Political saint Mahatma Gandhi & Symbolic Interactionist TheoryBy Prof Dr Sohail Ansari
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The act of bellringing is
symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless
interference with the quiet of other people. Al-Imran (The Family of Imran) Chapter 3 verse 104And that there might
grow out of you a community [of people] who invite unto all that is good, and
enjoin the doing of what is right and forbid the doing of what is wrong: and
it is they, they who shall attain to a happy state!
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One is to do both to be
Mahatma
· Political saint Mahatma
Gandhi ‘never lived off politics’ so to live for
politics.
Either one lives 'for'
politics or one lives 'off' politics.
Max
Weber
Sociological
Paradigm: Symbolic Interactionist Theory
Symbolic interactionism is
a
micro-level theory that
focuses on the relationships among
individuals within a society. Communication—the exchange of meaning through
language and symbols—is believed
to be the way in which people make sense of their social worlds. Theorists Herman and Reynolds (1994) note that this perspective
sees people as being active in shaping the social
world rather than simply being acted upon.
George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is
considered a founder of symbolic interactionism though he never published his
work on it (LaRossa and Reitzes 1993). Mead’s student, Herbert Blumer, coined
the term “symbolic interactionism” and outlined these basic premises: humans interact with
things based on meanings ascribed to those things; the ascribed meaning of
things comes from our interactions with others and society; the meanings of
things are interpreted by a person when dealing with things in specific
circumstances (Blumer 1969). If you love books, for
example, a symbolic interactionist might propose that you learned that books
are good or important in the interactions you had with family, friends, school,
or church; maybe your family had a special reading time each week, getting
your library card was treated as a special event, or
bedtime stories were associated with warmth and comfort.
Social scientists who apply
symbolic-interactionist thinking look for patterns of interaction between
individuals. Their studies often involve observation of one-on-one
interactions. For example, while a conflict theorist studying a political
protest might focus on class difference, a symbolic interactionist would be more
interested in how individuals in the protesting
group interact, as well as the signs and symbols protesters use to communicate
their
message.
The focus on the importance of symbols in
building a society led sociologists like Erving Goffman (1922–1982) to develop
a technique called dramaturgical
analysis. Goffman used theater as an analogy for social
interaction and recognized that
people’s interactions showed patterns of cultural “scripts.”
Because it can be unclear what part a person may play in a given situation, he
or she has to improvise his or her role as the situation unfolds (Goffman
1958).
Studies that use the symbolic
interactionist perspective are more likely to use qualitative research methods,
such as in-depth interviews or participant observation, because they seek to understand the
symbolic worlds in which research subjects live.
Constructivism is an extension of
symbolic interaction theory which proposes that reality
is what humans cognitively construct it to be. We
develop social constructs based on interactions
with others, and those constructs that last over time are those that
have meanings which are widely agreed-upon or generally accepted by most within
the society. This approach is often used to
understand what’s defined as deviant within a society. There is no absolute
definition of deviance, and different societies have constructed different
meanings for deviance, as well as associating different behaviors with
deviance. One situation that illustrates this is what you believe you’re to do
if you find a wallet in the street. In the United States, turning the
wallet in to local authorities would be considered the appropriate action, and
to keep the wallet would be seen as deviant. In contrast, many Eastern
societies would consider it much more appropriate
to keep the wallet and search for the owner yourself; turning it over to
someone else, even the authorities, would be considered deviant behavior.
Criticism
Research done from this perspective is often scrutinized
because of the difficulty of remaining objective. Others criticize the
extremely narrow focus on symbolic interaction. Proponents, of course, consider
this one of its greatest strengths.
Social constructionism is a theory that knowledge and
many aspects of the world around us are not real in and of themselves.
They only exist because we give them reality through social agreement.
...
There are two threads of social
constructionism, the weak and the strong. So for example, money
depends on the paper that we have given value. Strong social constructionism,
on the other hand, states that the whole of reality is dependent on language and social habits,
that all knowledge is a social construct,
and that there are no brute facts.
In the domain of social constructionist thought, a social
construct is an idea or notion that appears to be natural and obvious to people who accept it but may or may not represent
reality, so it remains largely an invention
or artifice of a given society. ... The meaning given to games
is therefore socially constructed.
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