Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Face (sociological concept)
Summary
Face is a class of behaviors and customs, associated with the morality, honor, and authority of an individual (or group of individuals), and its image in social groups.
Face refers to a sociological concept in general linked to the dignity and prestige that a person has in terms of their social relationships. This idea with different nuances is observed in many societies and cultures such as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Korean, Malaysian, Laotian, Indian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Thai, Russian and other Slavic cultures. Face has more meanings within the context of Chinese culture.
Although Chinese writer Lin Yutang claimed "face cannot be translated or defined", these definitions have been created:
Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes.
Face is the respectability and/or deference which a person can claim for themself or from others.
Face is a quality that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction.
Face is a sense of worth that comes from knowing one's status and reflecting concern with the congruence between one's performance or appearance and one's real worth.
"Face" means "sociodynamic valuation", a lexical hyponym of words meaning "prestige; dignity; honor; respect; status".
In China, in particular, the concepts of mianzi, lian and yan play an extremely important role in the fabric of society.
In Chinese culture, "face" refers to two distinct concepts, although linked in Chinese social relations. One is mianzi (), and the other is lian (), which are used regularly in everyday language although not so much in formal writing.
Two influential Chinese authors explained face. The Chinese writer Lu Xun referred to the American missionary Arthur Henderson Smith's interpretation.
The term "face" keeps cropping up in our conversation, and it seems such a simple expression that I doubt whether many people give it much thought. Recently, however, we have heard this word on the lips of foreigners too, who seem to be studying it.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related lectures (1)
Taylor Series: Applications and Exercises
Covers the application of Taylor series in writing functions and solving exercises.
Related publications (2)
EEG Spatiotemporal Patterns Underlying Self-other Voice Discrimination
Olaf Blanke, Pavo Orepic, Sixto Luis Alcoba Banqueri, Giannina Rita Iannotti, Thomas Koenig
There is growing evidence showing that the representation of the human “self” recruits special systems across different functions and modalities. Compared to self-face and self-body representations, few studies have investigated neural underpinnings specif ...
2021Plasticity in Unimodal and Multimodal Brain Areas Reflects Multisensory Changes in Self-Face Identification
Nothing provides as strong a sense of self as seeing one's face. Nevertheless, it remains unknown how the brain processes the sense of self during the multisensory experience of looking at one's face in a mirror. Synchronized visuo-tactile stimulation on o ...
2015Related concepts (5)
Honour
Honour (Commonwealth English) or honor (American English; see spelling differences) is a quality of a person that is both of social teaching and of personal ethos, that manifests itself as a code of conduct, and has various elements such as valour, chivalry, honesty, and compassion. It is an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or of institutions such as a family, school, regiment, or nation.
Guilt–shame–fear spectrum of cultures
In cultural anthropology, the distinction between a guilt society or guilt culture, shame society or shame culture and honor–shame culture, and a fear society or culture of fear, has been used to categorize different cultures. The differences can apply to how behavior is governed with respect to government laws, business rules, or social etiquette. This classification has been applied especially to so called "apollonian" societies, sorting them according to the emotions they use to control individuals (especially children) and maintaining social order, swaying them into norm obedience and conformity.
Mores
Mores ('mɔreɪz, sometimes 'mɔriːz; ˈmoːreːs, plural form of singular mōs, meaning "manner, custom, usage, or habit") are social norms that are widely observed within a particular society or culture. Mores determine what is considered morally acceptable or unacceptable within any given culture. A folkway is what is created through interaction and that process is what organizes interactions through routine, repetition, habit and consistency. William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), an early U.S.