I’ve just been chatting in email with a friend who asked me to boil down my critique of the concept of social construction as it has appeared in history, cultural criticism, anthropology and so on over the last 25 years or so. The term itself now produces a kind of thoughtless, reactive sneer from many outsiders (rather like “relativism”) that I’m almost tempted instead to write a sympathetic exploration of where the idea came from and why it was an important and useful idea before it became a banal shorthand. OK, so there’s a lot here.One thing I think you’re not giving sufficient credit to is that a Foucauldian or Bourdieuian view of social construction (I’m thinking of Bourdieu’s remark that the problem with “false consciousness” is that it’s redundent; all consciousness is partial, located, etc.) was not and still is not especially common. I agree that demonstrating that this or that practice is socially constructed isn’t showing much of anything, and at best it fits into what I like to call Stupid Historian Tricks (People think that it was thus, but really — Haha!). But people really did and do think that things are timeless, ancient and true in ways that can’t possibly be changed (because they never ever have). This was and is worth challenging, even if it’s not much an end in itself or can easily be bowdlerized (as, for example, in the way that many who have never read Anderson treat “imagined communities” as if this meant playing pretend).The other thing that strikes me as strange is your point that to acknowledge something as constructed necessarily makes it feel fake.
Do people really not want to celebrate Christmas anymore once they understand that the way we tend to celebrate it is pretty much a late 19th century creation rather than the way the Christians have always done things, or for that matter not enjoy pictures of Santa Claus once they know he was designed by Coke? Maybe on the second point if they have some preexisting antipathy to Coke, but that’s a matter of totemic contamination rather than the constructed nature as such.
I’m not Christian, but I enjoy celebrating Christmas, because I like exchanging gifts and hanging out with family. Rituals and traditions are what we make of themand I think modern folks are able to embrace the choices that offers without necessarily feeling robbed of authenticity as a result. Here’s the problem. For one group of practicioners, to acknowledge the constructedness (and thus historicity) of something undercuts some aspect of their ability to inhabit that practice and make claims about, if not its timelessness, its rootedness and authenticity.
The articles in this issue signify the maturation of social constructionism. After introducing the articles, I raise two questions that have remained under-represented on these pages. First, the historicization of constructionism has been avoided by constructionists and critics alike; and, second, the epistemological concerns have been dominated by realist-anti-realist debates.
So, yes, there are people who are upset by a detailed historical anatomy of Christmas. It is not that they believe that Christmas has no history, but they tend to see that history in declensionist terms.
(It used to be something good and traditional, and it is in danger of losing that character). When you undercut that sensibility by insisting that Christmas was something else again before that and before that, some people perceive that as an attack. (Just look at how attacks on Kwanzaa often are articulated: that it is an.invented. holiday, and thus somehow different than others.)Second, I think that when you participate in cultural processes with a conscious sense that you’re trying to construct a practice or identity which will then present itself as authentic and deeply rooted, you’ve got a double-consciousness that feels to intellectuals to be deceptive or manipulative. This is the problem with Taussig’s injunction to go out and construct as an end in and of itself. We are doing that all the time, but we do it best when we don’t see ourselves as doing it. I construct myself as a professional of a particular kind on this blog, and with some degree of introspection or self-consciousness, but not with bird’s eye view of the total purposes and ends of such a construction.
I do it because I feel it, because I live it, because I’m in it, and because that construction arises out of my life as a professional and my aspirations for my profession. People create new ideas about self and practice all the time, but I think they rarely do so with the instrumental intent to achieve those ends in and of themselves–they create as a response to their circumstances and experiences, out of the stuff of social life. While I agree that the concept of the “socially-contructed” can and has been used as a jejune shorthand, your critique seems to focus scholarship that deploys the concept as a conclusion to be reached and not as an assumption that can be used productively to pursue other lines of thought.Case in point, your take on Foucauldian scholarship. It should first be pointed out that much of Foucault’s early work was itself an attempt to complicate the Marxist and Marxist-inspired scholarship that relied on instrumental conceptions of ideology. One implication of Foucault is that ideology–socially constucted or otherwise–is insufficient to explain the ways in which power and control are exerted on individuals. It’s not simply that individuals participate in a socially-constructed ideology in which the interests of certain classes are advanced.
A more nuanced reading of Foucault’s genealogical approach suggests that multiple ideologies can converge and have real-world effects in unexpected ways as certain practices are realized and iterated through insitutions and individuals. As Discipline and Punish shows, the state and the ruling elite didn’t simply decide and then implement more effective ways to control people. Of course you’re right, folks can perceive a historicization of their “timeless” beliefs and practices as an attack, particularly if their invested in narratives of Tradition and Authenticity (and of course their are historical reasons for why T&A get invested with such power in our modernist society). I was responding to the notion that this is a necessary consequence, and wanting to emphasize that most people have some practice inventing traditions, if only in something as mundane as the blending of traditions that they and their partners bring to holliday rituals.Is part of what your arguing that we need a different term without the same conntations as “social construction” or just that we can’t be sloppy or simplistic in using it? Are you arguing, Ashis Nandi style, that historians and other scholars should just shut up sometimes and stop trying to ruin everything?
All this textological balderdash from the ’80s was a great dodge to keep kids from reading nasty old books and taking their authors seriously. But now we live in the 21st century and we have Google, and even if semiotics wasn’t hilariously dated there would just be no hope.For a random example, one could read Mitchell, or one could read John Romich Alexander’s. Or better yet, one could read both. That way you get the Exeter Hall party line, but you don’t just get the Exeter Hall party line. I am sure the situation is different in different disciplines.
Criticism Of Social Constructionism
One could argue, for example, that the academic discipline of anthropology is nothing more than the systematic exploration of the notion that everything is socially constructed. But in other disciplines, the idea that even anything at all may be socially-constructed is still novel and, in consequence of that, still has great power.The economic theorists who developed 35 years ago the so-called Black-Scholes equation used for pricing financial options, for instance (namely Black, Scholes and Merton), assumed that options traders would behave in a very precise way; they made these assumptions to make the mathematics of their model tractable. Their assumptions about trader behaviour were not based on any empirical evidence, not could they be, since there was little prior trading of options (because no one had a theory for how to price them coherently). For the same reason, options traders had no previous patterns of behaviour to call on when they began trading options.
Thus, without any other guidance, traders behaved according to the assumptions of the Black-Scholes model. As the Edinburgh sociologist of economics Donald MacKenzie has demonstrated with his detailed (so-called “thick”) studies, the economic theory of financial options has created – performatively – the very social phenomena it purports to describe and model.
Most mainstream economists, with their theorem-envy of mathematics, have yet to accept even the possibility that their models may construct reality rather than describing it in some value-free way, let alone the actuality that they have in fact done this. This is good to think with. It seems to me that one possible thread to pull here concerns a standpoint of critique. Social construction is a way to get at contingency, the possibility for things to be otherwise, as Foucault dramatizes with the wacky Chinese bestiary at the beginning of Order of Things. History and anthropology tend toward explorations of otherness, but both also have strands seeking to identify invariant human universals. Other (dare I say more practical) disciplines like economics have a much more comprehensive investment in stable essences. And social construction is certainly no given for my students, so getting at the dynamic conflations fridaykr points to is at least pedagogically a second-order problematic at this point.It’s true, I’ve seen so many lazy-bad demonstrations that this or that is socially constructed.
This may tell us something about where the author is coming from, and/or it may tell us something about their sense of the field into which they’re dropping their work. How to remove chrome plating at home. About the latter they’re probably not wrong, as the fact of publication suggests.I can’t say I’m worried about the critique of Taussig, which seems to me to be based on a notion that naive intentions are somehow more authentic.
Why Social Constructionism Is Wrong
If we actually accept that there is no preconstructive authenticity the concern that we’re more manipulative when we become conscious of the process pretty much evaporates.