Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. Its main subdivisions are social anthropology and cultural anthropology, which describes the workings of societies around the world, linguistic anthropology, which investigates the influence of language in social life, and biological or physical anthropology, which concerns long-term development of the human organism.
Reification
In Marxism, reification Latin res meaning "thing") or Versachlichung, literally "objectification"; regarding something impersonally) is the thingification of social relations or of those involved in them, to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects (see commodity fetishism and value-form).
What is rereification?
Reification is a translation of the german "Verdinglichung" as used by Marx. "Verdinglichung" exactly means "to turn into a thing". (ver = implication of a transformation, Ding = thing)
What is reification According to Karl Marx?
In Marxism, reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "making into a thing") is the process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.
What is an example of reification in sociology?
Reification (and its variants: e.g. hypostatization) occurs when the dynamic is treated as static, as a thing, as a commodity with a calculable exchange value. Human relations are the classic example, but you can also think in terms of things like culture. If you're in the States, think of "ethnic" restaurants.
Where did the concept of reification come from?
Though the concept of reification is used in Das Kapital by Marx, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in the early The German Ideology and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 .
What is the concept of reification?
noun. the act of treating something abstract, such as an idea, relation, system, quality, etc., as if it were a concrete object: Defining “home” as if it were just a roof over one's head, instead of the center of a web of relationships, leads in turn to the reification of homelessness.
What is reification with an example?
Reification takes place when natural or social processes are misunderstood or simplified; for example, when human creations are described as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will".
What does reification mean in sociology?
ABSTRACT: The concept of reification is used by Marx to describe a form of social consciousness in which human relations come to be identified with the physical properties of things, thereby acquiring an appearance of naturalness and inevitability.
What does reification mean in Marxism?
In Marxism, reification (German: Verdinglichung, lit. transl. "making into a thing") is the process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.
What is another word for reification?
What is another word for reification?hypostatizationobjectificationpathetic fallacythingificationpersonificationmanifestationincarnationexternalizationUSexpressionrealizationUS38 more rows
What is cultural reification?
Rather than a product of comparison, the reification of culture—the tendency to turn names into things—may be inherent in the act of naming (Appadurai, 1996).
How does reification occur?
The fallacy of reification, also known as misplaced concreteness, occurs when a conclusion is reached by assuming that an abstract entity behaves as a concrete object. Finally, reification is also used in a different sense to describe how we perceive certain objects.
Who developed the theory of reification?
Lukács's theory of reification, explained in his 1923 work, History and Class Consciousness, is often interpreted as a theory of ideology, but it is also a theory of social practice and a work of social ontology.
What is reification quizlet?
reification. the tendency to accept conditions of everyday life as natural rather than socially constructed.
What does reification mean in the Gestalt theory?
Reification is a concept used in Gestalt Psychology that refers to the human mind's tendency to consider an object in its entirety before it perceives the object as the sum of individual parts. A simple example of this is when a person is trying to buy a car.
What is reification in capitalism?
"reification." This term, first coined by Georg Lukács in. 1923,3 implies that products made by man come to assume in. capitalist society an existence independent of man, "the erec- tion of an objective world of things" (Vergegenständlichung).
What is reification according to Lukacs?
Reification, according to Lukács, means taking social relations for things. An institution, for example, a university, is in reality a complex of social relations, but it appears as a solid and substantial thing like a natural object.
What is an example of reification fallacy?
An example of the reification fallacy is reasoning from the fact that people do good in the world to the conclusion that good exists in the world as a chair does. Although good is a feature we ascribe to human actions, it does not exist in the world in the same way.
What is reification in law?
reification: (1) the notion that private ownership of property is natural and. inevitable; (2) the notion that labor power is a commodity to be bought and. sold; and (3) the notion that gender roles are mandated by nature or God. Legal doctrine is shaped by these limiting assumptions: thus, the law of real.
What is reification in literature?
Reification (also known as concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.
What is reification according to Lukacs?
Reification, according to Lukács, means taking social relations for things. An institution, for example, a university, is in reality a complex of social relations, but it appears as a solid and substantial thing like a natural object.
What is reification in psychology?
Reification is when you think of or treat something abstract as a physical thing. Reification is a complex idea for when you treat something immaterial — like happiness, fear, or evil — as a material thing.
What does it mean when a wedding ring is reified?
However, reification is often considered a sign that someone is thinking illogically.
What is the definition of objectification?
objectification. the act of representing an abstraction as a physical thing. noun. representing a human being as a physical thing deprived of personal qualities or individuality. “according to Marx, treating labor as a commodity exemplified the reification of the individual”. synonyms: depersonalisation, depersonalization.
What is reification in sociology?
Reification (a term best developed by Lukacs 1971) describes the ‘tendency of socially authored structures to appear as real, as external to and independent of, individuals’ ( Blaug 2007: 32) … These … become embedded into the sociotechnical systems which we use to organise activity. Scripts and schema are products of prior knowledge and are stored, thus favouring certain activities, ways of thinking, and filtering decisions. Even an information literate actor is not free to determine for themselves the grounds on which they are filtering information, particularly not as much of this may take place before they start conscious cognitive work. But these schema are not necessarily the products of the actors ’ prior knowledge and experience. Within organisations, they are as likely to have been designed by others. ( Whitworth 2009a: 146)
Why is reification important?
Reification is particularly important in understanding the relevance of Moore's paradox to the continued primacy of IQ and IQ cut-offs, as it caused IQ to go from being a correlate of brain health and a predictor of relevant outcomes to being seen as if it was itself the best indicator of brain health and the most concrete and real outcome of all.
How does reification work?
Reification shifts the intersubjective or subjective to the objective, giving something the status of ‘truth’ when in fact it is just a ‘socially authored structure’. Schema, or ways of thinking, are designed and imposed, and individuals subjected to them are obliged to restrict their own judgements in order that they conform to the schema. For example, employees in an organisation may not pass on information they have gathered which could be in conflict with operational objectives, vision statements or things they otherwise believe the management want to hear. Eventually, they may even stop ‘seeing’ the information altogether. The members of the organisation see the world differently depending on what side of the power divide they are on ( Blaug 2007: 39–40).
What is the critique of positivism?
The critique of positivist naturalism in terms of reification of the subject and the life-world is linked to the series of methodological disputes (Methodenstreit) which, since the double foundation of sociology by Comte and Dilthey in the nineteenth century, have opposed the partisans of the method of causal explanation ( Erklären) to the partisans of the interpretative methods ( Verstehen ). Drawing on Vico's principle of the verum factum (verum et factum convertuntur), according to which we can understand the sociohistorical reality because it is a human product, but not nature which is a divine product, humanists claim that the appropriate method of sociology is interpretative in that it aims to understand, by means of a phenomenological and hermeneutic reconstitution of the meaning of action, the social-historical world (Hegel's objective spirit) as an objectivation of subjective actions. Social facts thus have a meaning and cannot be treated ‘as if they were things’ (Durkheim). The naturalistic elimination of the meaningfulness of action through statistical observation is reifying in that it transforms psychic acts into pseudophysical facts and reduces culture to (second) nature. Against Durkheim and his fellow ‘factists’ who ‘change the subject’ of the human sciences by substituting factors for actors, humanists thus argue that social facts are not things but that things are social facts whose meaning can be understood and which can be interpreted as an ‘ongoing accomplishment of the concerted activities of daily life’ (Garfinkel).
Why did reification of diagnoses lead to unproven diagnoses?
For example, Kendell and Jablensky (2003) argued that Down and Huntington syndromes still existed, but formerly reified diagnoses of dropsy, chlorosis, and Banti’s syndrome no longer existed because behavioral criteria for these diagnoses did not define clearly bounded groups. The researchers claimed, “typology will be abandoned and replaced by a dimensional classification” ( Kendell & Jablensky, 2003, p. 8). Hyman (2010) hoped that researchers would construct alternatives to the DSM criteria that would help scientists “move beyond currently reified diagnoses in order to provide the information that will lead, ultimately, to a valid classification” (p. 171).
What does reification mean in DSM?
Reification means that an abstract concept comes to be seen as something concrete. Kupfer and Regier (2011) were frank in stating that reification of diagnostic categories had been a serious problem for DSM-III-R and DSM-IV. Despite the fuzzy boundaries of DSM diagnostic categories, and despite the fact that DSM diagnoses had not been validated by unique brain dysfunctions or other biomarkers ( Nesse & Stein, 2012 ), many researchers mistakenly believed that DSM diagnostic criteria did represent valid mental disorders ( Hyman, 2010 ). Hyman worried that this mistaken belief “was palpably impeding scientific progress” (2010, p. 157).
Why did McCarthy introduce reification?
McCarthy (1979) introduces reification in order to reason about knowledge and belief in first-order logic. He introduces terms to represent concepts such as “ ‘ Mike’s telephone number ’ in the sentence ‘ Pat knows Mike’s telephone number ’ ” (p. 129).
What is reification in Marxism?
"making into a thing") is the process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity. This implies that objects are transformed ...
What is the process of reification?
"making into a thing") is the process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity. This implies that objects are transformed into subjects ...
What is hypostatization in science?
Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy .
What is the difference between reification and alienation?
The concept is related to, but distinct from, Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement; reification is a specific form of alienation; commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.
What is the act of transforming human properties, relations, and actions into properties, relations and actions of man?
The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man‑produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of alienation, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.
Who was the first to describe reification?
The concept of reification rose to prominence chiefly through the work of Georg Lukács (1923), in his essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," as part of his book History and Class Consciousness; this is the locus classicus for defining the term in its current sense. Here, Lukács treats it as a problem of capitalist society related to the prevalence of the commodity form, through a close reading of Marx's chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital. Lukács's account was influential for the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer 's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse. Others who have written about this point include Max Stirner, Guy Debord, Gajo Petrović, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Timothy Bewes, Axel Honneth, and Slavoj Žižek .
Who used the concept of reification in the book Das Kapital?
Though the concept of reification is used in Das Kapital by Marx, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in the early The German Ideology and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 .
What is reification in psychology?
So, reification means mistaking, with or without being aware of it, something intangible for something concrete and really existing. Examples of intangible things are relationships between people/social structures, or sort of 'thought experiment' things we create in our minds to explain concepts (mental constructs, I think is the term?).
What does reification mean in German?
Reification is a translation of the german "Verdinglichung" as used by Marx. "Verdinglichung" exactly means "to turn into a thing". (ver = implication of a transformation, Ding = thing)
What does it mean to reify something?
To reify something is like to cast it into law, to make it permanent, almost like you're taking ephemeral, concepty air and turning it into rock. It's like to make something real. It's important to note that when reification isn't a solitary activity; so using a famous example from Althusser, when you're walking down the street and you hear a police siren and a man yell "Hey you!", when you turn around, you are reifying the policeman's right to yell at you.
When can a commodity be understood in its undistorted essence?
The commodity can be understood in its undistorted essence only when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole.
What is the culture war of race vs class?
The Right increasingly dresses in working-class rhetoric, framing conservatism and nationalism as working-class values. It posits the Left as middle-class socialists (or as the post-left likes to say, professional-managerial class). Yet it’s solution to the problems of the “white working-class” is more capitalism, more social conservatism (e.g encouraging two-parent families), less immigration, etc. In this article's comment section for example, the suggestion of raising inheritance as a solution to the ills of the British working class is treated as Soviet communism. Think about it, critical race theorists are always being accused of Marxists, even if many leftists here would accuse the same people of being liberal anti-Marxists? This culture war serves one end, the maintenance of capitalist hegemony.
How is labor subjugation reinforced?
As labor is increasingly rationalized and mechanized, this subjugation is reinforced by the fact that people’s activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.
Is reification a thing or object?
as i'm writing this, i'm thinking more and more that reification may be at least as difficult to define and with at least as many uses as thing or object. reification is some sort of (literal, metaphorical, etc.,) transformation into a thing, conceptualization as a thing.
