Hw assignment revised Essay Example for Free

Hw assignment revised Essay Culture includes everything about a particular groups way of life; from high art to the most ordinary behavior (what we eat for breakfast, for example). It is defined as the manner of life for a whole society and the sum of socially transmitted behavioral patterns and can be classified into values, norms, institutions and artifacts. The set of distinctive features of a society or a social group, which includes emotional, spiritual and intellectual, can be called as culture. It encompasses the community’s ways of existing together, its value systems, customs and ideals. Everything we do, from our food to our behavior can be considered as culture. From the essay, â€Å"From Culture to Hegemony, culture is defined as the norm of life. Barthes who used the model of linguist de Saussure, sought to uncover the latent meanings of the norms. He tried it from boxing to little things. Transmission of culture is done through language, material objects, customs, institutions, and art, passed from one generation to another generation. Usually, this transmission remains intact and â€Å"pure†; however, when foreign influences set in either through cultural diffusion and/or assimilation, naturally, the native culture will have become irreparably modified. In â€Å"From a Native Daughter†, Haunaini-Kay Trask, bemoans the rape of her native lands culture. How the haole invaded their land and proceeded to change their history. For her historians like the missionaries from whom she had her education, were a part of then colonizing horde, one part colonized the spirit and the other the mind. She believed that any outsider were to understand them, one should first know their language, their songs, their chants, their customs, and their bond with the aina (the land). She said, â€Å"This bond is cultural, it can only be understood culturally†¦Ã¢â‚¬  IDEOLOGY: Ideology includes the underlying ideas that shape culture. These ideas are often what we take for granted, i. e. they are unconscious. For example, the idea that success is gained through going to college and getting a high paying job seems so obvious as to be truth. However, it is part of an ideology. A trick in identifying ideologies is to look for undefined terms in a statement. What does success mean and where did that meaning come from? Ideology is the organized collection of underlying ideas that shape the culture. Being unconscious, they are often taken for granted. They are abstract thoughts applied to reality and every society has an ideology on which they base their actions on. From Marx’s Ideology as quoted in Subculture: the meaning of Style by Dick Hebdidge, ideology is defined as a set of common beliefs that lie beneath the awareness commonly known as â€Å"common sense†. This common sense, although transparently, validates ideas. These taken for granted phenomena can function as signs, which in turn, will reflect the reality of the culture and can be analyzed through mapping them on a range of potential meanings. Power and class are parameters which extends and vary ideology thus making it achievable to have different levels of divided labor. Our education system is the one who is responsible in instilling the ideology into the individuals of the society. In other words, the ideologies are maps of probable meanings which serve to have persons think their way into positions of power or subordination. HEGEMONY: A form of power usually built on ideologies. Instead of bullying (i. e. using coercion) to get your way, its easier and more sustainable to make your victim believe that your way is the right way. For example, car makers dont have to force us to buy new cars at gunpoint; its easier to make us think that getting a new car every couple of years is simply what one does. The underlying ideology might be that newness equals human progress. Hegemony is the subtle almost undetected authority of one individual over another and/or one group of people over another group. This dominance however doesn’t use threats or force. Naturally, the dominant party in our society has their advantages. For example, a dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage. Moreover, our cultural perspectives became in favor of the dominant group. It controls the way ideas are discarded or neutralized. It happens in a process where hegemony alters our notions of common sense of a given society. According to the Gramsci, hegemony is the association of social groups exerting total social authority through coercion, imposition of thought or shaping consent. Familiar examples of this include the selling of cars where you coerce your buyers to buy because it is only right that you get yourself a car and thinking that it is simply what one does after a few years of using an old car. It may also because of the ideology that’s behind it is that a new car means an improvement in your lifestyle. Hall is also quoted in Subculture: the meaning of style, in the chapter, From Culture to Hegemony, Hall (1977) was cited saying, â€Å"hegemony refers to the situation in which a provisional alliance of a certain social group exerts total social authority over other subordinate groups not only through coercion or by the direct imposition of ruling ideas but by winning and shaping consent so that the power of the dominating class appears to be legitimate and natural†¦ â€Å" DEFAMILIARIZATION: Lastly, defamiliarization, also called â€Å"ostanenie† is a method of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar way. It is done in order to improve the insight of the familiar. Religion is a tried and tested way of bringing order to a world of chaotic events. In the article, World View and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols, from the Antioch Review by Clifford Geertz wherein he describes how religion is composed of sets of symbols that are in turn composed of meanings that can only be stored in the symbols. He says that a people’s ethos is the way they dress or their movements and the way they talk. In general it is the quality of their lives while the world view is the cognitive aspect reflects how the people view the natural order of things as they are found in their world. All of these things are in some way or another affected by the religion of the people. Geertz considers the wajang as the clearest illustration of the relationship between the metaphysical (i. e. religion, belief etc†¦) and the people of Java’s actual values. The wajang is the ritual shadow play using puppets that usually lasts all night and well into the early morning. The gamelan is the director musician and storyteller all in one. The most famous characters in the wajang are the Pendawas and the Korawas, and their endless wars. The Pendawas represent the five senses that must always work together to come up with just and good decisions. They represent calm detachment from the everyday events of life which is the way these myths are interpreted and translated into the actual culture that is in the peoples of Java. The Korawas on the other hand represent passion and indiscretion. They are the representative icons that depict the capacity of religion not only to set the standards of ideal living but also delineate the workings of evil and destruction. Just like the Navajo looks at everything that is good and productive as in the form of a circle and thus evokes the circle in everything they do, so does the Javanese in their quest to detach themselves from the passions of everyday life to transcend into inner serenity and peace. Their world views affect their ethos and in turn dictate how they view their reality and consequently how they react to it. The concept of defamiliarization as defined above is also effectively illustrated in the article by George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant. In this article he tells the readers how he had to kill the elephant not because he had to do it to save the people, or because it is truly a danger, in spite of it having killed a â€Å"coolie†, he says that he killed the animal to save himself from looking like a fool it is expected of him to not be afraid, to be consistent (and thus consistent in his initial impulse to kill the elephant). His nationality and the empire he represents have created such a concept that as a member of the empire he is expected to conform to. Thus his actions no matter how mundane and ordinary they are will not have correspondingly simple interpretations at least as far as the natives are concerned.

The Role of Duty In William Shakespeares Hamlet Essays -- Shakespeare

The Role of Duty In William Shakespeare's Hamlet    Killing a person is not something that anyone can take lightly.   In the story of Hamlet, the uncle of the play's focus character, Prince Hamlet of Denmark, has murdered the prince's father, stolen the crown, and weds his mother.   The ghost of king Hamlet comes to the prince and tells him that he must avenge his murder.   The play follows Hamlet's quest of revenge against his murdering incestuous uncle.   The question that's left to the reader to answer is whether or not the final killing of Claudius was an act of duty or desire for young Hamlet.   Some may suspect that the reason he went through with his act of revenge was because he wanted to, but the majority of readers seem to come to the conclusion that his final act was an act of duty.    Hamlet's first thoughts on the revenge he has to perform went as follows:      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books,   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   copied there; and thy commandment all alone shall live.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   (A1, S5,L99-103)    This statement makes it perfectly clear that Hamlet views what he has to do as a job that he has to do for his father.    In act 2, scene 2 Hamlet meets an actor who easily displays intense emotion and passion on matters that have just come to his head.   Hamlet asks himself in the soliloquy that followed if he was a coward for not completing his task yet.   This makes it obvious that killing Claudius isn't something that Haml... ...on has resulted with Leartes and his mother both dead, and himself mortally wounded.   Had his quest of murder been for desire and not for duty, he wound have killed Claudius before any of this had happened.   But since he had to first test the ghost, and then wait to kill Claudius when he wasn't praying, Hamlet ends up dying in this scene, along with a host of others.   On the slightly brighter side, Hamlet finally gets the revenge his father needs.    The answer to the question of duty or desire arises another question.   If we arrived at the same circumstances as Hamlet, could we have acted quicker?   Although it seems like Hamlet went about this the wrong way because everyone ended up dead, I don't suspect that there are many of us that could have performed this still-villainous act at the drop of a hat.         

How useful is the Jewish museum to the historian studying the living and working conditions of Jews in Manchester in the early 20th Century?

The Jews in Manchester came from Eastern Europe, but the synagogue the museum is set in, was for Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Manchester. The Jews moved to Manchester as Industrialisation was taking place, and they thought that they would have a better life in England. Also at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews were moving west out of Eastern Europe to avoid poverty and persecution from Nazis. At first, when some of the Jews first came to Manchester, there were just twenty families around the cathedral, and they had got to Manchester buy peddling stuff that they had made and buying and selling cheap second hand stuff. The number of Jews grew slowly and by 1840 there were only three hundred Jews living in Manchester, and they had separated into two communities: the poor Jews, and the rich Jews. After 1840, yet more Jews moved from Eastern Europe to Manchester to escape the increase in poverty and persecution. By 1860 there were one and a half thousand Jews, and by 1914 there were thirty five thousand living in Manchester. I expected the museum to be a really good source of information, and really quite big and informative. The synagogue the museum is set in was founded in 1874 and it remained open for a hundred years. The museum was used by Spanish and Portuguese Jews; but by 1980 the museum was falling down! So, Jews in and around that area were asked to donate some things and they turned it into a museum. The museum opened in 1984. In the museum, there were two floors; the ground floor was set up like a synagogue with the torahs behind the altar, and the upstairs part, where the women and children would sit for the Jewish services was turned into a museum. The talk was given downstairs. The talk, I found very informative. The guide told us all about the different areas the Jews lived in, and where you could expect the poor Jews to live and how they would live and where you would expect the rich Jews to live, and how. He also told us about the working conditions for the poorer Jews. When the Jews moved over here, at first they probably had to sleep on the floor of a one up one down slum, at 12. 5pence per week until they found work. These slums were generally in the area of Red Bank. Then once the Jews had found work, they might be able to afford to move into the area of Cheetham Hill, where they could expect to pay 32 – 85pence a week (remembering that on a good salary they only earned i3. 00 a week, and they had to pay for food and water on top of rent, and 10% of their weekly earnings would ideally go to charity). If the Jews could not find work when they came over here, there were three things they could do: beg on the streets, apply for poor law, or you could starve. Many Jews could not find work as easily, as the skills they had acquired in Eastern Europe were not relevant for the skills they needed to work in the industrialised Manchester. These skills involved harvesting crops, and rearing farm animals etc, and could not really be put to use in the city of Manchester. When we went upstairs we found displays all around the top of the building, one side concerning the working conditions and one side concerning living conditions. In one of the displays, it showed one of the most typical jobs that Jews were employed to do, and that was Schmere. A schmere would work in a factory sewing bits of material together to make a waterproof fabric. It was a horrible job, and the glue would not come out of your clothes and the gases that came off it were in the long term poisonous, and made people ill. However, if one Jew was doing the work, then he dropped dead because of all the fumes, then another Jew would be ready and waiting to take his place straight away because they were so eager to work. Another very typical job (which the information was in a display) was the school teacher. The school for Jews in the area of the synagogue was called the King David School. In these schools the Jews were taught English as a main language, and some of the Jewish culture was lost through the generation. Some of the other jobs listed on displays at the museum were: tailoring; the manufacture of footwear; cabinet making; buying and selling of second hand goods; shopkeepers; market stall holders and credit drapers. There was only the two displays, photos and the guide to tell us about the working conditions in the twentieth century; but as you can see through all of this information, it was absolutely full of facts. There wasn't really an awful lot about the actual living conditions of the Jews in Manchester in the museum. There was one display, which showed a typical meal time in a working class Jews house. The table was set for two and the stools were different and very used and old. It was very small and crowded and extremely old fashioned, however, the Jews in this model household prided themselves on paying attention to their religious need, and all the religious articles were there, for a typical meal time. There were different wine glasses on the table and the cutlery did not match. There was a stone floor and this made the already tiny room look even more tiny, and colder in a way. There were two types of houses that the Jews would live in. The poorer Jews would live in a house, which were badly built, in a bad area, which had no bathroom/toilet, and no kitchen, and basically was just a one up-one down house. Sometimes, two or three families would start of their lives in England living in one of these houses. From the source sheet, from a census returned from the slum area of Red Bank, there are three families (11 people) all living in one of these houses, and two of these were young children under the age of three. However, in the area of Cheetham on the other side of Manchester where the richer Jews lived, houses were quite big, with a garden at the front and back of the house and near Broughton Park. In these houses it was not unusual to have a general servant living with the family, and the occupations are generally of higher status, and the numbers in the family are lower, with only three people living in the house at one time, and some of the houses not even being occupied. Before I went to the museum I wrote down some questions that I wanted to find out, that I thought were quite relevant to the topic. I wrote down nine questions, and from the talk and all the displays only two of my questions were not answered: did Jews get treated differently than other workers from a different religion at work? Where the Jews treated any differently in society if they lived in a different part of Manchester that was mainly occupied by other religions like Christians? In the museum, there were some things there that were not relevant to my topic to research, for example, the impact of the war on the Jews; there was a display all about the impact of the war on the Jews. I think there should have been more sources on the Jews social life. For instance, what did they do when they were not at school, work, or in the synagogue? There were some pictures of children's dance classes and brownie meetings, but there was not really anything on what the adults did in their spare time, and I thought that it would be interesting and helpful to know. The museum was created with articles that local Jews brought in, to contribute. So, if there are more working class Jews living around the museum, as the museum is set in the slum area, what if most of the articles brought in are related to the working class part rather than the middle class Jews that lived on the other side of Manchester? Also, the museum does not qualify for a lottery fund, so it was built by the Jewish people themselves, and the money they make goes towards lighting and heating bills, so they can't have bought many of the items in their, so some of the information might not be totally reliable. I think the information about the working class Jews is more reliable than the information about the middle class Jews in Cheetham. I think this because most of the information in the museum has come from the working class area where the museum is set, and the museum does tend to focus on the poorer Jews working and living lives. I think the guide tended to dwell on the working class Jews that lived in the same area of the museum, and I don't think he knew as much about the richer Jews. I think this because most of the people who came in to offer him information would have come from that area, as they live there and they would want to be a part of the museum. A historian has lots of sources available that could help them learn about the living and working conditions of the Jews. I think probably the most reliable way is to go and see some of the Jews that were living in and around Manchester at that time, particularly the more middle class Jews. They could ask them questions about what it was like for them to come to England and live here (as there is not much, if any information about this in the museum). Another use would be the internet. When the Jews came over from Eastern Europe to Manchester, there was nothing to help them set themselves up. So when some of the Jews had themselves sorted, they set up a charity to help other Jews that were in the position that they were when they arrived. So there would probably be some information about this charity on the internet, and this would help a historian find out about where the Jews had come from and what state they were in when they came to Manchester, physically and financially. Also, there could be some information from some old landlords, as the Jews rented houses when they came, they must have rented them off some one and that person might have records of who lived in that house and when. Also there would be records in places where the Jews from the twentieth century worked, and doctors or apothecary's records. I think the best way a historian can find out about the living and working conditions in the twentieth century, is to possibly find a diary that someone kept from that period, of their life. That way, the historian can be almost certain that this happened and it would tell a lot about that particular person, although, it would only tell you about that one person from that one family in that one area so it might not tell the historian a lot about the other people and people who lived in other areas. I think the Jewish Museum is very useful to the historian, especially the guide and the talk that he gave. Some of the displays and information is not relevant, but would still be interesting to a historian, looking at that period. Although, I do think that the museum could be of better use to the historians. For example, they could get some people in who lived in the different areas to give talks about what their life was like at that time, and how their parents and grand parents came to live in this country, and they could bring in articles that is useful to the historian. That way the historian can get any information he or she needs to know from that person about what life was like working and living in the twentieth century in Manchester for the Jews.

Athletes Who Are Caught Using Peds Be Allowed For Sports

Let us take a moment to understand we are all human beings capable of making mistakes, so the answer to the first question should athletes who are caught using PEDs be allowed to return to sports? Absolutely! Maybe not the same organization, team, etc. but to permanently ban someone from a specific sport is hasty. However, there are exclusions for every rule and if he/she becomes a threat to the league as a whole or a repeat offender, then that is when it should be put up for consideration. I do feel it is each respective league’s obligation to provide every possible plan / program to aid their athlete. For example, WWE (Wolrd Wrestling Entertainment) has a strict wellness policy with a three strike rule. Upon the first strike suspension occurs, but they also provide rehabilitation program for their entertainers. Third strike the employee is terminated, but then again the company still makes sure the ex-employee is provided with further rehabilitation efforts for free. Profess ional sports are a job, so it should be treated as such. Every employee is subjected to his/her employer’s rules. If an employee at McDonald’s takes Adderall (because it makes him more efficient at the drive through window) and pops on his drug screen, he may not be able to work at McDonalds, but he is not banned from the fast food industry all together – he could work at Wendy’s, Sonic, etc. Maybe a stretch of an example – I am basically saying – people make mistakes, especially when pressure is putShow MoreRelatedShould Peds Persist Illegal For Athletes?1220 Words   |  5 PagesShould PEDs Persist Illegal for Athletes? Who could spare a day not doing any sort of sports? Throughout the years sports have been taking much place in people’s lives. Physical activity is an action which requires an individual’s efforts and own sweat. Of course, the efforts should ward off any drug involvement, especially in the sports field. 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