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A Politics Activity
Watch a half hour of one the evening news shows on one of the networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, or PBS) or on one of the cable news stations (CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC). How do they discuss politics and political leadership? (We think you will find similar assumptions about what is “political” on any of these programs.) What assumptions do they make about political leaderships? What constitutes politics? How is politics in America tied to the presumption of two political parties?
A Thought Activity: Embarrassment as Social Control
How do students in your dorm or in your classes use shame, ridicule, and gossip as a means of social control in small-scale societies? Think of how you feel when someone uses this on you. Now think of how someone else feels when a person shames or ridicules someone else. Anthropologists studying gossip, shame, and ridicule have observed that people can be influenced by ridicule only if the matter being ridiculed feels genuinely embarrassing to the one being ridiculed. (If your professor tried to ridicule you for not knowing advanced astrophysics, you would not be embarrassed because you have probably not studied astrophysics. So you wouldn’t feel ashamed.) Where does the feeling of shame come from? Why is ridicule so powerful a social force in the lives of college students?