Abstract
The disciplines which I have brought together under the umbrella of ‘generic sociology’ are all firmly rooted in the commonsensical point of view that a difference of kind separates humans from the rest of the world, and ‘culture’ from ‘nature’. This anthropocentric cosmology has its deepest direct roots in a Judaeo-Christian theology which imagines human beings as created in the image of God and granted dominion over the rest of creation. Within sociology, the assumption of the separation of humanity and nature is sufficiently consensual to be almost invisible — it’s the ontological and moral air that most of us breathe — and all the more powerful for that.
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Notes
This could be approached from a different angle, in that positivism and realism are based on epistemological and methodological assumptions that there is continuity between humans and ‘nature’. This means that in principle the same or similar procedures are appropriate to their investigation. See M. Williams, Science and Social Science: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 47–51.
The ‘hegemony of social constructionism’ is discussed in T. Lovell, ‘Feminisms of the Second Wave’, in B. S. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) pp. 305–8. Lovell, somewhat ironically, equates being a ‘good sociologist’ with denying ‘any role to biology’ (p. 311). For a balanced introduction to the muddles into which we have talked ourselves over biology, sex and gender, see L. Segal, Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). For an understanding of disability which downplays organic embodiment, see C. Barnes, G. Mercer and T. Shakespeare, Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) pp. 10–38.
T. Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p. 88.
E.g. B. Adam, Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards (London: Routledge, 1998); U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); D. Goldblatt, Social Theory and the Environment (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); P. MacNaghten and J. Urry, ‘Towards a Sociology of Nature’, Sociology, vol. 29 (1995) pp. 203–20; S. Yearley, Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization: Reinventing the Globe (London: Sage, 1996).
M. S. Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
M. Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
A. de Swaan, Human Societies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001);
A. Kuper, The Chosen Primate: Human Nature and Cultural Diversity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996);
W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. II: Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 37–48;
B. S. Turner and C. Rojek, Society and Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity (London: Sage, 2001).
For a view of this process in the very long term, and from a perspective which is outside the axiomatic anthropocentric cosmology, see N. Eldredge, Dominion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
See P. Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); N. Evernden, The Social Construction of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992).
See the papers and discussions in Nature, vol. 409, no. 6822 (15 February 2001), and Science, vol. 291, no. 5507 (16 February 2001).
Summarised, as the heart of a powerful ethical argument, in M. Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984).
S. Freud, The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, ed. A. Freud (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) pp. 191–268.
A. Maslow, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, vol. 50 (1943) pp. 370–96.
For example, the papers collected in W. Beck, L. van der Maesen and A. Walker (eds), The Social Quality of Europe (The Hague: Kluwer, 1997).
L. Doyal and I. Gough, A Theory of Human Need (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).
A representative example of a straight social-constructionist approach to embodiment is C. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993). An interesting alternative approach to the human condition, stressing the intrinsic vulnerability of the body, and positing collective solidarity as a solution, is B. S. Turner and C. Rojek, Society and Culture.
S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, revised and expanded edition (New York: Norton, 1996);
P. V. Tobias, ‘Race’, in A. Kuper and J. Kuper (eds), The Social Science Encyclopedia, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1996).
F. Dikötter (ed.), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan (London: Hurst, 1997); V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (London: Cresset, 1988 [1969]); R. Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989) pp. 11–40; J. Rex, Race and Ethnicity (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986) pp. 38–58.
See, for example, M. Burleigh and W. Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
C. Barnes, G. Mercer and T. Shakespeare, Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) pp. 10–38;
B. Ingstad and S. R. Whyte, ‘Disability and Culture: An Overview’, in B. Ingstad and S. R. Whyte (eds), Disability and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
M. Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan, 1990);
D. A. Stone, The Disabled State (London: Macmillan, 1984).
On the facts of sexual dimorphism, see J. M. Tanner, ‘Human Growth and Development’, in S. Jones, R. Martin and D. Pilbeam (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) pp. 101–3.
On the possible economic and familial implications of this in an evolutionary perspective, see N. Eldredge, Dominion, pp. 104–15.
F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, first published in 1884, is available in a variety of editions.
R. Jenkins, Social Identity (London: Routledge, 1996) pp. 80–9.
See Y. L. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992);
M. Omi and H. Wynant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986);
B. Ringer, ‘We the People and Others: Duality and America’s Treatment of Its Racial Minorities (New York: Tavistock, 1983).
For a range of perspectives, see L. Barton and M. Oliver (eds), Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future (Leeds: Disability Press, 1997) particularly the chapters by Chappell, Walmsley, Campbell, Corbett, Borsay, Barton, and Oliver and Zarb.
H. Bradley, Fractured Identities: Changing Patterns of Inequality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996);
B. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997);
S. Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
B. S. Turner and C. Rojek, Society and Culture; B. S. Turner, ‘An Outline of a General Sociology of the Body’, in B. S. Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory.
See M. Harris, Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology, 7th edn (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997); T. Ingold (ed), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life (London: Routledge, 1994), chapters by Odling-Smee, Ellen, and Rapoport.
F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to the 18th Centuries, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life (London: Collins, 1981) pp. 31–103.
See, for example, G. D. Flood (ed.), Mapping Invisible Worlds (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993);
C. P. MacCormack and M. Strathern (eds), Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
F. J. Gil-White, ‘How Thick is Blood? The plot thickens …: if ethnic actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist controversy?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 22 (1999) pp. 789–820;
R. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations (London: Sage, 1997) pp. 44–8.
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© 2002 Richard Jenkins
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Jenkins, R. (2002). The Human World and the Natural World. In: Foundations of Sociology. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-87835-2_6
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