A practicing sociologist has the gift of being able to recognize things that many people spend their entire life in ignorance of. These “things” are what construct an individual person’s sense of reality are ideas that very often differ culture to culture. To further explain this meaning, a person can consider the idea of thunder. In a Westernized culture, many people will hear the loud noise and automatically associate it with a storm. However, in other cultures some people may immediately think that their gods are angry with them and thus cause the sounds in a fit of rage. The interesting thing about this is that both ideas are a direct result of the culture and language in which the individual was raised or adapted into. Their individual culture has conceived its own unique idea as to what the sound is created from. The once nameless, or unidentified, happening suddenly came to mean something to the specific cultures. The importance is not drawn from what the sound actually is, but instead by how the groups of people identify it. Their language molds and shapes the way that people live and move throughout their “reality”. The sounds that they use to name the “things” is incredibly important in recognizing why the people react the way they do. In the example of thunder, it’s not that the Westernized people are directly reacting to the sound for fear of the actual sound, but instead by the fear that a storm may be coming. Likewise, the person who hears thunder and believes the gods are angry might react with fear and recant their sins or wrongdoing to their gods, not the thunder. Both groups of people use the knowledge they’ve been given through their culture and language to explain the things that they couldn’t independently exp...


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...om what they know, they believe that it is a violation of the ways things should be. They become ignorant of the cultures that they may be right in the middle of by comparing them to the culture that they are familiar with and grading it on a scale. This causes a level of unwillingness to change institutions within a society because they are the standard. This makes it exceedingly difficult to relate to other people and the world as a whole because when someone is always trying to look at something while envisioning it as something else; they will never fully see the beauty of what they are observing. They limit their own experience for the sake of comfort and security, for the safety found within the familiar. Ethnocentrism is the safety blanket for many people yet the enervation that prevents them from fully experiencing the world and all of its different cultures.