Title: What is “Beauty”?
Topic: Naïve Realism
Relation: Introduction of Conformity and Conflict, page 5. The authors
explain the term Naïve realism and this post explores this concept in relation
to ideals of beauty.
Source: The data that I used for this post comes from the article “Fat Is Beautiful”
written by Dr. Susan
Albers
Description: “Fat is beautiful”
by Susan Albers, talks about how each culture values the meaning of beautiful differently.
This article starts with talking about
the show that is called Price of Beauty.
This show’s theme is that the meaning of beauty is defined uniquely in each and
every culture. Jessica Simpson and her friend who starred in this show went to visit
a remote tribe in Uganda with vastly different ideas from other western
countries. They also had a trip to France and interviewed a woman who is
suffering from anorexia; in France to be skinny is to meet the cultural
definition of a beautiful woman. However, when they traveled to Uganda, they
realized that Uganda people have different values of beauty than those of Westerners.
They think a full figure is reflected as a beautiful woman. Uganda people even
go to “fattening hut” to gain weight before their marriages, and they need to
drink several jugs of milk. According to this article, we could clearly see how
each culture has different perceptions of beauty.
Analysis: The introduction of Conformity and Conflict explains to us some
of the new terminology that we have to know while we are learning Cultural
Anthropology. On page 5 the author explains the term Naïve realism as follows: Naïve realism is the belief that people
everywhere see the world in the same way. If an ethnographer fails to control
his or her own naïve realism, inside cultural meanings will surely be
overlooked. When I read this article, it could be related with naïve realism
because it shows the different perspectives of beauty between French (and also
many other Western cultures) and Uganda people. This clearly implies that we should realize not all the countries have a same point of view of things. Also
people sometimes think, decide, and consider completely different ideas to what
I think is right. Therefore, I think
people should think with cultural relativism but do not think in
naïve realism which is really a harmful way to look at the world globally.
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