Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social by Gopal Guru & Sundar Sarukkai

Author:Gopal Guru & Sundar Sarukkai [Guru, Gopal & Sarukkai, Sundar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
ISBN: 9780199097890
Publisher: OUP India
Published: 2019-07-30T07:00:00+00:00

5

Social Self and Identity

In this chapter, we will argue that the idea of a social self is at the origin of much of the everyday understanding of the actions of the social, including that of identity within groups. In the next chapter, we will see how this social derives the capacity for authority which is related to the ways by which identity gets consolidated and sustained.

Social action has become an important framework to understand the social. The Weberian classification of the types of rationalities and types of social actions is one good example.1 However, in general, there is too much investment on meaningful actions and meaning-making which reduces the locus of social action to individuals. Unfortunately, the forced relation between the individual and the social is based on a fundamental suspicion about the social; it is almost as if anything done as a group has less value than that done by a ‘rational’ individual. However, social actions are not only about individual intentionalities and meaning-making—these reduce the totality of social action to specific types of individual actions for all purposes. What we want to do here is to explore how the social can itself act, and not how certain acts by individuals can be seen as social actions.

So far, we have seen how the notions of the social arise in the everyday. Individuals in a society invoke the social and talk about it in various ways. They use this term to make sense of a variety of acts and also to use it to order the way they act in their daily interactions. It might appear that every individual has a clear meaning of the social, but this is not the case since the social they talk about, refer to, and which influences how they act is a shared, collective social. But how can the social causally effect human agents, especially if is not a concrete entity? Even if the social were to be an abstract term (and in the earlier part of the book we have shown otherwise: the social can be experienced in various modes), it is possible to understand its causal potential. There are three simple examples of entities which share some characteristics of the ontology of the social but are also seen as causally efficacious. The first example is that of numbers and other mathematical entities. Modern science is not possible without these abstract (non-spatiotemporal) entities and it seems as if these entities have a deep causal impact on the concrete (spatiotemporal) world. The other two common entities which are also useful to consider in this context are space and time. In fact, many of the ambiguities in talking about the social are reflected in our talk of space. The invocation of the term ‘social space’ is an indication of how the social shares many of the characteristics of space. Philosophically, there are many points of similarities: The claim that space is not experientially accessible is the same claim about the social; the relationship between objects

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