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208"The way people look, dress, and act reveals their attitudes and interests. You can tell much about a society's ideas and values by observing the appearance and behavior of its people."
All of us by accident of birth are born into a particular society distinguished by its social habits and customs, its religious culture, its culture and political tradition and its stages of technological development. Our appearance and behavior irredeemably mirror our attitudes and interests, which subject to a particular social context we are in. In the endeavor to fully understand the ideas and values of this society, observing the appearance and behavior of its people has a necessary but not reliable role to play.
The assertion that our appearances and behaviors reveal our attitudes and interests is self-evident. These disclosed internal characteristics are closely associated with a society's ideas and values. All societies take upon themselves the task of initiating their members into its traditions, customs and practices. Ideas and values implied are acquired, learnt and later practiced both consciously and unconsciously by individuals in the society. Therefore, certain social patterns of a particular society become a signature image of its people. We naturally identified a women wearing chi-pao with a yellow skin as Chinese. A man who greets people with a bow is most likely to be Japanese. Holidays with specific rituals are another example of how people's appearance and behavior can reflect the ideas and values of the society. People in the United States and Europe dressed up for Halloween. Their appearances at that particular day reveal the ideas of the holiday. Spring Festival in China is celebrated with big family meal which manifests the importance of family reunion. Given the social nature of human being, disciplines focusing on social studies like sociology necessitate the studies of human appearance and behavior. Two concerns complicate this issue are that human beings do not always demonstrate a high consistency between their attitudes and behaviors; not all ideas and values of a society are transferrable to observable appearance and behaviors. One dividing line between animals and humans which distinctly separates them is the powerful tendency in man to defraud and cheat. In this game the humans outpace all other animals by a phenomenal margin. Animals too, sometimes appear to cheat but it is always a strategy on their part, and not a deception in the criminal sense. There is no breach of trust in their case such as we observe among the human. As a result, social studies are far more complicated and disputed than zoology. People's behavior can be bent and thus betrayed their own attitudes and interests for avoiding expected social consequence or achieving personal goals. Manifestation of values and ideas could easily be altered and mistook, if they could be transferrable at all. Another concern is some ideas and values might not even be explicit enough to be expressed in appearance and behavior. Thus, there exist vast amount of values and ideas implied in literature, painting, music and other forms of human activities rather than appearance and behavior. In another case, some values and ideas are simply too deeply embedded that it becomes impossible to detect. The dichotomy between individual and society could never be clarified in terms of how people's appearance and behavior could reflect the values and ideas of the society. To get a whole picture of the society, we need to explore both observable factors and implicit contributors.
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