Left Center Left

I sure hope the following says more about the intellectual climate at NYU than the state of social science today.

Year 3 (2006-2007): Rethinking the Social

The possibility of something called "society" and its place as a dynamic element of human experience was once the founding problem of the social sciences. But the discipline came to take this object for granted as an underlying principle of intelligibility, and turned increasingly to study the numerous micro-sociologies, understood as manifestations of this underlying whole. Today, the social often appears only as the networks or strategies connecting individual agents, or as the "social capital" these individuals accumulate.

In many fields of study, however, the concept of the social has recently been reexamined. In social studies of science, the separation between the social and the technical, or the human and non-human, is a problem to be explored, rather than a boundary given in advance. In ecological studies, human actions form part of a larger eco-system, whose transformations reshape the social world.

Among anthropologists and historians, new questions have been raised about the understanding of the non-secular: If social science is founded upon a commitment to the secular nature of social knowledge, what problems does this entail for understanding the majority of the world’s populations, whose lives are experienced as interactions with the divine or other forms of supra-human agency? Must the boundaries of the social world coincide with the limits of the secular? In these and other ways, a variety of contemporary scholarship is reexamining the boundaries of the social asking how they are constituted, transgressed, and transformed.

Doesn’t speaking of "limits of the secular" or "interactions with the divine" already stack the deck in favor of believing the truth status of supernatural, supra-human agency? I for one am happy to limit conceptions of the social to the relations between humans.

But beyond the kumbayah-in-subaltern-guise, these kinds of fellowship prospecti, conference statements and calls for paper tend to excel in a discourse I find offputting: that of the ever-interrogating pose. The easiest thing to do in life is to take one’s ambient culture at face value and to assume that its particulars are in fact universal and natural. Barring that, the second easiest thing to do is to produce statement after statement making suggestive overtures toward interrogating categories without actually adding any substantive knowledge. Now, I realize that the actual work of the scholars involved is likely to be more productive, but for novelty’s sake, I’d really love to read that some symposium was going to oversimplify X (or take a boundary/concept as given in advance) in order to study Y more effectively.