What Makes People Good or Bad? (Mis)Anthropological Essay on Searching for Social/ Cultural Reasons on Judging the Other People

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss thinking of people which is informed by culture, social institutions and personal experiences, and which shows significant tendency not to operate in simply binary mode when it is about people from somebody’s imminent social surrounding. Two examples are presented form the nowadays Belgrade. It is argued that at least people of this particular social context, who tend to deploy more nuances in the judging on and labelling their neighbours seen as bringing some kind of disruption of the social order then to those people they think as of generic categories only, are informed by such social/cultural perspectives on human being which paramount it, but also suggest its capacity for serious wrong doing.

Keywords

• social cognisance
• judging and labelling in culture
• urban neighbourhood
• Belgrade
• misanthropology