SOCY1050 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: George Herbert Mead, Karl Mannheim, Penis Envy
Lecture 6 - 04/03 - The Life Course
The Life Cycle: the biological basis of ageing
The life course: social, cultural, + historical context of a life from birth to death
our actual age and relative age are of crucial social importance to who we are and how
we relate to the world
Different meanings are ascribed to different stages of the life course across different
times and cultures
apart from physical signs of ageing, all people do not experience childhood,
adolescence, adulthood and old age in the same ways
Generations:
Karl Mannheim: generations, comprising biological birth cohorts, experience the world
in unique ways
Generations can develop a seperate consciousness
your destiny is in part determined by the era you are born into
homophily: age second only to race in what determines social connections
can be overly deterministic
The Life Course:
Socialisation is a lifelong process: the process by which people learn their culture,
including norms of behaviour, moral codes, traditions, symbols, rituals
Nature v. Nurture
Childhood Socialisation:
Sigmund Freud
focus on unconscious mind
infants develop sense of themselves as independent beings
The first part of the self to develop is the id, demanding immediate gratification
develops an ego and superego - moral sense of what is right and wrong
a restraining mechanism
civilising influence
Gender Socialisation:
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boys learn masculinity through fear of father, and later, identification with him as a
rival for the affections of their mothers
girls suffer penis envy - resent + devalue mothers because of this
daughter eventually identifies with her mother and her submissive attitude
Critique:
heavily reliant on biological roles + development
assumes family gender roles not present in all cultures
fails to acknowledge female sexuality - regarded as just the absence of a penis
George Herbert Mead
Symbolic interactionism
humans are self aware - by imitation of those around them
first theory of the self as a social creation
taking the role of the other
Children develop a sense of me by seeing through the eyes of others
the socialised self
distinct from the I - the unsocialised self of primitive wants and desires
Conversation between I and me = thinking
older children (>8) begin to learn morality and norms of behaviour by taking part in
organised games
children learn the generalised other - what others/society expects of them
Critiques:
no place for unconscious mind
does not incorporate power relations
little emphasis on the biological
Life Stages:
Childhood
Distinct social group, rather than adults in training
have their own culture, set of meanings and practises, rituals and language
has different lengths depending on opportunities for education and compulsions to
paid work (labour laws)
the idea that children are not sources of labour is relatively recent in the developed
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