Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Agency and the history of social relations
Bourdieu’s theory of practice has proved influential in research broadly concerned with ‘socialization’. His work, and that of the sociologist Giddens, informs various studies that have reformulated the ‘socialization’ problem into one concerned with how the history of social relations enters into people’s understandings of themselves and of the world they live in. Cognitive developmental theories of how meaning is constituted by children over time (especially those of Piaget and †Vygotsky) have been crucial to these ethnographic studies, as have findings from experimental cognitive psychology.
In the domain of ‘language socialization’ the work of Ochs with Samoan children and Schieffelin with Kaluli children has shown how, in learning to speak its native language, a child is also learning how to be in relation to others. In other words, the child’s cognitive constitution of the categories of its native language is mediated by a complex array of social relations (see Ochs 1988, Schieffelin 1990). Lave’s (1988) study of arithmetic as a cognitive practice in everyday contexts develops a theory of how ‘the person acting’ and the social world are mutually constituted; this perspective has important implications for theories of how people become who they are and in so doing constitute the social relations of which they appear to be the product. Toren (1990) analyses how everyday ritual activities inform the process whereby Fijian children cognitively construct over time the concepts that adults use to denote the hierarchical relations which implicate chiefship as a particular form of political economy; this work shows how cognition may be understood as a microhistorical process, one that inevitably transforms concepts and practices by virtue of constituting them.
Contemporary anthropologists recognize that ‘the individual in society’ is an historically specific idea of the person; it implicates a particular form of *rationality, one that informs and is informed by the politico-economic processes denoted by *‘capitalism’. This understanding poses a considerable problem to those theories in the social sciences that depend upon ‘the individual in society’ formulation.
People have to constitute the ideas and practices of which they appear to be the product. This new perspective means that ‘socialization’ is beginning to give way to a more complex understanding of persons as historical agents, actively engaged in constituting their relations with others and, in so doing, subtly transforming the concepts that denote these relations. Nevertheless, the idea of socialization is still prevalent in anthropology.
CHRISTINA TOREN
See also: childhood, culture and personality
Further reading
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, London, New York: Cambridge University Press
Briggs, Jean (1979) Aspects of Inuit Value Socialization, Ottowa: National Museum of Man, Mercury Series
Firth, Raymond (1957 [1936]) We, the Tikopia, Boston: Beacon Press
Fortes, Meyer (1970 [1938]) ‘Social and Psychological Aspects of Education in Taleland’ in J.Middleton (ed.) From Child to Adult. Studies in the Anthropology of Education, New York: Natural History Press
Jahoda, G. and I.M.Lewis (eds) (1987) Acquiring Culture: Cross Cultural Studies in Child Development, London, New York: Croom Helm
Lave, Jean (1988) Cognition in Practice, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press
Mayer, P. (ed.) (1970) Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology, London: Tavistock Publications
Middleton, John (1970) From Child to Adult. Studies in the Anthropology of Education, New York, Natural History Press
Ochs, Elinor (1988) Culture and Language Development, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press
Rabain, Jacqueline (1979) L’Enfant du Lignage: du sevrage à la classe d’age, Paris: Payot
Schieffelin, Bambi (1990) The Give and Take of Everyday Life, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press
Toren, Christina (1990) Making Sense of Hierarchy. Cognition as Social Process in Fiji, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology No 61, Athlone Press
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