This document discusses the social construction of the human body. It addresses how bodies are shaped by cultural and social factors like gender, age, and techniques of the body. While the body has a natural substrate, aspects like appearance, movement, and activity are culturally influenced. The document also examines representations of bodies in areas like masculinity, sexuality, and how consumer culture and medicine can fragment the view of the body. Emerging technologies may challenge conventional views of bodies and blur the distinctions with machines through notions like cyborgism.
Cross-Cultural Studies on Gender, Emotion and Personality. A Presentation summary based on the book from Matsumoto, D. & Juang, L. (2007). Culture and Psychology (4th Ed.). Wadsworth.
1. INTRODUCTION: All humans are sexual beings. Regardless of gender, age, race, socioeconomic status, religious beliefs, physical and mental health, or other demographic factors, we express our sexuality in a variety of ways throughout our lives.
2. Meaning and Definition on Sexuality:
1. Capacity for sexual feelings.
2. A person's sexual orientation or preference.
3. The condition of having sex
4. Sexual activity
5. Expression of sexual receptivity or interest especially when excessive
3.Sexuality:
Sexuality the working definition of sexuality is:
“…a central aspect of being human throughout life encompasses sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy and reproduction.
Sexuality is experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviours, practices, roles and relationships.
While sexuality can include all of these dimensions, not all of them are always experienced or expressed. Sexuality is influenced by the interaction of biological, psychological, social, economic, political, cultural, legal, historical, religious and spiritual factors.”
(WHO, 2006a)
4.Development of sexuality
At birth: gender assigned. It is common for 18 months old to play with genitals
3years: gender identification. Kids explore and fondle
4-5years: Normal to masturbate
School age: gender role behaviour is learned
6-12years: Identification with gender parent, both parents & kids have concerns & questions about sexuality & reproduction.
Cross-Cultural Studies on Gender, Emotion and Personality. A Presentation summary based on the book from Matsumoto, D. & Juang, L. (2007). Culture and Psychology (4th Ed.). Wadsworth.
1. INTRODUCTION: All humans are sexual beings. Regardless of gender, age, race, socioeconomic status, religious beliefs, physical and mental health, or other demographic factors, we express our sexuality in a variety of ways throughout our lives.
2. Meaning and Definition on Sexuality:
1. Capacity for sexual feelings.
2. A person's sexual orientation or preference.
3. The condition of having sex
4. Sexual activity
5. Expression of sexual receptivity or interest especially when excessive
3.Sexuality:
Sexuality the working definition of sexuality is:
“…a central aspect of being human throughout life encompasses sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy and reproduction.
Sexuality is experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviours, practices, roles and relationships.
While sexuality can include all of these dimensions, not all of them are always experienced or expressed. Sexuality is influenced by the interaction of biological, psychological, social, economic, political, cultural, legal, historical, religious and spiritual factors.”
(WHO, 2006a)
4.Development of sexuality
At birth: gender assigned. It is common for 18 months old to play with genitals
3years: gender identification. Kids explore and fondle
4-5years: Normal to masturbate
School age: gender role behaviour is learned
6-12years: Identification with gender parent, both parents & kids have concerns & questions about sexuality & reproduction.
Ch. 44-1Why Is Socialization Important Around the GlobeLO 1.docxsleeperharwell
Ch. 4
4-1Why Is Socialization Important Around the Globe?
LO 1
Debate the extent to which people would become human beings without adequate socialization.
Socialization is the lifelong process of social interaction through which individuals acquire a self-identity and the physical, mental, and social skills needed for survival in society (Figure 4.1). It is the essential link between the individual and society because it helps us become aware of ourselves as members of the larger groups and organizations of which we are a part. Socialization also helps us to learn how to communicate with other people and to have knowledge of how other people expect us to behave in a variety of social settings. Briefly stated, socialization enables us to develop our human potential and to learn the ways of thinking, talking, and acting that are necessary for social living.
Figure 4.1
The kind of person we become depends greatly on the people who surround us. How will this boy’s life be shaped by his close and warm relationship with his mother?
Christopher Futcher/ iStockphoto.com
When do you think socialization is most important? Socialization is the most crucial during childhood because it is essential for the individual’s survival and for human development. The many people who met the early material and social needs of each of us were central to our establishing our own identity. Can you identify some of the people in your own life who were the most influential in your earliest years of social development? During the first three years of our life, we begin to develop both a unique identity and the ability to manipulate things and to walk. We acquire sophisticated cognitive tools for thinking and for analyzing a wide variety of situations, and we learn effective communication skills. In the process we begin a socialization process that takes place throughout our lives and through which we also have an effect on other people who watch us.
What does socialization do for us beyond the individual level? Socialization is essential for the survival and stability of society. Members of a society must be socialized to support and maintain the existing social structure. From a functionalist perspective, individual conformity to existing norms is not taken for granted; rather, basic individual needs and desires must be balanced against the needs of the social structure. The socialization process is most effective when people conform to the norms of society because they believe that doing so is the best course of action. Socialization enables a society to “reproduce” itself by passing on its culture from one generation to the next.
How does socialization differ across cultures and ways of life? Although the techniques used to teach newcomers the beliefs, values, and rules of behavior are somewhat similar in many nations, the content of socialization differs greatly from society to society. How people walk, talk, eat, make love, and wage war are all functions of the cul.
“The fundamentals of science of living may be defined as” the body of knowledge consisting of certain principles which define the style of life, show the problems and solutions and present the path for the betterment of way of life. The modern and contemporary culture is having an impact on education. Education is more understood to be a training for getting some skills to earn and live luxuriously than to improve knowledge and inculcate culture to have a journey for truth. When the education and training are endowed with the value s then the system becomes more a path for perfection. Such education backed by training can make the man to observe, analyse, synthesise and interpret the actions of his bodymind complex and make him potential enough to do a thing, pragmatic enough to be efficient and wise enough to have a hunt for peace and bliss. In his hunt for peace and bliss he finds out the first hurdle in his mind.
There is no such thing as a typical entrepreneur. Some entrepreneurs are quiet and hard-working, while others are more outgoing and flamboyant. The key to being a successful entrepreneur lies in the ability to take an idea and then, through the process of innovation, develop it in such a way that it becomes a marketable product or service.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
3. Corporeal
Physical, and not spiritual,
of the body; relating to a
person's body, which is of a
material nature or tangible,
especially as opposed to
their spirit;
4. Our bodies are most decidedly
a part of nature, subject to
natural processes such as
growth and decay, hunger and
illness, and so forth, all of
which daily remind us of our
connection to a realm outside
society and culture.
5. While the human body consists
of an indisputable natural
substratum, cultural studies
takes seriously the notion its
appearance, condition, and
activity are culturally shaped.
6. Discussion of the human body
in cultural studies often also
refer to the related terms
‗mind‘ and ‗self‘. What are the
differences and relations
between these notions?
7. At least five specific features of
the bodies of humans
distinguish humans as species:
the capacity for binocular
vision, the audio-vocalic
system, bipedalism, hands, and
expressive capacity.
8. The capacity for binocular
vision – Most social encounters
begin with an assessment of the
appearance of the other. Most
generally, vision serves as the
coordinator of the senses.
9. The audio-vocalic system
The throat, mouth, and ears
are coordinated with the brain
and the central nervous system
to enable us to speak. The use
of language is our fundamental
symbolic capacity.
10. Bipedalism
We walk upright. Even in the
West‘s automobile-dominated
culture, walking remains the
basic way of moving around in
our world. Bipedalism also
enhances the way that our
vision works.
11. Hands – The fingers and
opposing thumb of the human
hand permit the manipulation
of objects in precise and
careful way. Tool use involves
complex bodily coordination
focused around the skilled use
of the hands.
12. Expressive Capacity
Humans have a capacity for
greater gestural complexity
than other primates. The faces
of humans can express a wide
range of emotions and some
embodied gestures (laughter)
appear to be unique to humans.
13. These five features frame the
kinds of activity in which
humans can engage. Thus,
cultural studies emphasizes
that the body is not merely a
material entity, biological
datum or physiological fact but
is a social construction.
14. Mind, however, is the capacity
for reasoned thought and
reflection, carried out by the
brain but not reducible to it.
The mind is regarded as
dwelling in the human body
but remains somehow distinct
from it.
15. The mind-body split is often
linked to a number of further
contrasts:
mind – body
private – public
inner – outer
culture – nature
reason – passion
16. This schema gives prominence
to mind in defining the person.
The body is seen, at best, as the
mind‘s vehicle and, at worst, as
driven by desires and appetites
that need the mind‘s
restraining influence,
guidance, and command.
17. Body and mind are better
thought of as interdependent,
not as separate entities. It is
also important to understand
that the human body straddles
the realms of ‗nature‘ and
‗culture‘.
18. The functioning of the material
body must obey natural
processes – we all have to sleep
and eat – but how sleeping,
eating, and other bodily activity
actually occurs in inescapably
framed social and cultural
factors.
19. Consider the very noticeable
significance of age and gender
in the treatment of the human
bodies. Except for transsexuals
the assignment of ‗male‘ and
‗female‘ is a categorization that
is exhaustive of the population
and lifelong in duration.
20. Age is, in many societies, no
less significant. At every stage
of life, there are expected forms
of behavior and culturally
defined and approved
experiences.
22. Shakespeare‘s 7 Ages of Man
1. Infancy
In this stage he is a helpless
baby and knows little.
23. 2. Childhood – It is that stage
of life that he begins to go to
school. He is unwilling to leave
the protected environment of
his home as he is still not
confident enough to exercise
his own judgment.
24. 3. The lover – In this stage he
is always remorseful due to
some reason or other,
especially the loss of love. He
tries to express feelings
through song or some other
cultural activity.
25. 4. The Soldier – It is in this age that
he thinks less of himself and begins to
think more of others. He is very easily
aroused and is hot headed. He is
always working towards making a
reputation for himself and gaining
recognition, however short-lived it
may be, even at the cost of his own
life.
26. 5. The Justice - In this stage he has
acquired wisdom through the many
experiences he has had in life. He
has reached a stage where he has
gained prosperity and social status.
He becomes very attentive of his
looks and begins to enjoy the finer
things of life.
27. 6. Old Age – He begins to lose
his charm — both physical and
mental. He begins to become
the butt of others' jokes. He
loses his firmness and
assertiveness, and shrinks in
stature and personality.
28. 7. Extreme Old Age
He loses his status and he
becomes an insignificant
person. He becomes
dependent on others.
29. Therefore, gender, in
tandem with age, provides
two of the deepest
determinants of the cultural
and social shaping of the
human body.
31. Very obviously, the body is the
means or instrument for carrying
out all the practical action through
which people engage the world.
Marcel Mauss devised the concept
of ‗body techniques‘ to describe the
ways in which society to men know
how to use their bodies.
32. There is no ‗natural‘ form to bodily
actions, no pan-human, pre-
cultural, universal or inherent
shape to actions such as walking,
swimming, spitting, digging,
marching, even staring or giving
birth. Rather, bodily actions are
historically and culturally variable.
33. However, body techniques are
vary quite conspicuously
according to gender and age
differences, the effects of
training, and the transmission
and acquisition of these
techniques.
34. For example, women deliver weak
punches in part because they
usually clasp their thumbs inside
their fingers; women throw
differently from men; children can
squat with ease while most adult
Westerners cannot.
36. Young identify differences in
Western industrial societies in how
women ‗hold‘ themselves
(comportment), their manner of
moving (motility), and their
relation to space (spatiality) which
are more limited and circumscribed
than the behaviors of men.
37. ―Girls don‘t bring their whole
bodies into the motion as much as
the boys. They don‘t reach back,
twist, move backward, step and
lean forward. Rather, the girls tend
to remain relatively immobile
except for their arms and even the
arm isn‘t extended as far as it can.‖
38. Feminine comportment and
movement is characteristically
marked by a failure to use the
body‘s full potential range of
motion. Some examples:
Women are generally not as open
with their bodies as men in their
gait and stride.
39. Typically, the masculine stride is
longer proportional to a man‘s
body than is the feminine stride to
a woman‘s. The man typically
swings his arms in a more open
and loose fashion than does a
woman typically more up and down
rhythm in his steps.
40. When simply standing or
leaning, men tend to keep their
feet further apart than do
women, and women tend more
to keep their hands and arms
touching or shielding their
bodies.
41. The origins of this characteristic
features of feminine comportment
and movement are not innate, but
currently dominant forms of
feminine motility serve to restrict
and inhibit the realization of
women‘s intentionality.
43. During social encounters, such as
when we are engaged in a
conversation with a friend or are
travelling on public transport, we
feel the need to acquire
information about others – their
status and identity, mood and
orientation towards us and so on.
44. •Facial expression
•Stance
•Limbs disposition
•Tone of speech
These are ‗body idioms‘ which
describes ‗dress, bearing,
movements and position, sound
level, physical & facial gestures
and broad emotional expressions
45. For example, Goffman shows how
walking involves a range of
cultural understandings about
types of people:
1. who may have to be managed
or avoided
(beggars, market researchers,
pamphleteers)
46. 2. Those to whom special care
must be exercised (the frail,
people with canes or guide
dogs, toddlers)
3. Those who can be turned to
for reliable directions (traffic
wardens, police)
47. 4. Those who want us to
stop and listen and watch
(buskers, mime artists)
5. Those who look likely to
threaten our persons and
property.
48. In walking down a street, we
constantly monitor our own bodies
and those of others to avoid
collisions – less complicated when
we are ‗single‘ (solitary walker)
than if we are ‗with‘ (accompanied
by others with whom we must
coordinate our progress.
49. This involves scanning upcoming
pedestrians but doing so in an
unobtrusive and non-threatening
way. Goffman calls this the norm
of ‗civil inattention‘. The
orderliness of many public places
depends on people following this
rule.
52. One element of hegemonic
masculinity involves bodily
displays of aggression and
violence. This is often regarded
as facilitated, if not actually
caused by male masculature
and chromosomal heritage.
53. Among teenage working-
class boys, for example, a
certain amount of pushing
and punching, playfully
framed, can function as
signifier of friendship.
54. Sometimes, this aggressive
behavior can be personal (e.g.
assault, fist fights, etc.) or
institutionalized (e.g. wars, etc)
and one of the best specific
institutionalized examples is
the fascist ideologies.
55.
56.
57. Fascist
a political system based on a
very powerful leader, state
control and being extremely
proud of country and race, and
in which political opposition is
not allowed.
58.
59.
60. This warrior mentality sharply
polarizes bodily characteristics
along gender lines. Women are
regarded as soft, fluid, a subversive
source of pleasure or pain who
must be contained and negative
‗other‘ to be hived off from
authentic masculine existence.
61. Men therefore need to police
the boundaries of their bodies
carefully, and through drills
and exercises develop a
machine-like, organized, and
hard body that can resist
merger or fusion with others,
and that is reliably autonomous
62. In this belief system, the
pleasure of combat is highly
praised and killing comes to be
seen as a means of affirming a
man‘s wholeness, a way of
asserting coherence of his body
and self by invading the bodily
boundaries of others.
63. The movie industry, now just a
century years old, has proved to
be a potent source of
representations of masculinity.
Arguably, there is a greater
range of masculinities on offer
in popular films than
femininities.
64.
65. It needs to be emphasized that
male bodily power is evident in
many, very much more
mundane settings, such as
angling on a river or canal
bank.
68. The representations of the
human body, in particular by
postmodern technologies of
photography and film, has
stimulated a range of debates
about the limits of acceptable
images of the human body.
69. The representations of the
human body, in particular by
postmodern technologies of
photography and film, has
stimulated a range of debates
about the limits of acceptable
images of the human body.
70.
71.
72. We must realize that there is a
distinction between ‗erotica‘
and ‗pornography‘. Erotica has
its roots in the Greek word for
‗love‘, and generally connotes
a diffuse source of sexual
stimulation.
73.
74. Pornography, however, pushes
sexual explicitness to the
extreme. It is a form of
representation that graphically
depicts sexuality in order to
stimulate its consumers.
75. It is also important to
distinguish between
‗offence‘ and ‗harm‘. What
persons and groups find
offensive varies and is a
matter of taste and moral
conviction.
76. When we claim that some
object or arrangement is
harmful, we are
maintaining that it has
measurable deleterious
effects on people‘s attitudes
and behavior.
77. For example, we may well
find offensive the cartoons
that children watch on TV,
but it is different matter
entirely to hold that these
cartoons are harmful.
78. Manifestly, there are many
sexualized images that give offence
to individuals or groups, but to
claim that pornography is harmful
is to propose that negative, anti-
social consequences can be proven
to follow from its existence and
consumption.
81. The human body is
increasingly coming to be
treated not as a unitary
whole but a differentiated
entity requiring specialized
treatment.
82. Consumer culture
fragments the body into a
series of body parts to be
maintained through diet,
cosmetics, exercise,
vitamins, etc.
83.
84. Also, there are a wide range of
cosmetics to be applied to the
many different parts of the
body: mouth, hair, skin, eyes,
lips, teeth, legs, feet – and
products and applications
continue to diversify
85.
86.
87. Health care is provided
by medical specialisms
which divide the body up
into specific regions and
functions.
88.
89. The fragmentation of the
body into a collection of
body parts can be regarded
as implicated in the larger
process of fragmentation in
the contemporary world.
90. The concept of cybernetic
organism or ‗cyborg‘ is
another challenge to
conventional essentialist
understanding of the
human body.
91. The cyborg was originally
conceived as neuro-
physiologically modified
human body that could
withstand the demands of
space journeys.
92.
93. In reality, however, the
cyborg combination of the
mechanical with human is
already with us, evident in
the extensive use of simple
prosthetic devices.
94.
95. It is also apparent in the wide
acceptance of cosmetic surgery,
biotechnological devices like
pacemakers, the use of
vaccination to program the
immune system to destroy
viruses and advances in genetic
engineering.
96.
97.
98. Humans are immersed in the
world, producing their
humanness in relationships
with each other and with
objects. We exercise in the gym,
play sports in specialist shoes,
and contact people by mobile
phones.
99. These routine interactions with
machines and technology draw
us into increasingly
international technocultural
networks – bringing an
important sense that we are all
cyborgs now.
100. For Haraway, the cyborg
notion refers to the hybrid
networks that arise from the
incorporations of humans
into technologies designed
to assist human projects.
101. The enormous impact of
techno-science on the home,
market, workplace, school, and
hospitals offer the potential to
override the old determinations
of class, race, and gender and
establish new modes of human
being.