This Dove commercial has a very strong meaning and pertains to these individuals’ values and beliefs and how they affect his or her identity.

Objectives: The topic of unit five is ‘Adornment’ and the following three objectives were put in place for us to incorporate within our blog posts or responses.

• Evaluate personal values and paradigms around body decoration and physical beauty.
• Investigate how physical appearance affects definitions of identity and belonging.
• Analyze values and belief systems of physical appearance across cultures, sub-cultures and generations.

Artifact(s):

1) ‘Personal Reflection Essay’ blog post

2) ‘People Watching’ blog post

3) ‘Adornment Discussion’ comment in reply to a group member’s (Aluba) blog post

Reflection: After looking through all of my unit five blog posts and responses, I would say that I met all three of the unit objectives. I personally enjoyed this unit because it required me to explore my own values and how they affect my adornment. It also allowed me to stop and take a good look at the people around me and make assumptions on their values based on how they choose to dress and behave.

This first objective was easily met through my ‘Personal Reflection Essay’ blog post. In this post, I was able to evaluate my own personal beliefs and how they influence my thoughts on body decoration and physical beauty. I I explored some of my own beliefs and their source, for example I stated “There’s a very common saying that my mom never failed to tell me which was, ‘Treat others the way you want to be treated’.” This helped me explain that I make it a thing in my life to not judge others. I also talked about how I do not have any tattoos but I’m not against them, I actually enjoy hearing stories behind people’s tattoos, I just choose not to have any because of future goals I’ve set for myself. In order to further my take on physical beauty, I mentioned a past experience that taught me to never make physical beauty a priority in my life because everyone is beautiful in their own way. I think that being different and original is beautiful thing.

Because this was an assignment, as long as everyone completed the assignment then you met the second objective. This assignment was the ‘People Watching’ blog post, which required us to take a good look around and choose three individuals that we wanted to elaborate on based off of their physical appearance. Some of the requirements of this assignment were to describe each individuals appearance, what the individual is doing at the time, talk about how their values my have influenced his or her dress, and make assumptions about their age, race, gender, health, and emotional condition based on their dress. For each of the individual’s that I choose to talk about, I made sure that I met all of the assignment requirements. By meeting all the assignment requirements, I was able to show that I explored how physical appearance influences a person’s identity and sense of belonging.

I was able to meet the last unit objective through my ‘Personal Reflection Essay’ blog post and a response comment that I left on one of my group member’s ‘Adornment discussion’ blog post. In my ‘Personal Reflection Essay’ blog post, I talk about how my values and beliefs are heavily influence by my family’s, especially my mom. Although I adapted a lot of my values and beliefs from my family, some I’ve formed on my own from experiences throughout my life. Most individual’s values & beliefs were adapted from their family’s, this includes values and beliefs on physical appearance. Of course fashion changes over the years but people will still dress themselves based on their values and beliefs. Moreover, in my response comment that I left on Aluba’s (one of my group members) ‘Adornment discussion’ blog post I talked about how different cultures have their own values and beliefs that influences how they choose to dress his or her self. This was a response to her assumption that the female who covered up when it was an 80-degree sunny day, chooses to dress that way because of either cultural or religious values and beliefs. I also mentioned that it’s really interesting to compare values and beliefs of different cultures because they’re so diverse. I’m from Hawaii, so I’m pretty used to diversity – in fact I love it because it makes people unique.

Future goals: Overall, this was by far my favorite unit because I really enjoyed making connections between an individual’s appearance, values, and beliefs. It was very interesting to reading my group member’s people watching assignments and learn about the variety of people that we have here at the University of Oregon. I would not change any of the blog post or comments that I wrote for this unit, maybe add to them but I wouldn’t change the content. I also can’t think of any other objectives that I would add to this unit because the three that are already in place covers all of the ideas under adornment.

References:

Sanders, C. R. (1989). Introduction: Body Alteration, Artistic Production, and the Social World of Tattooing. In Customizing the Body (Chap. 1). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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