This course has now come to an end. Looking back to the first day of the semester I walked into the class without a clear undertanding of what sociology was and what exactly it was about. I have come a long way since then and learned a lot. Sociology is A perspective and an academic discipline that examies the human being as a social being, who is a product of social interaction, socialization and social patterns. In other words, sociology is the study of society. It is the study of the relationships between the people and the larger social network in which we all live in.
When I first saw the word “Debunking” in my textbook, I had no idea what it meant. I have come to learn much about it. It consists of looking at both the obvious and surface-level, and the less obvious and deeper explanations for social behaviour. In a simpler terms, “seeing the familiar in the unfamiliar and the unfamiliar in the familiar”. Debunking is helpful when it comes to analyzing almost anything. It helps to break things down and make sense of them.
Ethnocentrism is another term I have learned about. Being ethnocentric means you have extreme national pride. Being prideful of ones own country isn’t neccessarily a bad thing but it sometimes can be led in a different direction. Being ethnocentric is having pride for your own country, but at the same time you are putting other countries down. This can start a lot of conficts, and can result in extremes such as war.
One thing that has really grasped my attention throughout the course was the video we watched in class on the topic “Race and Genetics”. It was very interesting, and really made me go into deep critical thinking. It was useful inforation for me. To summarize it, it was factualexperimentation on a group of students, all of different races, sizes, and genders. They experimented to see which other classmates had the most gene similarities. They all estimated that they would share similargenes with classmates of the same skin colour. The interesting thing about this experiment was that they were all wrong. This is what amazed me. The students had more similarities with the classmates that looked nothing like them. This concluded that skin colour and genetics had nothing in common. Genes were genes, and they have nothing to do with race or religion.
Throughout the course I learned a lot about Ghana, aswell as a lot of other places and relgions around the world. I learned other ways of life, and researched the fortunate, aswell as the less fortunate. Ways of living, such as how one may freshen their breath in the morning, or how one receives schooling, or the way a family is run. I love learning about people, culture and ways of live. I have learned alot about all of these topics, and learned that there is lots of less fortunate people who are suffering from poverty, slavery, torcher, and bad ways of life.
The article that stumped me at first was the “Body Ritual Among The Nacirema”. At first it completely confused me and i had thought it was about some weird culture doing weird things. After critical thinking I came to discover that Nacirema was actually American spelt backwards. I then read over the article again and saw what the article acually was about and it made complete sense. This is a good example of how strategies like debunking and critical thinking can help you understand something in the proper context after you dig deeper.
Overall, I am very satisfied with the amount of information I learned in the sociology class. I now have a different view on the world today, and I will use the knowledge I have obtained throughout the future.
