The humanities are the words, the ideas, and the s Essays

The humanities are the words, the ideas, and the stories that help us make sense of our live s and our world. They can introduce us to people we have never met, to places we have never visited, and the ideas that may have never crossed our minds. By showing how others have lived and thought about life, the humanities help us decide what is important in our own lives and what we can do to make them better. By connecting us with other people, they point the way to answers about what is true to our heritage and our history . The humanities also help us address the challenges we face together in our families, our communities, and as a nation. In this definition, Congress includes Archaeology , Comparative Religion , Ethics , History , Languages Linguistics , Literature , Jurisprudence , Philosophy , History, Theory, and Criticism of the Arts , Aspects of the Social Sciences which use Historical or P hilosophical Approac h Humanities, General and Interdisciplinary as subjects included in the definition. As fields of study, the humanities emphasize analysis and exchange of ideas rather than the creative expression of the arts or the quantitative explanation of the sciences. History, Anthropology, and Archaeology study human social, political, and cultural development. Literature, Languages, and Linguistics explore how we communicate with each other, and how our ideas and thoughts on the human experience are expressed and interpreted. Philosophy, Ethics, and Comparative Religion consider ideas about the meaning of life and the reasons for our thoughts and actions. Jurisprudence examines the values and principles which inform our laws. Historical, Critical, and Theoretical Approaches to the Arts reflect upon and analyze the creative process. I have always said my culture is part of who I am, but it doesn't define who I am. I think a person's culture is definitely an influencing factor in their life, but their own thoughts and actions define their individuality. The writer W. Somerset Maughamfelt that culture creates the person. He wrote, It is very difficult to know people. For men and women are not only themselves, they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learned to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. You can know them only if you are them. Indeed, one's environment, one's nationality, one's race, one's religion--all these form much of one's essence since some of the traits are in the DNA. This is one reason that immigrants who came through Ellis Island moved into the neighborhoods that housed those of their own culture. These people were defined by their religion, the foods that they ate, the types of clothes that they wore, the colors they liked, the values that they had, the customs that they held, the type of hairdos and mustaches or beards that they wore. Now, in America and in some other countries, many nationalities and races are so mixed that these defining notions are not always apparent. And, few cultural patterns and customs are followed since there is no single culture to be defined. When you grow up in a certain culture, an individual tends to reflect the values of that culture. That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone in that culture thinks exactly alike, but there are certain broad limitations that most of that culture's people would adhere to. In the United States, for example, we stress the value of individual freedom above most other things. This is probably not the case in countries that exercise greater control over their population. Keep in mind that there may be many cultures in any one country, so there are important differences between those groups. Values and attitudes are often generated by one's culture. These are related to perspective. We see the world through a particular lens; filter our experience through a particular set of ideas. This lens and these ideas are functions of our cultural background. However, "culture" can be understood as a local phenomenon. We can talk about a culture of the home and a culture of