Re: [xmca] The Interpersonal Is Not the Sociocultural

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Michael, I only heard the word "societal" for the first time 
in 2005. It is a technical word not found in the ordinary 
language or even in Marxism, SFAIK, ... well that's my 
excuse for going 60 years without learning it.  :) It was 
only when I came into contact with academic psychology and 
sociology that I discovered that "social" had an 
interpersonal meaning actually! :) Otherwise what I now call 
societal was what I used to call social.

It was Weber who said that the task of sociology is to 
reduce concepts about society to "understandable action, 
that is, without exception, to the actions of participating
individual [persons]."

But I think most people don't even think of societal 
phenomena as relevant to psychology. Societal phenomena are 
just objects of perception. Conversely, Weber was saying 
this because people generally believed the converse, that, 
like the weather, societal phenomena exist independently of 
the actions of individual people.

Andy



Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
> Jay,
> one of the sources of this problem is that in many cases, where another language (Russian, German) uses the adjective "societal" the English translations use social. The former has all the political and cultural dimensions you want to see, whereas the "social" becomes unpolitical and uncultural.
> Michael
>
>
> On 2010-04-01, at 10:25 PM, Jay Lemke wrote:
>
> In the course, and on the exams, I found it necessary to push students very hard to understand that "social" did not simply mean interpersonal, but also cultural. Whether talking about ZPD or scaffolding or any sort of social theory of learning, students, even good, bright, phd students, unless previously trained in anthropology (rare) and even if with some training in sociology or political science, simply saw the social as always the interaction among individuals. (Non-American students seemed to have less of this problem.)
>
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Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 
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Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
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