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Tagged ‘Social structure‘

Perception and symbolic violence

Traditionally, the study of the social perception of reality has been approached either from the standpoint of political demoscopy of how “public opinion” defines the most varied social problems, or from social psychology analyzing the mental processes which give rise to the perceived images of reality. But none of these perspectives takes into account how social relations of power affect social perception. The sociology of knowledge, with the centrality it gives to the relationship between social structure and points of view, can alleviate this explanatory inadequacy.

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Racism and crisis

There are two possible hypotheses explaining the mechanism of racism in situations of crisis. The first appears to be not specific to situations of crisis and suggests that when these contexts receive immigrants there are some changes in the social structure which would be analogous to upward mobility. According to the second hypothesis, the changes that are taking place in the social structure are totally opposed to what is pointed out in the previous hypothesis, involving a loss of symbolic capital of certain native classes.

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The sociologist and the social position

Not everyone can be a social scientist. As not everyone can be a soccer player. The only people being really able to do social science or sociology are the socially uprooted as many cases demonstrate all along the history of the social sciences; that is, those who are not well integrated in its membership groups, and which do not have reference groups: these are characterized by having a habitus which, by socialization (some would call it "by nature"), is cognitively heterodox; i.e., socially critical.

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The epistemological break

The epistemological break is not a technical, non continuous and consciously planned process. It is an undecided and infinite social process determined essentially by social conditions affecting the individual. An effective epistemological break hardly can take place without performing previously a rupture with both the common and the cultivated thought. And doing this means breaking with the social groups which are the spokesmen of such thought patterns.

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