim (Marks, 1974) identifies anomie as being without law or norms, similarly, D.J Spencer (2000)

Before referring to the impact of culture on families, I will say that culture is known as knowledge, art, beliefs, law, morals, customs and all habits and skills acquired by man not only in the family but also to be part of a society as a member that is. It is also defined as a set of ideas, behaviors, symbols and social practices learned from generation to generation through life in society. The family is defined as a group of people linked by blood, marriage, or adoption; usually centered on a married couple, their dependents, and relatives. Although there have also been non-traditional families made up of people who are not linked by blood or marriage and are now found more frequently in many regions of the world.

“Our views and behavior depend to some degree on our social location in society—our gender, race, social class, religion, and so forth.”(Barkan, 2013). As I have grown up and my perspective of the world has broadened I have realized how narrow my views were. I grew up in Germany, Italy, and Hungary before moving to the USA, but because I was so sheltered I really didn’t know what was really happening in society. As I grew older I have come to realize the socialization process did help me develop my values, beliefs, morals, my religious outlook, my political affiliations and what not.

Throughout this course I have learned about sociology and certain sub-categories. Some of these include social institutions, social hierarchy, and socialization, these are relevant to an educational socialization. But, the sociology that I am going to focus on is related to family. Status, role and reference groups are classified in the sociological studies of family. For reasons that I am focusing on family, is that family is extremely important to me and the bonds that we had is unlike most families. It is a bond that has been broken and I am slowly trying to mend it back together.

My family history is rather unclear and unexplored. I do know that my maternal grandmother was adopted. My paternal side is said to be Italian. I come from an English speaking family. The geographic range is also unexplored and limited to western Pennsylvania. I grew up in the small town of Nolo, Pennsylvania. I can recall moving from one house to another but within the same county. I did change school districts one time. I would consider this to be very stable. Currently, I reside in Indiana county where I grew up. I have been married for six years and have a two year old son that will soon be a big brother. My wife and I built a home within the same geographical location as our parents. My spouse was also raised in a stable nuclear style family structure.

While looking upon my personal culture and my family’s culture in an attempt to find appropriate dishes for this assignment, it became apparent to me that I have no definite culture. Whereas I have lived in Canada my whole life, my family’s background has engaged me in varying cultures, though I have never felt truly attuned to one culture. On the other hand, my father is a first generation Canadian, his parents both from Scotland. Though aware of my Scottish origins and my grandparents’ migration to Canada, Scottish culture has never been explicitly celebrated amongst those in my family. Furthermore, my family previously migrated from Ireland during the Irish famine, resulting in Irish culture to also represented in my family’s culture. Variously, my mother’s side of the family has lived in Canada for many generations, but I do not consider myself as being authentically Canadian. Accordingly, throughout my childhood, I was never encouraged to celebrate an explicit culture. Furthermore, religion was never prominent in my life either, as my parents decided against baptizing any of my siblings and me, as per the family tradition, because they wished for us to have religious freedom. However, because of the rest of my family’s religion, as well as my background, my family has always celebrated Christian holidays, though I have never been to church for a reason other than a wedding. I find that without any cultural ties from my family’s history and practices, that the culture I