national myth

Examples of national myth in the following topics:

• A Multicultural Society

  • It is generally applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities, or nations.
  • The absorption of the stream of immigrants in itself became a prominent feature of America's national myth, inspiring its own narrative about its past.
  • The Melting Pot tradition co-exists with a belief in national unity, dating from the American founding fathers:

• Ethnicity

  • Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic" identity (like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity) are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states.
  • At the level of "ethnic networks", the group begins to have a sense of collectiveness; at this level, common myths of origin and shared cultural and biological heritage begin to emerge, at least among the elites of that group.
  • At the level of "ethnies" or "ethnic communities", the members themselves have clear conceptions of being "a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, and one or more common elements of culture, including an association with a homeland, and some degree of solidarity, at least among the elites".
  • According to this framework, the idea of ethnicity is closely linked to the idea of nations and is rooted in the pre-Weber understanding of humanity as being divided into primordially existing groups rooted by kinship and biological heritage.
  • Some of the social traits often used for ethnic classification include nationality, religious faith and a shared language and culture.

• Cultural Evolution

  • During the Romantic Era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalism, developed a more inclusive notion of culture as a worldview.
  • These took concrete form in a variety of artifacts, both symbolic, such as myths and rituals, and material, including tools, the design of housing, and the planning of villages.

• The Social Reproduction of Inequality

  • The premise that education fosters equal opportunity is regarded as a myth, perpetuated to serve the interests of the dominant classes.
  • According to this myth, those who fail to achieve success have only themselves to blame.
  • According to conflict theorists, this myth obscures an important social fact—the individual failures of many students can be explained by large-scale social forces.

• Capitalism, class, privilege, and oppression

  • Despite the myth that hard work leads to getting ahead and making it, for the most part people have little power to improve their class position.

• Introduction

  • During the Romantic Era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalism, developed a more inclusive notion of culture as worldview.
  • This view of culture as a symbolic system with adaptive functions, which varies from place to place, led anthropologists to conceive of different cultures as defined by distinct patterns (or structures) of enduring, although arbitrary, conventional sets of meaning, which took concrete form in a variety of artifacts such as myths and rituals, tools, the design of housing, and the planning of villages.

• Gender vs. Sex

  • ., male v. female) mirrors capitalistic hierarchies embedded within many post-industrial societies, it does not in fact match the biological reality of people, and thus sociologists examine what role the "myth of distinct, dichotomous sexes" plays in social patterning and structure.
  • As a result, support groups and community centers sprung up in the 1980's (forming a national Transgender movement in the 1990's) to (a) teach people the story they would need to tell to acquire transexual services and identities, and (b) lobby medical and psychological communities to remove these newly added (or newly socially constructed) "disorders" from the record books (this process has been somewhat successful as transsexuality has been reinterpreted repeatedly throughout the last two decades and in some countries gained legal recognition and protection).

• Ideology

  • A political ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group that explains how society should work and offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order.

• Romantic Love

  • Reciprocity of the sexes appears in the ancient world primarily in myth where it is in fact often the subject of tragedy, for example in the myths of Theseus and Atalanta.

• The Symbolic Nature of Culture

  • These meanings took concrete form in a variety of artifacts such as myths and rituals, tools, the design of housing, and the planning of villages.