Culture of Beauty

     Americas culture highly values beauty, which would be fine if we valued a realistic and  attainable  beauty. However we do not, our ideas of beauty are influenced by the media even though most of us  know that the pictures we see on billboards and in magazines have been photoshopped .

     Below is a video from Dove, it shows how much photoshop can change a persons appearance.

     I find this video to be very sad yet eye opening. The fact that Americas image of beauty has become so distorted is just sick. Young girls grow up being shown that beauty is a synonym for perfection. To be beautiful one has to be tall, skinny, tan, have perfect skin, lips and eyes.

     Magazines show pictures of photoshopped women next to cosmetics, claiming that a certain brand of foundation made them beautiful when in reality it was a computer.

     The irony in the above picture is ridiculous. One of the first things a person sees when looking at this add are the words " Don't mask me. FIT ME". However the purpose of foundation is to mask real beauty in order to achieve the perfect ideal image of modern beauty.  Not only that, but the woman in the picture probably does not even resemble herself after all of the photoshop that has been done to her.

     In the beginning of this post I said that America has a culture that highly values this fake version of beauty.  I'm sure that as many other countries are becoming modern their ideas of beauty are becoming just as distorted as ours. However there are a few places in which the natural and unobsessed  relationship with beauty still exists.

     Dr. Campbell did a study on body image in a nomadic community in northern Kenya called the Ariaal. He found that "Ariaal men are much more consistent than men in other parts of the world in their views of the average man's body [one like their own] and what they think women want [one like their own]." (Kottak, 31) The Ariaal did not have billboards or magazines, they only had one TV playing CNN. Their body image had not been ruined by the media.

     I wish America could go back to a time before our image of beauty became distorted. However since we can not reverse the damage I think that it is our responsibility to educate young girls (and boys) on the powers of photoshop before their perceptions of beauty become just as distorted as the rest of ours.

References:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U

http://kimgray.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Screen-shot-2011-06-21-at-8.06.48-PM.png

Kottak, Conrad Phillip. Cultural Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity. 15th edition. New York. McGraw-Hill. 2013

Classroom Papers

     In class we read an essay by Min-Zhan Lu in which she described going to school in China where only certain forms of writing were acceptable and others were viewed as anti-revolutionary.

   
     Here in America we students have a little more freedom of expression, we can choose to write about many topics, even controversial ones. However I can also think of many ways in which the american school system forces certain rules and guidelines upon students.

     I can remember writing papers in high school and struggling my way through MLA format, I was so stressed about getting every period and comma right that some of the joy of writing was turned into stress. I wanted to make sure I wasn't accused of plagiarism, which is important however I think we could give credit where credit is due without having so many stressful rules.

     I can also remember having to write many different styles of papers with many different expectations in each kind. The universal expectation however was for students to use  a more sophisticated flowery language. The "better" writers used many hard words and long sentences. Flowery writing was never my style, I felt that it sounded silly and unnecessary. And now I see that content is in many cases better than unnecessary fancy words. It would have been nice if a teacher had told me that a long time ago so I could have enjoyed writing without that unnecessary stress.

Nonhuman Primate Communication

     Language, whether written or spoken is our primary means of communication as well as mode of cultural transmission.  Language is based on learned associations between words and the things they stand for.

     Only humans speak. No other animal has a communication system approaching the complexity of that of humans. Other nonhuman primates communicate through call systems which consist of a limited number of sounds that are only produced under certain environmental stimuli such as food. However these sounds are automatic and can't be combined. For example if food and danger are encountered at the same time they can't combine the two calls to communicate the same thing.

     Many believe that culture is only characteristic of humans, primarily due to language. However chimpanzees and gorillas definitely fall into that gray area. (This isn't to say that chimpanzees and gorillas are on the same level of cultural complexity as humans or that humans evolved from them...an argument I have no desire in starting on here. I simply want to point how interesting and smart chimpanzees and gorillas are. They aren't on the same level as humans however they are on a higher cultural and intelligence level than other animals.)

     Several apes have learned to converse with people through means other than speech such as ASL (American Sign Language). The first chimpanzee to learn ASL was Washoe and the second was Lucy. Both were raised by humans and both exhibited several human traits in their communication such as swearing, joking, telling lies and trying to teach language to others. For example Fouts (a researcher) arrived at Lucy's place and found a pile of excrement on the floor. When he asked her about it she replied "dirty, dirty", her expression for poop. When Fouts asked whose it was Lucy blamed it on Fouts's coworker Sue and later on him.

     Something I found very interesting was a reply to a reporter by Koko, a gorilla. When asked whether she was a person or an animal, Koko chose neither and replied : "fine animal gorilla". Koko knew she wasn't human but also that she wasn't simply an animal. Her intelligence was greater as well as her cultural ability.

     Many may wonder why then, if chimpanzees and gorillas are so smart, do they not have language in the wild? The answer is. they lack the mutated form of a  gene known as FOXP2. This mutated form allows humans to speak. Those who have the nonspeech version of the gene can't make the fine tongue and lip movements necessary for speech. A British family known as KE had a severe speech disorder. They had the nonspeech version of the gene and couldn't even talk to each other.

     Chimpanzees and gorillas could have an even more complex culture if they had the mutated form of FOXP2 like we do. And again, this isn't an argument in favor of evolution or any big debate, simply a few interesting facts and ideas that I hope you guys will find interesting.