The+Social+Construction+of+What


 * Summary of Hacking, “The Social Construction of What?”**
 * --Suzanne**

• It’s fashionable to talk of the “social construction” of all kinds of things. It’s supposed to be liberating in the sense of letting you reject standard expectations (of, say, motherhood), but it usually isn’t. • The idea of “social construction” is related to relativism. Some are opposed to relativism. This is part of the “culture wars.” • The point of using the term “social construction” has been to raise consciousness. • “Social construction work is critical of the status quo. Social constructionists about X tend to hold that: (1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. N, or X as it is at present… is not inevitable” (p. 6). “[M]ost people who use the social construction idea enthusiastically want to criticize, change or destroy some X” (p. 7). • The social construction of gender has been raised by many feminists (though some feminists oppose it) to highlight the possibility of changing accepted roles of men and women. [that’s a big paraphrase on my part--but Hacking seems pretty sympathetic to the feminists’ idea of the social construction of gender, or at least sees the utility of it] • For a more concrete example, he cites //The Social Construction of Women Refugees”// as another “X”, though in this case, it’s clear all agree the world would be better if women were not forced to flee their homes. So what’s the point? Moussa, the author, argues that in Canada the term “woman refugees” is used as if it’s one type of thing--so it’s the idea of the woman refugee that is socially constructed. So the “X” here is the //classification// of being a woman refugee and the “matrix within which it’s embedded” (p. 11) (rules, institutions, etc)--and being in that classification has a subtle impact on how such a person feels about herself and what she experiences. So the X is often the //idea// or concept of a particular thing, not the thing itself. • “People begin to argue that X is socially constructed precisely when they find that (0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted, X appears to be inevitable” (p. 12). • Those proposing that the “**self**” is socially constructed may be reacting against the Western, individualistic view that the atomistic individual is the main social unit and enters voluntarily into interactions with others, especially if they at one point thought of this notion as inevitable, as opposed to a view that says humans are shaped by society from the start. [not so convinced I understood this section well (pp. 15-16), esp. the part about Sartre and existentialism and how that fits in…] • Discussions of **race** tend to divide between constructionist views (race is socially constructed) and “essentialist” views (that race is indeed inevitable and based on identifiable biological things and part of one’s essence), though no one describes themselves as “essentialist.” • There’s a similar divide between people who think **emotions** are universal and those who believes that culture shapes what emotions people actually experience. • There are degrees of “constructionist commitment” based on how strongly you believe that (1) … “X is not inevitable; (2) that X is a bad thing; and (3) that the world would be a better place without X” (p. 19) .The six grades, from weakest to strongest are historical, ironic, reformist and/or unmasking, rebellious, and revolutionary. • The “X”s can fall into three categories: objects, ideas, or “elevator” terms which “raise the level of discourse (p. 21). • The “objects” category includes concrete things like people, material objects, and actions, as well as some fairly vague things like experiences and relations. • “Ideas” includes “conceptions, concepts, beliefs, attitudes to, theories” (p. 22) • “Elevator words” like “facts, truth, reality, and knowledge” (p. 22). These words tend to be defined in circular terms, and their meanings have changed over time. • There has never been a truly universal constructionist, someone arguing that all of reality is really socially constructed. However, one author wrote //The Social Construction of Reality// by which he meant the idea and understanding of reality as something out there and apart from us, and how that is socially shaped [if I got this right]. • In some cases it’s unclear if the //X// is the object itself or the idea of that object or that object after it has been affected by people’s idea of it. The example is the child TV viewer. What’s socially constructed is the idea that this is a category (a “species”) and all its members are in some way alike. And then that idea may influence parents in how they treat their children and then ultimately it may affect the children themselves. [To me this seems no different than the “woman refugee” one above--am I missing something?] • It’s important to clarify whether you are talking of the idea or the practice or thing itself. For example, the practice of child abuse has probably always existed and always been wrong, but the concept of child abuse has probably been more fluid. But since both are true, it’s no contradiction to say that something is both socially constructed and real. • Something about the social construction of quarks and why that’s different from the social construction of strikes (in baseball) because baseball is a game created by people, but it’s not clear that quarks are in some way a product of a social or human-created thing… [not sure I fully got the point though] • “Ways of classifying human beings interact with the human beings who are classified” (p. 31). People are affected by what others think about them. “The classifications of the social sciences are interactive. The classifications and concepts of the natural sciences [like quarks] are not” (p. 32). • Differences of opinion about whether things in the physical sciences are socially constructed depend on whether you think there’s some objective reality out there or there is no thing until it’s named by humans. (The author seems to take the former stance, noting that most scientific theories and concepts are pretty stable over time.) • But with people, there’s much more clearly an “idea, the individuals falling under the idea, the interaction between the idea and the people, and the manifold of social practices and institutions that these interactions involve: the matrix, in short” (p. 34).