Considering The Norm Part 1
By Simon Kennedy
Wearing shoes, not going to bed when we’re tired, spending the majority of our time indoors or not going to the bathroom when we need to, these are just a few things that occur so often in our daily lives (generally without thought or question), that despite thier detrimantal effect on either our mental or physical health, the vast majority of us, would consider some, if not all of the afore mentioned occurences as being perfectly ‘normal’. But how do we know what normal is, when so-called normality is in a perpetual state of flux, forever being constructed, deconstructed and then re-constructed in a different guise, form or language?. Far from being a solid and stable construct, normality relies upon a multitude of external and relative factors to determine its appearence at any given moment.
If you visited the Dinka Tribe in Southern Sudan, you would come across men with carefully placed scars across thier faces, this is not the result of a fierce battle or animal attack but the metering out of a cultural tradition, marking the transition from adolescence to manhood. To those not accustomed to such a ritual, this purposeful kind of scarring may seem at once strange, if not cruel but to the Dinka it’s perfectly normal.
In the west, it used to be a common sight to observe somebody making use of a telephone box, again this was seen as normal behaviour but since the advent of mobile phones and advancements in new media technologies, such a person nowadays is quite likely to be viewed with a modicum of suspicion, they must be dealing drugs, or perhaps hiring a prostitute, whatever they’re up to… it’s not normal. From these examples alone we can see how cultural and technological factors can influence and inform what we consider to be the usual or standard thing, if you add to this economic, political, religous, juidicial, social and educational factors, you begin to understand why ascertaining what and why something is deemed normal has as many layers as it does variants.
