Society

The words my group and I have chosen are deconstruction, diaspora, society, reform and revolution, and race. My word is society. Society to me is, a institution to which people live in, interact, and learn certain rules regarding behavior such as social norms and social roles/scripts. Scripts refer to the unspoken set of rules one follows in a certain social context. For instance, when eating at restaurant, a person has learned to wait to be seated, and to provide a tip at end of the meal. Society is where we grew up. It's one of our biggest classrooms outside of home, it's where we learned a lot about life and the people around us. Society has taught us to exhibit behavior X in situation Y. When growing up, I hear a lot of remarks from my father about society. I remember a lot of these comments vividly such as “wow I can’t believe how much society is changing” (in terms of trends, technology) and “it’s good that you have a job now, you’re interacting with society” and “until you come out to the ‘real world’ you won’t really understand how society is like”.

Society is an institution in where people interact. Through their institutions, certain rules, customs, and values are shared. Not every society shares the same values however. I remember having a lecture in my Psychology of Emotion class on morality. There was a hypothetical scenario where two siblings were away on a trip and had sex with double protection. They both enjoyed it, was it okay? As expected, some of my classmates suggested that it wasn’t, however when the professor asked them to state why, nobody was able to find a ‘logical’ explanation. Most explanations against it was either based on or influenced by emotion, or tied to their set of values. I raised my hand and suggested, “it’s only not okay because society said it’s not”. While many societies view incest as completely taboo, there are a few societies that practice royal incest. Within our society incest is wrong, but in others it is encouraged. Different societies may operate differently and have a different set of rules. Because societies can be so different, it is hard to define. As written in "New Keywords", the term society has been controversial. Margaret Thatcher suggests 'there is no such thing as society' while the early images of society are of an organism or 'living structure'. Although society is intangible, I do believe it exists.How societal rules, values, customs, and social norms are created are far beyond my knowledge, as is why they vary so much from society to society. What intrigues me the most is the fact that I am a product of society, and individuals such as myself are the ‘creators’ of our society; without us, there probably wouldn’t be a society, yet we as individuals are relatively powerless to define our society’s rules. Or perhaps it is quite the opposite.