I am an eighteen year old Pakistani-American in his first year of college. California, Fremont is where I have spent the majority of my life, although I have spent about two and a half cumulative years abroad in my parent's homeland, Pakistan. My family tree has and continues to be completely native members of this great country. I believe that this has helped in me being vastly associated and connected to my heritage, the reason that I have such devotion towards my heritage is because it’s what my religion preaches; and that is something I take very seriously. Now, throughout the duration of this autobiography i will be analyzing: race, nationality, and ethnicity; since these major sociological topics play key roles in our everyday lives, and affect how we ultimately turn out as human beings, which I will be showing you exactly how as we head into the first section of my sociological autobiography.
The first sociological topic I want to get into is social interactions. From the section 4.6 of Henslin’s ebook, we see that he describes this concept as a “stereotype” we put up when we are amongst others in public. And I agree with this because I, myself go through this especially in memorable social events that a lot of people I care about, attend. For example, as the book states: “eye contact, smiling, and body language” played a huge role in all of the birthday parties I have had. No matter what I am going through I always try to convey that I am having a great time, because my family and friends are in attendance. To go into depth, during my seventeenth birthday party I had celebrated it in SF, CA during a windy night; I was unaware that’s where i was going to be celebrating it, but even though I didn't like the cramped streets, and cold weather blowing in my face, I didn't let it stop me from showing my family that I appreciated what they had done for me by setting up a series of positive social interactions, such as: smiling, showing interest in the plans they had arranged, and being grateful to be able to spend this time with the people I love. As the book states, I was mostly “unaware” of the actions i did because i knew subconsciously how to act in order to influence my family into thinking I was having a great time, which I ended up did having. Another sociological topic, I want to discuss is the concept of social structures. Now, the James Henslin ebook describes this structure as the guiding factor of how we behave with others, whether they be our teachers or strangers; basically this term is defined in 4.2 as: “the ways that people and groups are related to one another”. The reason that I chose to focus on this important concept as one of my sociological topics, is because it really surprises me as i get older how society treats one another without actually knowing them, we just base strangers off what we see. And I have been on both ends of this spectrum. I remember when I was about ten years old, my family decided to enjoy a meal in a fancy restaurant/hotel located in Karachi, Pakistan; all of my family had worn American-styled clothing, while I had worn traditional Pakistani “Shalwar Kameez”, this led to my family having to wait longer to be serviced, and it made me feel sort of out of place, as the establishment were all wearing normal pants and shirts you would see here in America. It was weird and I still remember to this day that I had been involved in not meeting the social rank that everyone else was at which would make the owners of the restaurant believe that I didn't have enough money to pay for the food, or that i wasn’t as important as the other customers, just because of the clothing I wore.
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From part two of this class, I'd like to set my sociological autobiographies primary focus to gender and age, as the first form of social inequality that I'll be discussing. In 12.3 of our ebook, gender & age is referred to as “the basis for scapegoating.”, I have found this statement to be quite true as children are often scapegoated since they are young and often stereotyped to make mistakes. This is the reason I chose to discuss “gender and age” as a form of social inequality, because it really is an unfair concept which i have been through. Being young, (below the age of twelve) I often found myself in situations where I would not be taken seriously or have credibility. This made it so that I was often grounded for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or not having my side of the story be taken into consideration by either my parents, or people older than me. Being the youngest in my family also made me an easy target to scapegoat if my siblings, (who were all older than me) made a mistake. My gender didn’t help either since boys have a stereotype to “mess around”, that’s what makes societies take on “gender & age” an inequality, it is unjust how there are societies that are able to label people of a certain age, or gender “scapegoats”.
In the third section of this sociological autobiography, I decided to focus on family as my first social institution from our covered material in part three. The ebook's definition of a family in 16.1, is quite simple, it is referred to as “ two or more people who consider themselves related by blood, marriage, or adoption.”, and on the surface that’s what a family truly is. Although most individuals have a different “family of orientation”, which is another term from the book that is defined as the family in which a person grows up in. For me, I grew up in a “nuclear family” where I was and still am lucky enough to have both my parents, and three siblings. My family is the driving force and motivation behind the majority of all my decisions whether it be dated back from my youth, or the decisions I make currently as an adult and even all the way up to my future. I have a close family and one that has influenced me to pursue two other social institutions from this class, education & religion. Now you may be wondering what my family has to do with these other two institutions, well because of my family's influence on me, I have chosen to further my education and keep my religious morals. My family often makes sure to collectively remind me to keep up with both my education and religion. Moving my main focus to education, or as 17.1 of the class book describes it: “a formal system of teaching knowledge, values, and skills” learning new things has always been a trait about myself that I've liked. For example when others in my history classes would fall asleep during a video reenactment of historical events, I would always try to take something away from what I would learn, since history is known for repeating itself. When it came to religion in my life, the books definition of religion adhering into a moral community made sense when I read it, because in Islam community is a very important component. In my life, I try my best to go to the mosque for my weekly Friday prayer; the thing about going to the mosque is that there are many other muslims that also attend, some are my friends that I know, some family, and this unites us together as Durkheim stated in his definition of“religion”. I can connect to that definition because every Friday, or even every time that I go to any masjid (mosque) my faith increases because i am with my community, who all believe in the same god as me.
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