Week 2: Seeing and Perceiving

"We live in the world of perception within our mind – what we see, hear, touch, taste and smell is nothing than the brain perception of electromagnetic signals.” Dr Chris, Seeing and Perceiving Lecture, 2010.

What is perception and why is it different from seeing?

From a simple biological understanding, we learn that seeing is a process that only involves the reaction of the retina to light or stimulus (or more specifically known as electrochemical signals). While perception, on the other hand, is a process that transforms this stimulus (the unprocessed sensory raw data) into something that we can understand. This is only made possible because we use stored information to help us to decode or interpret what we just experienced.

According to Rosenzweigh (2001), perception is different from seeing because “Perception is not just the passive recording of sensory stimuli, but rather an active mental reconstruction of the real world around us” (p.44). Though we may not consciously aware what happens inside our brain, we are actually active meaning-makers, thus Rosenzweigh believes that our perceived reality is actually nothing more than a symbolic representation of the outside world. However, Rosenzweigh argues that this (the way we perceive things) may vary depending on the individual collective knowledge and past experience.

Does culture and society affect perception?

As seeing is a biological construction of the world, perception, on the other hand, is construct by culture and society. When I studied for anthropology module last semester, I was particularly amazed with the problems and difficulties encountered by anthropologists during fieldwork. But, of course, the most challenging part for this researcher is when approaching the people. There were some incidences where researcher almost gets killed by the native people because they fail to recognise the researcher as ‘another existence’ of human being. On various occasions, researcher may face partial-rejection by the society because of his or her appearance and behaviour does not fit with the perceived-image of what is considered as ‘normal’ human being according to their society’s standard (note: partial-rejection also includes other factors such as culture and language differences).

Napoleon Chagnon who is noted for his work on Yanomamo society give a perfect example on how his existence is well-accepted in the society but is still considered as subhuman by the Yanomamo people: “No holds were barred in relieving me of these, since I was considered something subhuman, a non-Yanomamo” (Chagnon, 1997:16). His experienced with Yanomamo society has poked some questions on my head, “Why can’t these Yanomamo people see him as a ‘normal’ human being? What makes him differ from other? According to Chagnon himself, the reason why the Yanomamo considered him as something subhuman because they see him as a white hairy man who is different to the normal Yanomamo man with dark-less hairy form – or in other words, Chagnon is less human in Yanomamo standard.

Chagnon fieldwork of Yanomamo society actually gives some good insights on how society and culture can affect our perception. It also explains why perception is partly biological in nature (as perception also require our sensory capability) and partly determined by nurture (e.g. through socialisation process and the environment we brought to). For example, even though Yanomamo people are fully aware of Chagnon existence in the society, the way Yanomamo perceive a ‘normal’ human being shows that they must have learnt the characteristics that classify ‘human being’ according to their society standard (e.g. dark skin and less hairy) – which unfortunately for Chagnon, he is not qualified in those characteristics.

With this example, it can be argue that culture and society does affect the way we view the world. Therefore to say that one person’s perception is ‘true’ or ‘false’ than the other is impossible because people from different culture see and perceive things differently.

REFERENCES

Chagnon, N. (1997). Yanomamo (5^th ed). USA: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Rosenzweigh, R. (2001). In The World of Senses: Perceiving Is More Than Seeing. Retrieved 20^th August 2010, from http://www.kyb.mpg.de/publications/pdfs/pdf3050.pdf.