Rural Life and Culture - Essay Example

When I arrived, I was astonished to see that there were only citrus fruits in the farm; most of them being oranges. Occasionally, a tree of lemon could be spotted. I asked my uncle where the trees of mangoes, strawberries, and bananas were. My uncle told me that mangoes and oranges do not grow in the same season. That was when I learnt that ripening of different kinds of fruits has a strong relation with season. Links to sociological ideas Culture shock I had never been to a rural farm before this occasion; it was my first time that I happened to see a village.

I had read about what villages look like in my books. I was expecting vast fields, a lot of plantation, people with cattle and pets, wells, and probably crops also. To a certain extent, I had seen what I had expected with respect to the environment of a village. Nevertheless, I could not avoid a sense of culture shock when I reached the place. As I said before, it was a kind of place that I had never seen before this on any visit with my family, I could sense a considerable difference between the lifestyle of the people in the area surrounding the rural farm and the city where we lived.

Elements that were different between people in that area and the area where I lived included race, trade, and lifestyle. I had seen a lot of diversity in terms of race where I lived. There were Latinos, African Americans, Caucasian Americans, Indians, and others in the surroundings of my home as well as in my school, but in this village, there was a majority of Caucasian Americans. People in my neighborhood were employed; they went on jobs everyday whereas in this place, people did work but their works were of a strange kind to me.

Rather than leaving for the office every day, people started to gather in the crop-fields and start harvesting the crops. Even my uncle would get up to collect oranges from the farm every morning. He sold those oranges to a man who daily visited him and took the oranges to the city. The air in the area was very clean, fresh, and full of fragrance of the citrus fruits. It was quite unlike the quality of air in the city where we lived. Although the air in the city was not very polluted, yet I never happened to experience the fragrance of the kind that I was experiencing in the farm, at my home.

So there were many different aspects between the rural farm and its environment, and the environment of my neighborhood in the city. However, since the farm was so beautiful and I was enjoying for the most part, the culture shock did not affect me negatively. Behavioral norms Study of the behavioral norms is a very important sociological topic that is related to the non-material culture. I noticed a fundamental difference between the general behavior of the people in the city where I lived and in the area of the rural farm.

In the city, people remained so busy that they hardly could find time to get together so frequently. Everybody had a defined schedule of the day and any deviation from that would be depressing. I noticed that such a routine had made people, including myself to a considerable extent, stern and unemotional from the inside. People in the area of the rural farm were quite unlike us in terms of behavior and behavioral norms. My uncle had given us such a warm welcome that we felt very happy. Before visiting him, we were a bit anxious thinking that he might think that we had taken a lot of his time, but he did not