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How social norms affect society
Impact of culture on people's behavior
Impact of culture on people's behavior
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To what extent do the belief systems in The King of Trees act as a means of enforcing societal norms?
Social norms are a natural part of any society and influence the course of human behavior. Societal culture is based generally on the interrelationships of fairly like-minded people with a shared belief system of accepted norms which leads to trust and predictability, and a stable community. The novellas in The King of Trees by Ah Cheng set in Communist China explores the expectation of conforming to societal rules with stories told from the perspective of characters who question why people are blindly following the expected social norms of the culture. When various characters throughout the novellas challenge the accepted belief system they are outcast, ridiculed, or punished as a deterrent. The King of Trees uses compelling stories to illustrate how a belief system, whether imposed or implied, enforces social norms.
Very different belief systems can result in stable cultures and communities. The King of Trees novella, focuses on how a powerful government can demand what is socially acceptable. The novellas are set in revolutionary China in the midst of major culture changes dictated by the government as necessary for people to live together successfully. The social norms are set by a popular government leader, Mao Zedong. The imposed belief system from his radical change to society, from a free-thinking population to one focused on the collective good, was the foundation of the what was sociably acceptable. The new social norm of working hard for the good of all is emphasized when in the first novella in The King of Trees, also titled The King of Trees, many characters are introduced including LiLi, a high spirited educ...
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...non-conformist attitudes, and in The King of Chess the chess fool defeating the old chess master symbolizes the act of the old culture being defeated by the new. The King of Trees depicts how the belief systems in revolutionary China enforced new social norms on the population. Understanding the power of the social norms that were imposed in China at this time helps the reader understand how individuality in the citizens might have been expressed as well as why the government felt threatened by such behavior. One theme in The King of Trees is that individuality is persistent despite what is socially acceptable, and understanding the concept of social norms allows one to appreciate both sides of the difficulty conforming to social norms.
Word Count: 1303
Work Cited
Cheng, Ah. The King of Trees. Trans. Bonnie S. McDougall. New York: New Directions, 2010. Print.
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
The book "The Baron in the Trees," by Italo Calvino is about the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, or simply known as Cosimo, spent almost all of his life living up in the trees of Ombrosa after refusing to eat the disgusting plate of snails that his sister had made for the family dinner one night when he was twelve. Cosimo kept to his word "I'll never come down again!" (Calvino 13) and he never set foot on the ground again. Cosimo was not bound to one tree though; he was able to travel to many parts of Ombrosa by tree, and lead a very adventurous and full life. The main point of my essay is to discuss the ongoing relationship between Cosimo and the environment.
...values, practices, ideals, expectations and self image joining together in order to achieve a common goal. In Yu-i’s case, the traditional Chinese community wanted to maintain ancient practices, while western oriented Chinese adults wanted to modernize the country and make it similar to the United States and Britain. In Kaysen’s case, abnormal behavior in communities resulted in admittance into the community of the mentally ill. The psychologically disturbed community wanted only to fit in, while the sane community decided that they were threats to society. Both Yu-i and Kaysen physically leave their group only to find that the community ideals have only made them better people.
Folkways are impulsive and passively observed in a way that there is little to no pressure, on individuals who violated such orders in the society. Children learn how to behave in agreements with those Folkways by observation from parents and adults in such society while Mores are norms of a society that have an official means of conforming the laws of the land. Norms are ways to guarantee that every member of a giving society behave according to the customary law of the land. An individual who breaks these laws are subjected to punishments. The society has this mores and people are assigned to enforce them and whoever that cannot conform to this law are liable for the consequences and this are just ways that every society use to promote orders and reinforcing that there is a uniformity in everyone's behavior in order to coexist in a giving society by order.
In conclusion, it can clearly be seen through all of the examples posed that the belief systems of a nation can both directly and indirectly influence a nation’s people and culture. Whether it be negative, such as Legalism’s harsh rule causing revolts and Confucianism’s filial piety causing economic downfall, or positive, such as Buddhism reuniting the people of China and Daoism’s advancement in sciences, the correlation is clear. This influence has occurred in nearly every nation that existed, and likely every nation to come, as it all revolves around a single idea: all of the actions we take, and the products which sprout from them, are rooted from our beliefs.
Cheng, Ah. The King of Trees. Trans: Bonnie S. McDougall. New York,NY: New Directions, 2010. Print.
The human phenomena of conscience and the instinctive concepts of respect and consideration are only a few of the positive qualities that have helped shape complex cultures with all the many different belief systems throughout the world. Every different society in the world has different laws and rules that guide the behavior of their members.
In Lord of the Flies, the boys take into account the context they are acting in. Upon realising their freedom from the rules of society, they defy morality by giving in to their human desires of violence and power. Nurture limits these unscrupulous desires, but human nature overrides nurture when nurture lacks constraints. This pattern occurs within any society. Whether the norms of a society are ethical or unethical, the beliefs are enforced upon that particular group. Society norms make an immense impact on individual
“The whole character of Chinese popular religion flows in the direction of plethora of rituals and obligations without much discernable doctrinal underpinning” (Corduan, 2012, p.410). The Chinese popular religion has gravitated away the gods of Buddha and Daoism and captured the philosophy of luck and materialism (Corduan, 2012), while it “is less concerned with philosophical issues and
In his poem, “Notes from the City of the Sun”, Bei Dao utilizes obscure imagery consistent with the Misty Poets and veiled political references to illustrate the struggles in Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. The poem is sectioned into fourteen short stanzas containing imagery that are symbolic of the cultural hegemony in China under the rule of Mao Zedong. Bei Dao, born Zhao Zhen-kai, is an anti-revolutionary poet and one of the founders of a group known as the Misty Poets. The Misty Poets wrote poems that protested the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong. Therefore, a lot of Bei Dao’s poems speak out against the Cultural Revolution and the restrictions that it placed on any form of art. Bei Dao’s poetry is categorized as “misty” because of the ambiguity in its references to Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. An obscure imagery that occurs twice in “Notes” is the sun imagery. Another imagery that depicts the injustice of the Cultural Revolution is the description of freedom as scraps of paper. In the poem, Bei Dao also equates faith to sheep falling into a ditch; this is a depiction blind faith during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how Bei Dao’s use of the Misty Poet’s ambiguous imagery and implicit political context in the poem “Notes from the City of the Sun” to illustrate the cultural hegemony in China under Mao.
The codification of deviance can vary widely between different cultures, a norm in one culture can be considered deviant in another. For example, the notion of cannibalism has been proved by anthropologists to be a spiritually divine form of ritualistic sacrifice in the ancient Aztec culture of Mexico. Yet in Western culture murder and the consumption of human flesh is considered highly revolting, dealt with by harsher consequences by law than most other deviant crimes. These differences are due to the way each individual society develops their own moral codes. These codes are often defined by cultural ideologies, adversity to other cultures and ritualistic practises which have become accepted, as well established patterns in the development of culture. Lloyd, M 2007 implies this by saying 'we are born into a pre existing (social) order the comes ready made with a large stock of norms and rules we must learn if we are to participate as c...
Through the characters and their experiences in The King of Children, Ah Cheng shows the effects that the Cultural Revolution had on education and how that affected the people’s search for personal meaning in education. The Cultural Revolution and Down to the Countryside’s elimination of all practical and economic incentives for receiving an education caused characters to find moral and ethical incentives for education, such as to protect others and to be able to communicate effectively.
...at maintain the harmony of the universe (Philosophy and Theory). This concept of balanced equilibrium is seen many times in Chinese mythology and applies well to real life aspects, especially with the notions of good and evil, and how the two interact in a given person or thing. Mythology in China also tends to show a discouragement towards violence, a main belief of Daoism and Shintoism. This religious concept aims to promote peace in society, where time usually wasted on trivial matters like arguments and war could be spent protecting nature and appeasing spirits (Collier 25). Religion in Chinese mythology has set certain guidelines in which followers of a given faith were expected to act accordingly based on the concepts they learned from legends. It has proved to be one of the more influential factors in the daily actions of those affected by Chinese traditions.
It holds that, as a matter of fact, moral beliefs and practices vary between cultures (and sometimes between groups within a single society). For instance, some societies condemn homosexuality; others accept it; in some cultures a student who corrects a teacher would be thought to be disrespectful; elsewhere such behavior might be encouraged. The rules, principles and standards that constitute a morality differ in different religions, and cultures, just as they differ historically. The morality of ancient Greece was not the morality of feudal Europe or contemporary American; the morality of the Trobriand Islanders is not the same as the morality of the Kwakiutl Indians (Barnet, 2008). In this paper I intend to argue that moral reasoning
On the edge of a small wood, an ancient tree sat hunched over, the gnarled, old king of a once vast domain that had long ago been turned to pasture. The great, gray knees gripped the hard earth with a solidity of purpose that made it difficult to determine just where the tree began and the soil ended, so strong was the union of the ancient bark and grainy sustenance. Many years had those roots known—years when the dry sands had shriveled the outer branches under a parched sun, years when the waters had risen up, drowning those same sands in the tears of unceasing time.