Absence of Body in Sociology - Human Psychology - Lecture Slides, Slides of Psychology

Download Absence of Body in Sociology - Human Psychology - Lecture Slides and more Slides Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! The Absence of the Body in Sociology • 'Sociology of the Body' a comparatively new area. • Sociologists traditionally concerned with social structures, institutions, forms and patterns of interaction, ideologies, cultural formations- more recently things like discourse and identity. • Embodiment largely absent from these analyses. • Impossible to study social phenomena without including embodiment as a part of ones analysis. • Identity and subjectivity, health, gender, childhood, ageing, violence and conflict, work, race and ethnicity all linked to corporeality. • Identity construction and subjectivity something that happens around the body. Docsity.com The Socially Constructed Body. • Body the primary focus and locus of power in modern societies. • Made explicit in 'Discipline & Punish' (1991) • Foucault Erving Goffman and Mary Douglas all aligned with a social constructionist approach to embodiment. • From this perspective there is no pre-social self/ body/ identity/ subjectivity. • The materiality of the body ignored. • Bodies inscribed with meaning through culture. Docsity.com Four main strands to social constructionism. 2 Historical and Cultural Specificity. There are no universal rules of social interaction. There are no universally true concepts. All conceptual categories are particular to time, space and place. • Concepts change over time. • Concepts not shared between cultures. • Universal rules do not exist. • Beauty in UK different from Borneo. • Good manners in 18th C England different form contemporary manners. Docsity.com Four main strands to social constructionism. 3 Knowledge is sustained by social processes. Social processes shape the kinds of knowledge that is produced. • Even scientific knowledge is socially constructed. • Funding considerations, political and economic constraints, power relations, moral frameworks all influence the paradigms of scientific enquiry and therefore knowledge. • There are social processes involved in the production of knowledge. Docsity.com Four main strands to social constructionism.4 Knowledge and social action go together. How you think about something shapes how you act towards it and how you act shapes the way you think. • E.g. Drug addiction may be treated differently depending on whether we view it as a medical problem, a criminal act or a psychological disorder. • How we think about the world shapes how we deal with it. Docsity.com The Body and the Sociological Imagination • 'Sociology of the Body' becoming established part of the 'sociological imagination'. • Sociologists primarily concerned with the way that social processes construct and mould the body. • The body is first and foremost a social thing. Docsity.com Foucault and the Body. • For Foucault he 'mad' a social construction of modernity. • Category of 'madness' had to be invented and invested with a 'regime of truth' • Madness- particular behavioural 'scars' or traits that were outwardly visible. • These traits ‘invented’ or ‘identified’ by professionals with knowledge. • Individuals were inscribed with these traits in a social context. • ‘Madness’ not a biological category it is a social one. • All human bodies a product of social and discursive processes of inscription. Docsity.com Critiques of Foucault. • Suggests that individuals are simply ‘effects’ of various discourses. • Loses sight of human agency. • A materialist history that neglects the denies the materiality of the Body but at the same time acknowledges a prediscursive ontology of the body. (Butler 1999) • What then constitutes the prediscursive body? • Ambiguous on the issue of whether there is body outside of culture (Butler 1999) Docsity.com Bakhtin, resistance and the Carnivalesque Body 2 • Rituals celebrated sexuality. • Aggressive and violent acts depicted symbolically in rituals. • Real acts of violence also - fighting, torture, stoning or killing of animals • At Carnival social class inverted, gender roles ‘played with’ • People dress as animals, jesters, clerics and tramps. • Carnival represented a temporary inversion of all accepted categories. • Unlike high cultural forms the carnivalesque celebrated the low / base/ vulgar. • Grotesque body privileged over the borgeois civilized body. • Grotesque body open, borderless, an animal, hybrid body uncivilised and uncontained. • Temporarily free of Foucault's disciplinary technologies. • A body that resisted control. Docsity.com Passive Docile Bodies. • Foucaults body a passive ‘receptor’ of social control. • A ‘transcendental’ body -waiting to be inscribed • Body relatively static and ‘amenable’, to the processes of inscription. • Body is ‘singular’ and ‘passive’. • Discourses of modernity seek to create docile bodies. • Bodies ‘disciplined’ by discourses into efficient and productive ‘materials’ needs of capital and the bio-political state. • The discourses of Madness and sexuality regulate our social behaviour by defining what is normal and what is not. • Modernity, for Foucault, is based upon a biopolitics. • Modernity seeks to make bodies productive, functional bodies. Docsity.com The exclusion of the Biological body. • Marcel Mauss one of the first to suggest the ways in which apparently 'biological' traits such as walking and talking are in large part shaped and determined by socio-cultural processes. • Feminist Dale Spender argues that the fact women and men talk in different ways to one another is of social and not biological significance. • Robert Hertz -dominance of right hand was ‘of little biological importance but of the greatest social significance’. • Norbert Elias - socio-historical processes led to modern notion of a disciplined, civilised body. Docsity.com Sociology .v. Biology. • Biologists take body as point of departure in human functioning. • Physiological architecture sometimes used to explain human behaviour. • Territorial disputes with psychologists and sociologists. • A highly political conflict. Docsity.com The Politics of Biological Reductionism • Tendency amongst biologists to assume that human behaviour and social arrangements are natural and inevitable. • Dictated by structure and functioning of the 'natural' body. • Little scope for change in the short term. • Percieved by sociologists to be conservative and champions of the status quo. • Gender roles different due to 'natural' difference o0f men’s and women’s bodies. • Sociologists concerned that biologists 'naturalise’ difference Docsity.com Sociobiology, socio-cultural difference and the natural body. • EO Wilson (Sociobiology: 1975) • Suggests animal and human behaviour can be studied by using an evolutionary framework. • Neo-Darwinism. • Inequalities between men and women attributed to their biological differences. • Sociobiology used to explain differences in educational achievment by reference to biological difference. Leftists concerned that sociobiologists were saying such inequalities were somehow natural and inevitable. Docsity.com Subjectivity, identity, emotion and the biosocial. • Many of the emotions that go towards making human subjectivity have a biological infrastructure. • Language we use to describe our subjective experiences of the world are social and cultural in character, but many forms of emotion a physiological phenomenon. • Sociologists often accused of treating identity as entirely a social construct and ignoring the embodied nature of subjectivity. • Adequate accounts of subjectivity must take a more integrative approach. • To understand the role of subjectivity in our social existence we must acknowledge the way that the body produces it in us through emotion as well as how our bodies are socialized and acculturated. • Socialisation can produce physiological change- look at the naturally stronger bodies of men, they have evolved physiologically to be stronger because culture has determined certain roles for men. Docsity.com Conclusion • Social constructionists agree that gender roles are culturally determined but they still insist in ignoring the physiological affects of culture on our bodies and the cultural affects on our physiology. • We must go past the notion that we are passive machines inscribed with culture. • Subjectivity and identity are partly emotional in nature. • Our emotions are physiological. • Sociologists need to consider that we are both biologically and socially determined. Docsity.com