Worldview Paper
The Worldview Paper covers the origins of your personal values, worldview, and ideas. You can discuss your attitude regarding minorities, ethnic and religious groups, gender roles, nationalities or anything relevant that we have discusses in class. I am looking for you to examine your ideas on a level beyond your surface opinions. Not just what you think, but why you think it and how that has shaped the ideas you have about cultural information.It should be a minimum of 5 pages, double spaced, 12 pt. type, normal margins.
Below is a small example of what I am looking for. This is what I would talk about, in part, were I to be doing the assignment. Obviously, this is rather short, and yours should express a more fully develop idea. Also, mine has a fairly conversational tone, while yours should be more college oriented. You don’t need to talk about the same categories that I do. Talk about what is important to you. Your religion, sexual orientation, national identity, “race”, or whatever. But remember, it needs to focus on the cross-cultural information of the class.
Gender: My father abandoned my family was I was about 2 years old, leaving my mom to raise my older brother and me by herself. My mom got married, and pregnant with my brother, when she was a senior in high school. Four years later, she was on her own with 2 kids to take care of. The polite way to characterize my childhood is to call it “modest”. We were poor. My mom worked a lot, but with 2 kids and only a high school diploma, you tend to limit your earning potential. As such my mom learned to do most things herself. When the car broke down, she fixed it. When the hot water heater burned out, she replaced. Dripping faucet, long work hours, general lack of resources; she handled everything. Growing up, my idea of what was a woman’s job, or “women’s work” as they use to say, was limitless. I saw my mom take care of everything. I truly believed all women were equally independent and self-sufficient. My idea of what a woman “should be” was fundamentally articulated by her actions and behavior during my upbringing.
Likewise, this upbringing obviously shaped how I viewed “manhood” and male behavior. It was a very long time before I understood what informed this idea. I was strongly influenced by pop culture as to what it means to be a man. People often talk about this; mass media shaping your gender ideas. This is usually presented in a negative context, but it was actually pretty good for me. Perhaps because some of the media I enjoyed, namely books, was a little less traditional. I grew up reading books about John D. MacDonald’s fictional character Travis McGee. McGee is a smart, worldly, ex-soldier who was capable and handled situations (often outlandish adventures) with style and ease. It also helped that he lived on a house-boat in South Florida. Magnum, P.I. was another character that I looked up to. He was, again, worldly and smart, and of course had great adventures. But he was also a nice guy, good to his friends, with a strong sense of honor and integrity. Finally, and I hate to admit this as an anthropologist, but I loved Indiana Jones. While he was cool and smooth, he was also an academic. He was a college professor on top of being able to throw a punch (let’s keep this between us). I liked that these men, and others like Sherlock Holmes, were not one-dimensional. It was acceptable to be highly intelligent and not fit into some “Revenge of the Nerds” stereotype. I wouldn’t really argue that I am actually like any on these charters, but it played a major role on how I saw men. I wanted to be up for an adventure (which is what I thought men should be doing with their time) at any moment, be generally honorable, and also understand the history, geography, culture, or other facts around it.
Minorities: As I said, I grew up pretty poor. I went to a fairly affluent school, which wasn’t a lot of fun for me. I was also on the outside looking in. Because of this I always hated to see people treated different. While I am white and male, hardly the picture of diversity, I was not completely unfamiliar with the idea of exclusion. As such, I was never comfortable with discrimination, whether based on gender, ethnicity, or (in my case) socioeconomics.
I also spent a lot of time at the museum as a kid. My mom was always a big fan of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Plus it was free. The old museum at UF, before it moved next to the Harn, had a replica of a Maya temple. As a kid I decided that it was definitely the most magical place in the world. Disneyworld had nothing to offer compared to this place. I was genuinely mad that I wasn’t born in a land such as that. Florida had no ruins whatsoever. But, I also decided that anyone from such an enchanted location was O.K. in my book. Whatever language barrier might exist, or other cultural difference, people from other places had seen things I want to know about. I didn’t know what Mesoamerica was or that it was different from other parts of the globe, so everyone got lumped together. I worked out issues of geography later.