Sociological analysis through pottery

By having a full chapter about Gender and a long discussion about this topic during this week, I decided to talk about Greek Potteries. Because they show within a moment; the huge difference between males and females in that ancient civilization.

            Based on many survived artworks we can see the clear difference between the two genders. The following Greek Potteries show women activities, how they dress and look like.

            A woman sitting on a chair looking at her self through a mirror. That shows the importance of appearance to Greek women.

This Image shows 2 women carrying pieces of clothes and a large bowl in the middle between them.  This scene is about laundry.

This scene is divided into 2 friezes; the first one is for a group of women weaving. And the small one above shows women in a wedding ceremony.

We can see a strong connection between all the images of the women. Almost all of them are about Domestic and indoors activities.  In general, the house and children was the responsibility of the women.

            On the other hand, her are some images of men on Greek potteries. 

             In this Image, we have two men, perhaps athletes, fighting or sparring each other. While someone is just observing what is happening.

An Image of a man carrying a bow for hunting with his hound. As we can see, it is an outdoor scene. 

A scene of a group of warriors marching toward a battlefield. 

The scene on this pottery shows a young man, on the right, listening to an old man, on the left, playing music. Maybe the scene is about a musical lesson. So, we can say that men had more access to education than women.

Greek potteries are a key factor to look at Greek people’s social life. Just from few examples; we can see the big and clear difference between the two genders. Woman are for domestic activities and indoors obligations. Men are all about masculinity, power and outdoor activities. Also, they  have a better chance to get education than women.

From a sociological point of view, ascribed status, sex, determined a lot in the Greek’s life. Females are inferior to males. However, even though they are restricted their role is still very important. Despite how we look at their Gender Polarization right now, they found their own way to divide their social role. Each gender carries a role that supports the society and helps maintaining it.

  

Role-models

The term role model in sociology generally means any "person who serves as an example, whose behavior is emulated by others". Who is your role model? Who do you look up to? Is it a scientist? A scholar? Or maybe your own parents?

Having actors as role models has been something that’s been going on for long now,  seeing how the actors play certain character, and the audience might fall for that certain character, but at the same time, not differentiating between the character and the actor/actress. Especially children.

One of the reasons I decided to write about this certain topic is that I remembered a little chatter between me and my friends about Miley Cyrus. How she was only seen as Hannah Montana, a role-model for little girls, and then how she evolved to a totally different example, a bad one. (1-2)

And as for boys, their role models might be from WWE(World wrestling Entertainment), which is an entertainment programs that target males from age 18-34, and also children. But how do you group children with 18-34 years old males? These role models are certainly not good ones.

Why is media portraying these people as people a child should consider a hero? Why are most kids these days not consider scholars, scientists as heroes and role models these days? Is it because the whole world is focused on self-entertainment in this century?

There are many other "role-models" to be listed but I thought that these two stands out the most.

Judging by the cover

Judging someone by what they look like isn’t the right thing to do, in fact it is completely shunned against, but that does not necessarily mean that people actually follow that rule. On the contrary, it is a completely natural reaction for people to look at a passerby and quickly make assumptions about that person’s personality or profession and will immediately have something to say whether good or bad.

The eyes can reveal so much about a person and in great depth may I add. Just by looking at the way someone interacts with people, you can receive indications about that person’s personality.  

People, (and me personally) tend to critic what we see, and that is usually the way that person dresses or how he or she carries him/herself. It is incredible the amount of information you can get just by the wardrobe that that person has on. Whether it may be a uniform or a certain motif that connects him or her to an organization or an in-group if you will, you can get a sense of that person’s role and identify their position within the society.

When observing people you can naturally tell that persons age (in some cases that is), ethnicity, race and sometimes even their nationality. These elements all fall into the category of an ascribed status which simply means that they are social statuses that we are given at birth and are rigidly assigned to us without our personal choosing. Another example of that is our family background; we do not choose our families but are born into them.

In contrast, an achieved status is a social position which we as individuals have the freedom to pick and choose a role or position that ultimately best defines us and reflects our personality to others. Examples on these statuses are job occupations such as a doctor, fire fighter, teacher, student, worker, business man and many others.

These uniforms are status symbols. They identify what you are in the society. A high ranking officer is known from the amount of the merits he has accumulated and that are displayed on his uniform. A student is identified by his school uniform in the aforementioned school colors and so on.  Uniforms are a big part of our daily lives and they provide a sense of order to our life. We get dressed in certain “uniforms” depending on the roles we play and the places we go. A business man would dress in a smart suit and tie to his morning job and would probably slip into something more comfortable if and when the scene changes.  

Usually when it comes to sport teams, such as basketball and football, the members of the in-group are dressed in the same uniform and work together as one. Other examples of in-groups are the military or the army where there are groups of officials dressed in the same uniform and are working together to make the team function correctly and efficiently.

Status symbols can be very important in times of crises, because we can usually spot out the person we want really quickly. In the case of a robbery we can spot a police man a mile away from the car he drives and by the uniform he wears.