Transcription
Welcome to part two of our video in the top 10 most relevant and impactful theories in the social sciences. Now, if you've clicked on this and didn't see part one, then I suggest that you go back and watch that first so you don't miss numbers six through ten. And for the rest of you, I'm I'm back. It's definitely not two weeks later, and I'm definitely not wearing the same shirt for continuity purposes, but I do have a fresh cup of coffee and I'm ready to go through the top five theoretical movements that every student in the social sciences should know. Again, this is my own personal list based on my experiences as an educator and qualitative researcher, but if there is anything you feel that I've neglected or any additional topics that you'd like me to discuss, let us know in the comments and I will get to it eventually. And remember, if you like the video and find it helpful, drop a comment below to let us know why and consider liking and subscribing to the channel.
Number five on our list is Marxism. Now, in the broadest sense imaginable, Marxism is a conflict-oriented economic interpretation of history based on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that developed really into two separate traditions. One political, which aimed to overthrow capitalism in favor of some form of communism, and the other academic, which is much less politically oriented and exists as a form of criticism and analytical method and theoretical lens that we use to discuss everything from literature and architecture to race, gender, and political economics. Now, why is Marxism conflict-oriented? Well, in their reading of history, Marx and Engels focused on technological innovation and class conflict as the driving forces behind social development and change. And this is a huge simplification, but they argued that all societies move through four stages: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. Each of those stages is characterized by distinct technological modes of production and the potential revolutionary forces created by the tension between the wealthy and the poor. For example, in primitive communism, which Marx imagines as a kind of like stone age hunter-gatherer society, all productive labor is shared equally by everyone within a tribe. Over time, though, technological innovation, like the domestication of animals and agriculture, leads to more specialized forms of labor, which creates a class-based society. Some people eventually end up having it better off than others and then create laws to keep themselves in power. That results in class conflict, which benefits those in power, leading to the development of new forms of social organizations. So the development of new technology exacerbates class conflict, leading to revolutionary change.
Now, in Marxist cultural theory, this interpretation of history was combined with a structural model that divided these societies into two parts in order to better understand and analyze them. There is the base, or infrastructure, of society, which is composed of the technological means of production, things like industry, land, natural resources, and so forth, as well as the social interactions that relate to economic production. The uh conversations that you have while buying and selling goods and services or commodities and real estate, whatever, every social interaction you have that relates to economics. The base supports and is ideologically influenced by the superstructure: the media, the education system, religion, politics, and law, the cultural institutions that inform our identities. In classical Marxist theory, these two things, the base and the superstructure, exist in a constant dance of mutual influence and support. And historically, in Marxist sociology and anthropology, what authors did was apply these different models to different societies using a method that we call Marxist dialectics, which means essentially trying to understand one group in terms of its conflicting interests with a different group in society. For example, to better understand the bourgeoisie, the factory and business owners, a Marxist critique would begin by studying the ways in which their economic self-interests conflict with the interests of the working class, or the proletariat. In that way, the Marxist dialectic basically takes complex social phenomena and boils them down into a binary, focusing on points of conflict and then theorizing the ways in which those conflicts can be resolved or result in the development of new forms of social organization. That's Marxist dialectics in a nutshell.
Now, this is a simplification, but these theoretical models were extremely influential in the social sciences. They not only formed the backbone of all Soviet anthropology and post-revolutionary Chinese social theory, but also, as a form of academic criticism, influenced a huge number of Western social scientists. Um, so having said that, what are some criticisms of this approach? Well, from an anthropological perspective, one of the major ones is that classical Marxist readings of history were overly deterministic and implied a Eurocentric bias. They took a model of European socioeconomic development and superimposed that model onto non-European societies. That was one of the major attacks used against Marxist anthropology all the way up through the the 1970s. There were also some pretty serious empirical criticisms. Marx saw social science as a vehicle for affecting political change, right? Which meant that his social theory and the work of many Marxist social theorists was partisan, it was non-objective in its analysis, and that led many critics to question the scientific viability of data collected by Marxist researchers.
Now, within the social sciences, these criticisms were devastating, and in the second half of the 20th century, they led to a systemic change in the way that Western social scientists approached Marxism. With the rise of postmodernism, in particular, there was a kind of gradual generational shift towards authors who rejected the kinds of totalizing modernist meta-narratives that were promoted by earlier Marxist theorists, but who also saw in Marxism's emphasis on ideology, power, oppression, and in its economic critique of capitalism, in those things, they saw a powerful theoretical tool for studying contemporary liberation struggles. Authors like uh Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Axel Honneth, to name a few, have selectively adapted and reimagined aspects of Marxist theory and dialectics to study issues like race, gender, labor conflicts, trans rights, and national and religious minority identities. And that's how I would recommend that you understand Marxism as a form of academic criticism today: a diverse theoretical movement with a troubled and complex past that reemerged as a profound critique of capitalism and the ways in which capitalist modes of exploitation are mirrored in liberation movements around the world.
Number four on our list is Critical Theory, which can mean two different things. On the one hand, the term Critical Theory is often used in a narrow sense to refer to several generations of social theorists in a Marxist tradition called the Frankfurt School, which began in the 1930s with the German author Max Horkheimer. But the term is also used in a much broader sense to refer to forms of social philosophy that use aspects of Marxist theory in order to critique and challenge power structures. And in that second, broader sense of the term, there are many different critical theories, from critical historiography and critical cartography to Critical Race Theory, which is probably the most famous. And all of these explore the ways in which ideology becomes embedded in social and political institutions and comes to influence and dictate our behavior and beliefs in society. And by studying and or deconstructing the historical development and origins of those ideologies, critical theorists attempt to use academic scholarship to affect what they see as positive social change. So Critical Theory is both an analytical method adapted from Marxist historical materialism and, depending on how you look at it, also a form of political action. Uh, now, one of the main tenets of Critical Theory, as articulated by Horkheimer writing in the 1930s, is that social science, unlike natural science, is never politically neutral. In the same way that we bring aspects of our identities and ideological assumptions to a text when we read it, social scientists bring their own unacknowledged biases to their interpretations of culture, which, you know, isn't great. But the real problem was that social science often claimed to be objective, which gave those unarticulated biases a sense of scientific truth. And Horkheimer argued that those false claims of objectivity supported the interests of the ruling elite, of colonial powers, of both totalitarian communists and capitalist states, and the national education systems in which academics worked. So, in Horkheimer's framework, traditional theory in academia served to reinforce the status quo by uncritically reproducing ideological narratives that supported forms of exploitation. And he proposed Critical Theory as an alternative, um, the goal of which was identifying and overcoming the forms of oppression inherent to the societies in which we live. And I'll give you an example of what that looks like. One of the most famous, I think, is Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which applies Critical Theory to the study of education. And writing in the 1960s, Freire critiqued the traditional educational model in which the teacher is an unquestionable authority figure who transmits knowledge to the student, and the student's role is to passively receive and memorize everything that the teacher says in the classroom. Freire argued that that traditional model of education supports the development of anti-democratic, authoritarian politics because at a very early age, students learn that they should be passive, that they should avoid asking questions, and that they should always accept and do what they're told. And those ideals, which he links to the governing philosophy of totalitarian states, become part of the ideology that's imprinted on people through the education system. And as an alternative to that more traditional understanding of education, Freire proposes a completely different educational model called the problem-posing model, in which students learn through collaborative discussions moderated by teachers and are encouraged to constantly question the sources of information that they are given in the classroom. And the idea is that by internalizing the value of collaborative learning and questioning authority, education as critical pedagogy can help build stronger democratic institutions and push back against authoritarian, anti-democratic politics as a form of counter-ideology. And that's the structure that a lot of Critical Theory follows: problematizing traditional social institutions, exploring how they can potentially contribute to oppression or exploitation, and then proposing alternatives that build on progressive understandings of democracy.
Number three on our list is Symbolic Interactionism, which was extremely influential in the development of sociology in the second half of the 20th century and is still important today. But the thing is, Symbolic Interactionism is not a single unified theory. It's more of a micro-oriented approach to sociology that provides a framework on which other contemporary sociological theories are built. Now, we generally trace Symbolic Interactionism back to the sociologists Herbert Blumer and George Herbert Mead. And, you know, like everything else, this is a huge simplification, but uh, Blumer and Mead's sociological perspective didn't look at macro issues. They weren't particularly interested in economics or the interplay between different social institutions. Instead, they focused on the way that individuals perceive the world around them and how that perception is conditioned by social interaction. And their approach was built on two foundational concepts. The first is that our behavior in any given situation is conditioned primarily by our beliefs about reality, in particular, the subjective meaning that we ascribe to the individuals and objects around us in society. And the second is that that subjective understanding of the world is derived from social interaction. For example, um, think of a very simple wooden cross. On a basic level, right, a cross is just two pieces of wood, but it obviously carries a very significant symbolic meaning for Christians, more so, for example, than Hindus or Buddhists. So the way that people interact with a cross depends upon the subjective, culturally informed meaning that they ascribe to it as a symbol. And that subjective meaning doesn't appear out of thin air. It emerges through constant social interactions and affirmations. Um, having Christian parents, or having a lot of Christian friends, or going to Catholic school, for example, over time, those things gradually contribute to the development of a personal sense of symbolic meaning, which, in the language of Symbolic Interactionism, is socially constructed. And later generations of theorists expanded upon that understanding of the social construction of reality, applying it to just about everything imaginable. Most importantly, though, in my opinion, the ways in which informative aspects of our identities, things like ethnicity, gender, and class, are understood and symbolized differently in different cultural contexts.
Now, what are some criticisms of Symbolic Interactionism? Well, the main one actually comes from within sociology itself. Researchers that apply Symbolic Interactionist thinking use qualitative methods. They focus on one-on-one interactions or on small groups of people, and they often don't have the macro-oriented, almost mathematical perspective that you see in quantitative approaches to sociology. In a sense, they're almost closer to anthropologists or ethnographers in the way that they apply and approach their research. And that's led critics to claim that Symbolic Interactionists basically miss the forest for the trees. They're so focused on individuals and small-scale communication that their work fails to identify systemic issues and the ways in which social institutions can also shape people's behavior. It's also been criticized by more quantitatively oriented researchers because it focuses on subjectivity, on what individuals think about the world. It doesn't really offer an all-encompassing theory of the way the world is, aside of course from the idea that our perception of reality is socially constructed. Now, personally, I dislike these criticisms because I think they actually highlight the strengths of the theoretical movement rather than speaking to its weaknesses. And in any case, no one approach to social science has to propose a totalizing meta-theory that encompasses a society in its entirety. Now, I think by simply focusing on one-on-one interactions and the ways in which we develop and interact with our own symbolic worlds, within sociology, Symbolic Interactionism provides, I think, a necessary qualitative counterpoint to more data-driven, quantitative social science. But whether or not you agree with those criticisms, you'll find Symbolic Interactionist thinking in a lot of sociology, um, in grounded theory, and Goffman's dramaturgy, or social constructivism, and even in entire disciplines like the sociology of emotion. And all of those things, Symbolic Interactionism is extremely important. But if there are any students out there, I would offer a word of caution. Um, it's important to remember that microsociology is often at its strongest when it's put into a larger context and supplemented by forms of quantitative data.
Number two on the list is Feminist Theory, which refers to the ways in which feminism, as a political movement, has influenced the theoretical and institutional development of different academic disciplines. And in the humanities, the fields that are most influenced by feminist scholarship are probably anthropology, sociology, art history, Women's Studies, obviously, and literary criticism. And what people sometimes fail to understand is that feminist scholarship in those fields does much more than promote women's interests. That also offers critiques of gender as a social construct, of gender politics and power relations, and most significantly, I think, provides a framework for understanding gender-based inequality in different cultural contexts. And one of the easiest ways, or at least least confrontational ways, that I've found to introduce feminist theory is Edwin Ardener's concept of Mutedness, or Muted Group Theory. Back in the 1970s, Ardener, who is a social anthropologist, argued that the dominant group in any given society generates and controls what he called the dominant mode of expression. Things like language systems, fashion, social values, and vocabulary are all controlled to some extent by the dominant group. And to gain acceptance in society, subordinate groups have to adopt the language and values of the dominant cultural paradigm. So, for Ardener, if a muted group has interests that conflict with the dominant group's in society and they want to challenge the existing power structure, unless they resort to violence, they have no choice but to use the dominant mode of expression, which serves to reinforce the interests of the dominant group. So it's not that muted groups literally can't speak. It's that the symbols, languages, and institutions available to them have been constructed in such a way as to always reinforce their subordination. Um, and this is a theoretical model that we can apply to any situation in which domination and subordination are institutionalized. But it's also the societal critique at the heart of feminist theory. Women, and for many feminists, LGBTQ groups, are muted. And as a consequence, to study those groups and to advocate for their inclusion in more egalitarian institutions, feminist theorists had to create new vocabularies, new theoretical perspectives, and research methods that responded to the needs of their respective disciplines. And because of that, feminist theory really evolved differently in different branches of the social sciences. I'm feminist archaeology looks totally different from feminist literary criticism, which shares relatively little with feminist economics, for example. Despite that heterogeneity, though, feminist theorists have made transformative contributions to social science that extend beyond their disciplines to challenge the ways that we think about human beings and our history. And I might be making some generalizations here based on my background in anthropology, but just off the top of my head, I can think of at least four major innovations that you should really know. The first is from feminist archaeology. Feminist archaeologists like Thelma Rowell and um, Margaret Conkey in the 1970s and 80s built a huge body of work that showed how earlier generations of archaeologists had taken modern Western gender roles and uh, projected them onto Paleolithic and Neolithic societies. And that resulted in a totally skewed perspective of human evolution that not only focused on men but also marginalized or completely ignored the role that women played in our early societal and cultural development. And, you know, from a scientific perspective, that that that ain't great, right? Um, the the second is more rooted in history and sociology, and that's the impact of feminist thought on social constructionism, which lends itself to critiques of ethnicity and class, but which, thanks to feminist theorists, was also extended to a critique of gender. There's a common and mistaken notion that our current normative gender roles are inherently human and that they're part of some kind of natural law. But historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have repeatedly demonstrated that human perceptions of gender have not only changed radically over the course of history but are also socially constructed. Um, gender is understood and performed differently in different cultural, social, and historical contexts. The third sort of innovation is a related concept, and that's the embedded nature of gender, the idea that the perception of women and of gender more broadly has to be understood in relation to the cultural, institutional, and physical environments in which we live. Um, and one very important part of that is what we call standpoint theory, which is a very simple idea: that a person's social class, gender, culture, and ethnicity all work together to influence their perception of the world. And because of all of those different factors and the way that they contribute to who we are, it's much too simplistic to generalize a minority or majority group based on one single factor alone, something like, for example, gender or race. I mean, researchers using standpoint theory, like Martin Nakata and Sandra Harding, were part of the vanguard that argued for more inclusive representation of minorities within academia itself. Which brings me to my fourth sort of major contribution, and that's that a lot of feminist theory does have an applied and politically partisan motivation. Um, it's interested in creating diverse learning environments in which marginalized groups gain not only representation but also play a role in what's taught in schools and universities. And that's made feminist scholars natural allies with decolonial or post-colonial theorists, with subaltern studies and indigenous studies, as well as other fields that focus on historically marginalized or muted populations. And those disciplinary alliances have changed and continue to change the way that social science is taught and represented in universities around the world.
Before I go on to discuss number one, I want to do a few honorable mentions. Um, I had considered things like gender theory, decolonialism and post-colonialism, semiotics, queer theory, alterity studies, the list goes on and on. But all of those are either too heterogeneous, too peripheral, or can be discussed within the context of another broader theoretical movement like post-structuralism or feminism, for example. Um, so none of those specific things made it on my list. But what did, and is in my number one spot, is Intersectionality, or Intersectional Analysis. Intersectionality refers to both an analytical method and a group of related social practices that are built on one very basic observation: that everyone, every individual, can experience discrimination in different ways, and that to understand and fight against forms of discrimination, we have to consider every potential factor that can contribute to the marginalization of individuals in a particular cultural context. So, Intersectional Analysis focuses on how the perception of things like gender, ethnicity, economic status, citizenship, sexual orientation, and physical ability come together and form our social identities and potentially form intersecting axes of oppression. Let me, let me explain. One of the best ways that I found to explain what Intersectionality does is a food analogy. I'm imagine, if you will, a pizza with a bunch of different toppings: olives, pepperoni, mushrooms, peppers, whatever. Um, every person who likes or dislikes that pizza will do so for different reasons, right? Some people might dislike mushrooms, some people love cheese and olives, and other people just simply hate pepperoni. So, if we want to understand why people choose to eat or not eat our pizza, we have to take all of the ingredients into consideration: the toppings, the crust, the sauce, everything. And then, this silly pizza analogy, what an Intersectional Analysis would do is build a model that assesses each ingredient and looks at how people respond to them individually and in different combinations. If some people are predisposed to like an ingredient like cheese, for example, it forms an axis of privilege. Pizzas with those ingredients will be the most liked, most eaten, the most selected in our pizza shop. And if people are predisposed to dislike a particular ingredient, it forms an axis of oppression. Pizzas with those ingredients will be marginalized in our hypothetical pizza shop and won't be eaten as often. Now, if you swap out the pizza for a human being, if you will, the toppings would represent different socially relevant characteristics: some age, ethnicity, gender, and so forth. And the resulting theoretical map that emerges from this allows us to better understand what combinations of variables inform the perception of our identities and how those intersect when we're discussing either privilege or oppression in a specific social context. And obviously, Intersectional theorists aren't overly preoccupied with food. The theoretical perspective and method is most commonly applied in studying minority groups and how they can be subject to discrimination on both the micro level of intersocial interaction and the macro level of corporate or state institutional and legal bias. It highlights the ways in which dominant social narratives classify those groups, breaking those narratives down into intersecting axes in order to better understand and fight against them. So, Intersectionality acknowledges that individual forms of discrimination exist on things like misogyny, racism, ageism, and ableism exist, but it's particularly interested in how those different forms of discrimination intersect to form new and complex social biases that are often difficult for us to fully articulate.
Now, where does this all come from? Well, the term was introduced in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who was working in the field of Critical Legal Studies. And it was first used by Crenshaw and other North American Black feminist authors to discuss the complex discrimination that African-American feminist activists encountered in the 1960s and 70s in their engagement with anti-racist, feminist, and pro-union organization for workers' rights. And they found that each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis, or one axis, above and to the detriment of others. Race, for example, was central to early civil rights movements. Gender was central to feminism, and class was central to the union movement. And because African-American women were simultaneously Black, female, and workers, they were often marginalized within social movements that focused exclusively on one single identity discourse. And over the last 30 years, Intersectionality has grown beyond the context of identity discourses in North America, and you'll find it used and referenced throughout the social sciences, basically anywhere that they're taught. It's particularly common in sociology and Critical Legal Studies, which is the like disciplinary crucible in which the theory was formed. But Intersectional Analysis has enormous potential and applicability in any qualitative approach to studying human interaction and forms of institutional discrimination. And that's why I've selected it for my number one spot, not only for what it is now, but for its potential relevance in the future of social science research.
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And that's it. That's my top 10 list. If you found the discussion helpful, or if there's anything that you think I missed, drop a comment below the video to let me know. And of course, like and subscribe to the channel. That's one of the best ways you can help us grow. And speaking of helping the channel, I want to take a moment to thank my awesome Patreon supporters. Um, these these people, thank you so much, you are amazing. I'm a bit behind on content this month and have a few very significant announcements coming, but we're going to be putting up a lot of additional Patreon material next month. At the moment, we have some pretty comprehensive reading lists and scripts for most of our videos, as well as supplementary study guides and written content. But soon, we'll have videos exclusive to Patreon, along with maps and artwork for an upcoming project on the history of Tibet. So come on over and consider joining our little community. And until then, thanks for watching, and never stop learning.
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