Simoné Bothma

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Learning Activity 1

In the following blog I am going to reflect on what I have learned in Study Unit 2 and how stereotypes, exoticization and misinformation has had an impact on my life.

I have learned that even though our world and mindsets as a human raise have progressed, we still tend to go back to our old ways of understanding different people. “The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs” (Horace,1956:503), as is our mindsets of today. We as citizens tend to fall back on previous events which impact our behavior towards a certain topic like, stereotyping. These prelisted events created “otherness”/ the ability of humans to separate themselves from others appose to different backgrounds.

As I watched the video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talking about the danger of a single story I couldn’t help but to think of the fact that most American’s believe that wild animals roam freely in the streets of Africa or that all Africans stays in huts. This is a perfect example to explain that a single story comes down to the fact that people create their own reality and therefore their own perspective about people by relying on stories from the past.

This mentioned facts all contribute to how people treat others different from them and therefore to the facts explained in Unit 2 of Social Anthropology.

 

Reference List:

Horace miner, 1956, Body Ritual among the Nacirema, https://www.jstor.org/stable/665280