Group Project Response

Although I tend to be more interested in how the brain determines our interactions and adapts to various aspects of society through psychology and neurology, I found research through sociological resources to be more appropriate.  Much of the time we spent together, it was to discuss the idea of “community” and discovery of each individual within the group.  Throughout the course of three weeks, we meet in various group patterns, such as two individuals for dinner or three that walked together.  Finally, the whole group met together for a lunch that was later repeated as a performance in class.     

To begin, the idea of “‘community’ is a good warm word frequently invoked by citizens, social workers, and politicians”.  This is something that humans desire to create a justification or even gratified experience toward the idea of belonging cooperatively to a society.  Customs and patterns of behaviors within a society not only serve as a ritual, but determine the social order.  Through the breakdown of these patterns, “‘society,’ [can become]… more ambivalent, invoking something elitist and exclusive.”  This leaves the “‘individual’ [to] often connote selfishness and bracketed with society” (Tuan).  Upon these different layers, I found applying them to our project can create various perspectives on how to understand what I saw as the collective underlying human condition through community, society, and the individual.

Community could serve on a national, even global platform, but for the organization within the group, it served as an educational system that determined our interaction as one unit.  Second, the society or culture built upon the materials for which we individualistically collaborated into one performance.  As individuals, we recognized different ritualistic patterns.  To serve as one community, the individuals were forced or willing subjected to perform in one instance.  These materials help to define the ritual of eating that was centered on the table or as it was in medieval times, the trestle table.            

The individual gives a light into what Tuan referred to as a view of “the existence of the world [held] within each character.”  Although society can build different meanings of the individuals as they individual is often seen as the break from the cooperative whole.  Complications can arise when society is to analyze to what extent the individual’s behavior breaks social order, whether it could be considered individualistic or deviant.  Overall, the project brings to question sociological ideas about our society that could be explored further.    

Tuan, Y.-F. (January 01, 2002). Community, Society, and the Individual. Geographical Review, 92, 3, 307-318.