#sasthots101

Another blog entry is another topic to talk about. Still about knowing the self, this time we delved on the relationship of culture and ethnicity in providing meaning to ourselves and our identity.

Our selfhood is a lifelong process that entails interaction of different factors.

Humans as we are, being a social group of organisms, we tend to interact with other people around us. Our meaning making is contributed by a lot of factors from the people that we see, talk, share, and interact with daily. With this, our sentimentality on material things are so rooted from the importance that that certain something gave us. It might be old clothing, an old rocking chair, century-old jewelries, house equipment, books, cabinets, and a lot more that we consider being sentimental to. In the context of Filipino culture, our elders are the ones that will always cling to the value of the smallest things and biggest things at home and that type of culture is being passed on to our generation and the generations to come.

Filipinos are really known for being culturally adhering to belief and values of the old times.

Being a country colonized by different races, this has been a remembrance of our strong faith to the things that are precious to us.

This topic focused on how identity is being shaped and honed by culture, as well as how it modifies and affects culture. Reading some of the materials given, I can say that our identity as humans can also recreate the culture that we have.

In every culture, the use of different signs, symbols, and even images around us are embedded with meanings that facilitate and establish social interaction and social condition.

It is important to habilitate these symbolisms and representations as a person identifies with their meanings or even building novel meanings for people. These are vital as a tool for giving birth to nationhood as it provides a sense of pride, power, justice, and accountability in one’s culture.

Alongside culture, ethnicity is another dimension of ourselves. This concept indicates participation in a two-way process of learning and creating meanings.

It is important to know that our identity is part of a lifelong process that is reinforced with the processes of enculturation (at the level of culture), socialization (at the level of society), and internalization (at the level of the individual). With this, we can have our formed identity and that it can also reclaim an identity of its own culture or ethnicity.

For these two modules, it was actually a combination of me knowing myself and me being myself. The discussion was very “self” centered I should say. Not in terms of isolation and loneliness but being able to fully identify myself and my roles with respect to the people around me. The readings are really deep as it tends to provide analysis to the individual level of a person. There are theories, concepts, and many more expounding discussions on such topics.

Knowing who I really am from my own perspective was quite a lot to take in. Maybe because I was not really that fully aware of the things that I can be capable of or maybe there are uncertainties that tend to overpower my thoughts eventually putting a toll on my emotions; of knowing the real “me” in the things that I do.

The present “me” is able to magnify my thoughts through the discussions we had in these two modules. Most of it might be very, very technical, and jargons are just all over the place but all in all, it made me able to construct a figure that I know I can put a meaning to.

Alongside this post is one of the creative outputs I submitted in this module. This was quite interesting because it is a depiction of the common misconceptions of people being “male” and being “female” in this dynamic society. Personally, I like the naked realities of the different illustrations. Seeing the output of my classmates gave me a surreal moment of comfort and nudity of art. But of course we focused on the body parts written, contrasting how different it’s being perceived by people.

This is mine. This isn't a lot but I did pour my creative juices on this one. After watching and seeing the outputs of my classmates, one idea is really dominating this: Most of us really think that men are more capable than women. Which is just not right, right? And not fair in all aspects. As I understand it, people are different versions of “me” that are actually comprising our society. We are part of that bigger narrative where people say that “society is like this and that”. Maybe, even after all of the education, facts, information dissemination, webinars, and testimonies from real life scenarios, a lot is still not instilled in their minds; that equality is now slowly becoming a norm. And we should respect each other’s capabilities regardless of the gender and sex they have.

I shared this part of my learning experience because I really see the bigger dimension of knowing myself. It is important that we know the context of our selfhood, our choices, our interests, our wants, and the things that we can do regardless of what we are biologically. I think that knowing that “me” in us is part of our growth and that we should acknowledge the dynamicity of it.

Being in this world full of rumors and lies and judgments and fights, I feel that knowing ourselves from within emanates a strong sense of identity and people, without having to tell them, will feel its light.