Cultural Values and Subcultures

This week in sociology we talked about cultural values. We learned how even though a lot of the things we do are normal to us, that is only because we have grown up thinking these things are important because the people surrounding us think so too. We read an excerpt from The Values Americans Live By and a few values stood out especially strong to me. Self Help/Initiative was one. In high school you are surrounded by people who either are active in school and get good grades or are lazy and do nothing. People who don't take initiative in school would be characterized as "lazy" even though that may not be the case. America is so competitive where if you're not constantly trying to climb higher and higher then there is something wrong with you. Americans need to take a step back and realize though that not everyone thinks that way and just because they aren't constantly climbing doesn't make them an underachiever. Another example is Action/Work Orientation which implies that people need to always be productive and efficient to be able to be successful. I have stepped back and realized that this is apparent everywhere especially in Stevenson also. Some students have such a jam packed day or stay up really late studying that they forget how important sleep is and automatically make that their last priority. Many people feel it isn't productive to just go to bed when there are lots of things to be done but in many other cultures, the idea of sleeping or resting is actually favored because it is productive in a way that helps restore your mind and body.

Another thing we talked about this week was all of the Subcultures or, smaller groups that people in society can fit into. We used Stevenson as an example and talked about the different types of material culture, mores, folkways, unique language, unique symbols and values that the people at Stevenson all posses. I began thinking about the other subcultures I might be apart of and realized I belong to a lot of them. One of them would be the town, Buffalo Grove, that I have lived in for the last four years. There are lots of trends that all of the people living in the area wear or have which could be part of our material culture. Living here with all of your friends there are always places that you shouldn't or should go at certain times, names for parks or places to go that people not from around Buffalo Grove might not understand and specific values that the majority of us all believe in to some extent. It is cool to think that just within the area I live in, there are so many people that I can still be connected to that I may not even know but they follow the same set of unwritten rules as I do because we belong to the same subculture.