Very nice video as always. However, as a linguistic anthropologist, I feel I should give some clarification on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that I feel the video lacked (most likely due to time constraints and not due to the producers neglecting or mischaracterising Sapir's work). I apologize in advance for the long comment. First, Sapir was not only a linguist but he was also an anthropologist. Although later generations of anthropologist have criticized some of his conclusions on Hopi languages Sapir's works are still very influential in the field of linguistic anthropology. Second, the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not something that Sapir, nor his teacher Whorf, ever came up with. It was rather a synthesis of their work by later scholars. I've seen in the comments that some people have mentioned the "strong' vs. 'weak' version of this hypothesis and that either Sapir or Whorf advocated one or the other. This is not completely true as neither Sapir nor Whorf ever advocated for the "hypothesis" in the first place. However, it is true that in their writings you can see arguments that can be said as having a "strong" believe that language greatly influences thought, or a "weak" believe in the same. It is true that most linguistic anthropologists (myself included) and some linguist do favor a "weak Sapir-Whorf." For most linguistic anthropologists language, thought, and culture influence one another but which one has the strongest influence is still debated. Most linguistic anthropologists argue that language will predispose someone to think a certain way rather than determine someone's thought. For example, John Lucy (1992, 1996, 1997); Lucy and Gaskins (2003)) looked at whether languages that classify most nouns as mass nouns (e.g. sugar is a mass noun in English. You need a unit of measurement to count sugar. You can't say three sugars but, you can say three teaspoons of sugar) are more likely to classify objects by material composition. The research showed that language such as Yucatec, in which all nouns are of this latter type, and plural marking is never obligatory, though speakers may opt to signal the plural if they wish to do so, much as with similar kinds of uncountable mass nouns in English. (Ahearn, Laura M. (2016-10-06). Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (Primers in Anthropology) (Kindle Locations 2672-2673). Wiley. Kindle Edition) speakers are more likely to group objects based on material composition (e.g. in a group of plastic and wooden combs and brushes they will group all plastic combs and brushes together and all wooden combs and brushes together). This is different for English speakers where most nouns are count nouns and you can have a plural marker (e.g. car/s). English speakers will tend to group objects by shape (so in the combs and brushes example we would group combs together and brushes together since they are the same shape regardless of material composition). When it comes to the idea of language predisposing you to certain ways of thinking rather than determining how you think the example above is a good demonstration of that. If you are asked to categorized objects by material and you are an English speaker you are able to do so. However, if you are just asked to group objects then you are more predisposed to do so by shaped and Lucy would argue that there is a strong correlation with that thought pattern and wheter your language has mostly mass nouns or count nouns. Again sorry for the long post :)
The problem with it is, ignorance of progress of language in time. Langugage will evolve and become complitaced with time not because of itself but the change in our understanding of reality. For example a traditional nationalist and a socialist can talk about social equality in a very different way that just because of the vocabulary they use they will likely to try kill eachother (that is what happened in Turkey from 1950ies to 1980ies). Sapir Worf theorem can totally disregard new way of using words or inventing new ones, that way it looks tome like in the eyes of a sapir-worf supporter language is a lot stagnant than it is in reality, like the meaning of words can change easily, for example the word arabic "Ala" means up or upper today, but if there is a possiblity for to be meant "to or for" in its' usage when prophet SAV was living it can show why the Muslim society had more gender equality than at epoc of Arabic Empire and their embrace of sedentary life after one or two centuries later.
I am a Namibian student doing CSI(Contemporary Social Issues) which is an online course,we dont get lectures or explanations and never have time to read the notes(which are nothing but long articles written by old guys).So this video and along with many other videos Have been super helpful.Thank you CrashCourse MAHN I LOVE THIS CHANNEL!!!!!!!
As a person who studies and creates languages as a hobby, this video was extremely helpful for me especially considering that I'm relatively new to the topic at hand. Thank you.
I click every single one of these videos expecting it to sound like tumblr, and then it always turns out to be interesting, thoughtful, and rational. This is an awesome series.
hey, just a heads up: at 3:25 in the captions, it says "the masculine is male" instead of "the moon is masculine" and i just thought i'd point that out so it can get fixed! thanks!
I love this kind of honest learning and discussion school usually put norm before knowledge, the teacher will get awkward and the student will be too scared to be honest, also some parent will be way over protective if there's something a little offensive on the subject being taught I want knowledge yet that is the last thing they give you at school
Brilliant synopsis of some common yet confused Sociological terms, lucidly explained that would make sense even to a layman. A wonderful crash course series!
I am a behavioral sciences major which means I focused on anthropology/sociology/psychology. I had to focus on one, and loved sociology as it answered more for me than the other two. But I love how this video pieced all three together. I am currently interesed in different masters programs. Special programs such as: Anthropology, applied and evaluation research, collective behavior and social movements, conflict resolution, Cultural, emotions,social thought, social linguistics, mass comm, qualitative metholodlogy, social control, social inequality, theory, stratification mobility
Stop signs around the world also differ slightly but are still instantly recognizable. PS I'm so glad the whole, "Sociology is not a science!!" mob has quieted down. It was getting hard to watch. Sincerely, someone with a bachelors in sociology.
"PS I'm so glad the whole, "Sociology is not a science!!" mob has quieted down. It was getting hard to watch." Time and patience won out here when the writers of this great series very smartly wrote a neutral look at sociological theories and its historical development. I mean, it's been weeks later and this laissez faire capitalist is still amazed at how well done that episode on Karl Marx was!
Money (status) is the all-time ideal or goal in western culture, while this may not be true for everyone, I'd say it is for most people. I wish more people devoted their life towards creating something useful for society, not just making money for the sake of it...or worse damaging others for it. But everywhere there are symbols of status reminding people that if they don't have good looks, money or whatever then they are not good enough. Logically we can know it isn't the case, but they are SO powerful anyway. I hope to live long enough to see a society as described by Jacque Fresco, where mundane everyday activities are automated enough that everyone enjoys the same opportunities and everyone can focus on developing themselves in whatever way they want without caring if someone has more or better things than them
Sociology studies how culture influences language. Anthropology studies how human language forms and what all human language has in common. Do these two disciplines ever intersect on this subject or do they ignore each other's theories?
Hi there. I'm a linguistic anthropologist so I might be able to answer your question. Although some anthropologists do study similarities between language most linguistic anthropologist are interested in the intersection of language and culture and how these two influence one another (you can throw thought into the mix too). Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology do intersect. For example, an area of study that both linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists look at is the intersection between language and gender (how do gender norms influence language use and how do this language use reinforces those norms can be an example of this interaction). One of the biggest differences between sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologists is their methodologies. Although this is oversimplifying it, as there are examples of people in both disciplines using a variety of methods, sociolinguists tend to rely more on quantitative methods (e.g. statistics) while linguistic anthropologists tend to use more qualitative methods (e.g. ethnography). Nevertheless, I know that both sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists work closely together and tend to draw from the same theoretical frameworks, attend similar conferences, and even collaborate with one another. Hope this answers your question.
I think that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis needs more elaboration, and perhaps a look at competing or related hypotheses. Perhaps CrashCourse Linguistics?
Some good books to check out on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis are Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
That thing about the gender of nouns, I feel it very important and I can't imagine how native English speakers see things. I mean, while learning Spanish I was surprised that it is "el dia" and "el agua". I still am. In my native Romanian, the nouns day and water are feminine and I can't compute how a day and water can be a male. It is so strange. I say "el agua", but I still think of it as feminine. The moon is feminine though. How can it be masculine ?? Germans ... The sun is a problem, as it is masculine and conflicts with star, which is feminine. But the strangest of things is the hybrid neuter gender that we have in Romanian. For example, one tractor is masculine, while two tractors is feminine. That applies for most objects, like instrument, hammer, chair and so on. So, I always imagine a single tractor as a male, but two tractors become females. It's hard to picture things in Romanian.
I actually heard of synesthesia a few months ago and I instantly thought of how I see the seasons/months of the year. I picture them as a circle with winter at the top and summer at the bottom. Right now, being May, we are going downhill and moving from a green area to a green-yellow area. I even feel relieved when we pass January, as I know it's all downhill from there. But I never thought that how I see nouns is also connected. I will try to find out.
In Dutch we don't have (explicit) grammatical gender, yet we do consistently refer to the moon as a "she" so I side with you guys, the Germans are crazy
That elevator thing totally happened to me. A woman walked in, turned away from me and faced the side wall, looking down. If she had behaved normally, I wouldn't have looked at her twice. She was acting oddly, and thinking she might be unwell, I looked over to see if she was all right. Well, that depends on your politics. It was Linda Tripp from the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinski scandal. Her government agency at the Pentagon had moved into my building during the Pentagon renovations in the late 90s. It was after the Impeachment hearings and after she'd had all the plastic surgery. We'd heard she was working in the building. Since she clearly wanted her privacy, I didn't say anything to her. I passed her a couple of other times in the lobby or elevators in the few months before the 2001 Bush Inauguration ended her employment with that agency.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is widely considered discredited among philosophers. There's no question that language and thought interact, but it's nowhere near as simple as language confining thought. Sure some people will find it difficult to think something clearly if they can't put it into words, but then we turn around and produce new language to express thoughts that can't be expressed in our existing languages to fix that problem.
There are actually two versions: The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the one Whorf actually advocated, says that language constrains thought and is almost universally considered false by linguists. The weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that language influences thought and is still debated among linguists. Proponents are responsible for studies like the ones quoted in the video.
I think most people go on auto-pilot for the majority of their time. If we can't immediately think about something as our language doesn't give them the means, most of us would just not bother with it. Only a select few would go out their way pursuing the idea and fixing the gap in their language It's not an unmovable constraint, but it still is an obstacle for people, and it takes time to conquer it..
"fixing the gap in their language" I don't think this is really the idea. The moon example given in the video would be a counterpoint to the notion of a 'gap' - which of German, Spanish, or English has a gap in identifying the gender of the moon? I think it's more the notion that IDEAS and confined by language, which doesn't even strike me as a good way to think about cognition (for one thing it assumes a separation of idea and language).
"Fixing the gap in their language" is a suboptimal way to phrase the idea; it's about correcting any deviation from a 1:1 mapping of mental states to linguistic expressions, however necessary to accurately convey your mental states via those linguistic expressions. That could be by "filling gaps" with new words, or by innumerable other processes of adjusting the language. In the case of the Moon's gender, it's German and Spanish that have the defect here, in that most of their words get put into gendered categories when the objects those words refer to often don't actually have gender, at least not in the sense of sexually delineated categories. I know that grammatical gender is a broader concept than that and predates the use of gender in the sociological sense we mean nowadays. But the moon isn't a man or a woman, it's a sexless object, and those languages lack a way to refer to it as such. The adjustment necessary to fix that would be something like adopting the use of their neuter grammatical genders for those objects and then coming up with gender-neutral articles and other pronouns; say for example, maybe an expression like "elle lune", instead of "(el)la luna" or "el(lo) luno".
"it's about correcting any deviation from a 1:1 mapping of mental states to linguistic expressions" What could this possibly mean, though? What is a 'mental state'? And how could one ever conceive of a linguistic expression divorced from thought? There are no utterances apart from thought - and even if there were you could never demonstrate one without being an active listener. As for the moon gender, your argument is sensible but I fail to see how it's a 'defect'. Aside from the argument that gender is a social categorization and thus not inappropriate to ascribe to inanimate things, I just don't see what is broken about doing so. I mean this in the sense of broken in comparison to what, or according to what metric? Is the argument that language should never implicitly ascribe categories which don't describe the thing? Who gets to decide when a category can or cannot be assigned to something? And how do they decide it? And what language do they use to do so? 0.o
I have some difficulty with the term Transmission of Culture. 'Transmission' implies some form of medium whereby cultural norms etc can be exchanged ( eg. air waves for sound). I would prefer to think we negotiate culture the same way we negotiate meaning; using language in all its forms to share positives and negatives. When we socialise our children ('George, don't do that!) we are involved in negotiating cultural norms. However, we can never KNOW if our norms are the same as another person's. We can only interpret their behaviour and language in the light of our own understanding. Like any science, you cannot be totally outside the observation as making the observation involves changing the system in some subtle and not so subtle way. This doesn't mean we should give up experimenting, but it should encourage us to be aware of our own involvement and biases.
Aaah, the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis. Controversial, to say the least. But pretty cool. I'm glad it got mentioned, but that its more sketchy aspects weren't left out.
In many cases, values and norms are the same because we value a behaviour as ideal or unappealing based on the norms we have. I think that is important to recognise
Surprised she didn't mention that for some rules it's a norm to break a more; like driving 5 miles over the speed limit is what people DO though it is technically breaking a law.
I really wish my university had a better sociology program when I went there. I took Intro to Soc. and the prof had such a thick accent I couldn't comprehend what she was saying even sitting directly in front of her in the first row. Anytime she could make a list of steps for a process she would start with step 1, jump ahead to step 4, back to 2, never address step 3 and done! Given all of that, I still got an A- on the first exam. But guess what? That wasn't good enough for her. It was 100% or take the test again until you got 100% - and the tests were entirely essay format. It was the only class I ever dropped in college.
in case it gets lost on anyone, "killing someone in self defense" being ok doesn't mean that while defending yourself it's ok to go ahead and kill another person. it means that you *may* _accidentally_ kill a person while in the process of defending yourself from said person and it wouldn't be considered a criminal charge. so do your best not to kill anyone under any circumstances. and don't look for excuses to do so.
I think people mis-interpreted Worf's analysis of the Hopi language. I don't think he said the Hopi couldn't conceive of time, just that they don't have words that correspond to bounded units of time. this conception affected the way they saw the world and their customs. It was other scholars who said Hopi couldn't understand time the way English speakers do.
I was very surprised when I saw that the French word for butterfly is masculine because as a native speaker of Spanish I always imagine them with feminine characteristics.
I would probably have referred to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as linguistic relativism, as it directs to a much more developed academic discourse, and discussions are generally more developed.
This is a really good crash course and I really like it thus far, but maybe make a better thumbnail, I almost miss it every time and it's so kinda underwhelming, but other than that keep going at this, it's awesome ^^
It seems very weird that these courses make a point to say they use Adobe. Do you recive free products or support? Do they donate to the show? I have never for instance read a book that started "this book was written with a uniball micropoint 0.05 mm pen in a mead notebook" nor any project that made a point of informing you of what office supplies were used. While not important the sheer oddness and repetition of it has left it stuck in the back of my mind for years. I rewatch almost the entirety of CC every 8 months or so and have since it's inception so I have probably seen the outro more than any human in existence =).
what about cannibalism in a situation of absolute survival. Like the Donner Party or being stranded at sea and someone dies on your boat. Idk if I would consider cannibalism a taboo. If I'm being honest.
You've got the "norm" "normal" relation backward. Something is not "a norm" as in a rule iff it's "normal" as in common, typical, or average. The older sense of the root "norm" is the rule-related one (coming from an even older geometric sense of a "rule" as in "a straight line"), and "normal" originally meant "in accordance with the rules". It is only from an assumption that what everyone else is doing must be the right thing to do that "normal" took on the sense meaning common, typical, or average. But it's entirely possible that people may commonly, typically, on average, do the wrong thing, in which case what's "normal" (in the modern sense) may violate norms.
Can examples of symbolic interactionism today be like the gender equality movement (women and LBGT), or like the health movement on veganism (even tho veganism might be based on new technology info) or smoking ciggeretes, and lastly, could symbolic interactionism relate to how we treat others different like from another culture? Racism? Please I don’t understand. I know these are kind of macro level examples but it started by the word of mouth right??
Could you add some references for the definitions you give? Like for the definition of culture from the beginning of the video? It would help us, the students in a hurry to write a research paper, more... just saying
So what would someone who follows a different culture other than the one they were raised with would be called? Ex. A Belgian who follows Greek cultural things
Of course we drive on the right and the Brits and Japanese on the left. Those are obviously norms. If anybody is interested in the concept of "norms" in a serious way, like for a course, they should check out an article by Anselm Strauss, late of UCSF, in which he virtually destroys the notion in more complicated contexts, like hospitals. I wish I could provide the source but I don't remember. It appeared in a medical journal, if I remember, about 30 years ago. I'm pretty sure it can be identified by its title in Staruss's bibliography. He was, by the way, a remarkable guy. Dying of heart failure, he taught seminars from his living room couch.
(long post) This video got me thinking about my culture as an American Southerner. I think many Americans from outside the South would benefit a great deal in their ability to relate to Southern ways of thinking if they took the time to look into innate values of the culture apart from aspects of the culture that they disagree with, making them turn off to any further understanding. Let me preface all of this by saying racism is bad. It's not good. It's not even okay. It's bad. I think it's bad, and so should you. Anyway. One major symbol of Southern culture that causes disconnect between Southerners and the rest of the country is the Confederate flag. From a historical perspective and a modern, non-Southern perspective it represents slavery, racism, and a group of states that caused a Civil War over wanting to keep them alive and well. In the South, it has a completely different meaning. It's been divorced from the beliefs of the Confederacy, because (despite popular belief) basically everyone in the South, outside small white supremacist sects, agrees that the racist ideals of the Confederacy were wrong. What appeals about the flag, though is the idea of a group seeing itself so different from the rest of a group that it is willing to break apart from the group and fight for independence on those grounds. Rebellion for the sake of a unique national identity. When viewed apart from the Civil War, the idea is almost romantic depending on the setting. I'll pause here to say I personally have not and will not ever fly the flag due to the other negative cultural meanings carried by the flag apart from these positives. Think of Scotland and how its people see themselves as so far removed from the rest of the United Kingdom that the possibility of separation came to a referendum not too long ago. Even if you don't think Scotland should become independent, the driving values behind stories like "Braveheart" tend to stir something within us, at least in the South. Not the perfect analogy, but you get the idea. The point is that many of the unfavorable aspects of the South originate in very specific values. The flag is one example, and it comes from a sense of collective identity and pride based on those around you, and that "me and mine" should be prized before the collective views of some faceless state that you may or may not feel represented by. Not saying it's right, but that was my little peek for you into Southern culture as I see it, with the hopes that blind distaste for the South will ease up for at least a few people out in the great big Internet.
