Perspectives through the Window of Sociology - Essay Example

Perspectives through the Window of Sociology “Australian culture, society and institutions are dynamic – today's Australian society is different from that of yesterday. It is good to look back and value what we have inherited. Federation was a great national achievement, but our founding fathers didn’t get it all right. They entrenched racism in our constitution and White Australia was the first legislation of the Federal Parliament. Australian society today is more open and tolerant” (John Menadue 2002, p. 1). Australia is an evolving into a multicultural society from a predominantly white, English speaking society until late nineteenth century. If transforming into multicultural nation as a government policy is complicated, exercising the policies and principles in everyday social interactions of Australians is even more complex, as it entails changing deeply-rooted social constructs and structures. The evolution of the Australia into a multicultural society makes for a very interesting study for a sociology student, as it offers a deeper understanding into the strengths and the challenges of an evolving society populated with diverse peoples. This essay shall briefly discuss multiculturalism with regard to recent media reports of ‘boat people’- the asylum seekers into Australia, and the treatment meted out to them by the government and the Australian public. I shall argue that rather than take a parochial view of the situation, if the government wants to demonstrate that Australia is a pluralistic nation, then it has to reflect on the different dimensions of multiculturalism so as to be genuinely sensitive to the difficulties of diverse origins and peoples. It should adopt a more open, understanding and non-judgemental view of people seeking asylum in the country. In the process of this analysis, I shall reflect on the ways in which my lessons in sociology, have helped changed my perceptions of the events reported above. Let me start with The Sydney Morning Herald (2013) newspaper report by reporter Bianca Hall “Minister wants boat people called illegals”. The report and the video clipping available on the internet in the web address given below, explain how the government defends its decision to change the labelling of the maritime asylum-seekers into Australia as “illegals” and “detainees” rather than as “clients”. The report further cites Kon Karapanagiotidis the Chief Executive officer of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre to state that such labelling is bound have a “profound” impact on the public view of asylum-seekers. By referring to them as “illegals”, the Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison made them appear lesser than humans and dehumanized them, and by addressing them as “detainees”, rather than as “people” suggested their “criminality”. The word “transferees” suggested that they “have no rights; they’re a package, a parcel, in transit” (The Sydney Morning Herald 2013). It brought to my mind Plummer’s words on each society as having a pattern, “We can look at all of society as a flow of social orders and patterns constantly being generated and regenerated around certain ‘problems’ – in … workplaces, churches, governments, stock exchanges and prisons” (2010, p. 100). It made me curious to find out if there was a pattern here in the way our society is treating the asylum-seekers, what are their problems and how it could be viewed in the light of sociological perspectives. Sociology is “the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behaviour” (The American Sociological Association 2006). In short, it is a study of social interactions in human relationships. Mills’ work Sociological Imagination (1959) which figured as a part the first two weeks’ study, is very pertinent here because it holds the potential to analyse the plight of asylum-seekers as a section of the society with different sets of sociological situations and historical backgrounds that has led to their present outcome of seeking refuge in Australia. The circumstances may be the discriminations and inequalities they faced in their home country which then becomes the motive for them to leave it behind in search of a place to survive respectably in future (Adapted from Mills 1959). This set me thinking on the inequalities and social status of the asylum-seekers and reminded me of the example of Romulus Gaita illustrated in “Chapter 8 - Class and Stratification” (Henslin 2013, p. 225) dealt with in week 5 reading. It is not uncommon to common across people of diverse origins, nationalities, languages and religious affinities in Australia anymore, especially in universities and schools. The mixed nature of classrooms was taken for granted by me and therefore, it did not occur to me that at least some international students may have experienced social discrimination on the basis of race, skin colour or nationality. However, this course in sociology changed my perspective completely and made me aware of many things that I have been hitherto blind to. For example, like most people, I too believed that asylum-seekers were poor, illiterate people. However, now it is clear to me how social stereotyping according to race, gender, skin colour, ethnicity and age as explained by Mark Snyder (Henslin 2013, pp. 87-88) influence our view of people and the minister’s words are an example of the ‘symbolic interactions’- the negative image that can be inflicted on the socially marginalized sections of the society. Now, why are these asylum-seekers discriminated? One explanation is that they possess attributes and appear to come from a culture that is either different from the accepted Australian norm. This brings into focus the explanation of ‘culture’ as the shared “language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviours and even material objects that are passed on from one generation to the next” (Henslin 2013, p. 44) in the fourth week. ‘Ethnocentric’ (Sumner 1906 cited in Henslin 2013, p. 77) view of the Australian authorities may have contributed to the apprehension of threat to the Australian society from the culturally different people seeking asylum. This in turn, may have led to their being labelled as ‘illegal’ and as ‘detainees’ which push them to the margins of the society and discriminates them. This discrimination then compounds their woes by depriving them of the opportunities of social mobility (p. 244), improve their socioeconomic status (Henslin 2013, p. 229) and stripping them of all powers in their low-class status. The class system, however, is not the only system of social stratification. It is explained that all societies have some sort of social stratification and generally can be classified into four, namely a) slavery – caused by debt, crime and war; b) estates division - the land-owners and big traders, the nobility and the clergy men and those serving in the church; c) the caste system according to birth and ethnicity and d) class system (Henslin 2013, p. 240-4). The other interesting thing that sociology has taught me is that this stratification does not just exist within the societies; it exists globally and also between societies of the world and thus the classification of the ‘most-industrialised’ countries, ‘industrialised’ countries and the ‘less industrialised’ countries, consisting of mostly the western nations, Australia and Japan in the first category, Spain, Greece and so on in the second and countries like India, China in the third category (Henslin 2013, pp. 251-253). This explains why the ‘boat people’ chose to travel to Australia for refuge; most industrialised nations hold more opportunities for employment and therefore better chances of survival. The theories of both Karl Marx (1848) and Max Weber (1968) explained by Germov and Poole (2007, pp. 26-28, 30-1) explain the why industrial capitalism has spread all over the world along with its fallouts of class-conflicts and the feeling of alienation. Weber understood forewarned that “bureaucracies” shall “treat individuals in a dehumanizing way that could lead to disenchantment with the world” (Macionis & Plummer 2005, p. 91). It is precisely the manner in which the immigration minister of Australia is accused to have treated the asylum-seekers by terming them “illegals” (The Sydney Morning Herald 2013). However, this action of the government has been criticized by the opposition immigration spokesman Richard Marles, who has expressed his belief that “Australia should do all it could to stop asylum seekers getting on boats for Australia” purportedly for one to ‘‘maintain an orderly process’’ and the other “to stop people dying at sea” (cited in The Sydney Morning Herald 2013). While this may reduce or prevent asylum-seekers from taking to the boat to Australian shores, is this measure really going to help or facilitate their transit to Australia by other alternatives? One way to show sensitivity to people of multicultural origins, in the case of these asylum seekers, would be to identify nation/region from which majority of these asylum seekers originate and facilitate their legal transition into Australia by validating their identification and bona-fides in the place of origin itself, by engaging NGOs and other neutral bodies like Amnesty International, or International Red Cross, who could oversee the operations and ensure/organize a relatively safe passage of the refugees into Australia for a nominal consideration. This would then prevent the current method of unsafe maritime adventures taken up by many refugees and also demonstrate the genuineness of feeling. In the absence of some such concrete measures to help alleviate the suffering of the needy and disadvantaged people by the most-industrialised nations like Australia, it is likely that more such victims of social conflict shall continue to suffer. In order to take such measures the entire social structure has to be changed, undergo transformation. Social structures can be understood as the norms that help organise any society and make them what they are and also distinguish them from others, “Social structures are the patterns of predictable human actions that cluster around key problems in living and they vary in all societies.” (Plummer 2010, p.101) Another factor that comes into play is the “habitus” (Bourdieu 1977) of “the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences” which can be viewed as positive or a negative. In the context of the asylum seekers, their habitus is not positively viewed by the authorities in question and therefore viewed as a liability to the country. The differences in racial, ethnic, lingual, religious and sexual are the principle factors of discrimination, while class gender and wealth are also significant determinants. This essay limits itself to dealing with the racial and ethnic factors as determinants for social discrimination due to the limitations of length. As mentioned earlier, these structures are based on a shared culture, or on commonly understood and practised language, habits, materials, faith and social interactions, that enable symbolic as well as physical exchange of relationships between the members of a society. These structures or patterns may not convey the same message or meaning to members of another society, unless the members of different communities develop a common platform on which they identify exchange modes to understand and complement each other in the functioning of the society. It is this platform that multiculturalism should build. This may mean recognizing the asylum seekers as people from different habitus, different culture as also linguistic and religious affinities, yet being sensitive to their current needs as human beings in distress situations for whose collective problems, solutions can be found practically with the help of sociological imagination (Mills 1959). Sociological imagination helps to qualitatively develop the mind which allows its practitioners to “not only identify constraints and possibilities, but also how to act with that understanding”; and this, Mills emphasizes, “is the ‘promise’ of the sociological perspective” (Henslin 2013, p. 5). In sum, the issue of maritime asylum seekers into Australia has demonstrated that the transition to multiculturalism is a difficult and slow process. It requires complete transformation of societal structures and ways of thinking to be sensitive to the diverse needs of people from diverse cultures and genuine intentions to work out viable alternatives to the situation. Applying sociological perspectives and sociological imagination can help find solutions that benefit all parties involved. References Bourdieu. P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. Germov, J. and Poole, M. (2007). Public Sociology – An Introduction to Australian society. NSW. Allen & Unwin. Henslin, J. (2013). Sociology: A Down to Earth Approach (2e). 9781442558830. Macionis, J.J. & Plummer, K. (2005). Sociology: A Global Introduction, 3rd edn. Pearson/Prentic Hall. Harlow. Essex. Menadue, J. (2002). Australian Multiculturalism: successes, problems and risks. Online Opinion Retrieved from http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=523&page=0 Mills, C.W. (1970 (1959)). The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plummer, Ken (2010). Sociology: The Basics. Taylor and Francis, Hoboken, ISBN: 9780203847725. Pp. 97-108. The Sydney Morning Herald (2013/10/20). Minister wants boat people called illegals by Bianca Hall. Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/minister-wants-boat-people- called-illegals-20131019-2vtl0.html The American Sociological Association (2006). What is Sociology? Retrieved from http://www.asanet.org/cs/root/topnav/sociologists/what_is_sociology Read More