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Albinism And Social Identity

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Goffman (1997) expresses a stigmatized person as someone who possesses undesirable physical characteristics that are not within the normal characteristics in the group to which he or she belongs. Furthermore he states that this person is consequently reduced in the minds of society from a whole and normal person to a tainted, reduced one. Goffman (1997) argues that normality is a counterpart to stigma. Burke (2007) on the other hand states that society establishes categories, where certain characteristics are considered normal within a category, he refers to this as social identity, which draws a picture of social identity which is based on first appearances, and occurs through mixed contacts, that is, social situations where those stigmatized …show more content…

There are different 'types' of albinism, the most common one is ‘opculocutaneous albinism (Blakenberg, 200). Albino according to the dictionary definition refers to a person or animal having a congenital absence of pigment in the skin and hair (which are white) and the eyes (which are usually pink). Society is defined as the collective of people living together in a more or less ordered …show more content…

(Goffman 1997, p. 204). Isolation refers to the segregation of people or things from other things and culture, Culture consists of language, values, traditions, norms and an attitude is a person’s general feeling of favourableness and unfavourableness towards something. Beliefs about that object provide the basis for the formation of the attitude toward the object (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Search engines and study selections The search criteria for the abstracts used the key words search strategy combining shorted and unbridged words to identify the difficulties of living with albinism. The following databases were used to search for articles Google Scholar, JSTOR, PsychINFO, EBSCO, and psych Articles. Making use of keywords such as albinism, albino, society, identity, stigmatization, isolation, culture, and traditional beliefs. Ensuring that appropriate terms were used in combination with these key words so to ascertain how demographics are closely associated with people’s attitudes towards aspects of albinism. Inclusion and Exclusion of

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