Issue208 【Persistence 小组】第二十七次作业，有点乱

欣馨之火UID: 2183210

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."


In this era of increasing communication among different societies or cultures, people are more and more interested in learning much about a society. Some, like the speaker, think that one can tell much about a society's ideas and values by observing the appearance and behavior of its people whose attitudes and interests can be revealed from the way they look, dress and act. In my point of view, though the outward appearance and behavior of people help to understand a society and studying them is a quick and simple method, one cannot be acquainted comprehensively with a society only by these.

Admittedly, people's appearance and behavior sometimes is the manifestation of the ideas and values of the society they belong to. It goes without saying that an individual grows up under the influence given by certain society and he/she was always taught to dress or act in certain style according to the cultural traditions, customs and inner values handed down through generations. For example, the Tang costume, one of the Chinese traditional costumes which be regarded as the dresses of Tang Dynasty, reveals more or less the traditional aesthetic value of Chinese people and many Chinese people dressed it during the traditional festivals to show their beauties.

However, there are still other approaches, more comprehensive to some extent, by which one can deeply understand either a society or the maintaining culture in it. This is especially when it comes to the multicultural modern societies. The outward appearance or behavior of different groups of people tends to be conformable in daily lives of modern times and it is hard for one to distinguish the differences among the groups in one society only by observing the way people look, dress and act. Moreover, because of the conformity, case-by-case analysis should be introduced into the studying the ideas and values of a society.

Furthermore, the speaker's statement overlooks the probably crucial distinction between free societies and oppressed ones. People probably pretend to abide by the conformity while privately disobey it when they are living in an oppressed society. They cannot act as they want or express themselves freely considering the possible oppression, or even cruel punishments. In this situation, one will definitely misunderstand a society by observing its people's behavior.

In the final analysis, studying the appearance and behavior of people open a window for one to learn the ideas and values of the society which the people belong to, while, it is more important to penetrate beneath the outward appearance if one wants to get complete and objective comprehension of a society.