Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-032-17265-1
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 252 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 392 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Emerging Societies

Challenging the assumption that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South.

Each social collective comprises an interpretation of itself – including the meaning of life, the concept of a human person, and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various social collectives have of themselves. This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. All chapters of the edited volume focus on the relation between social ontology and structures of inequality. They argue that each society comprises several historical layers of social ontology that correspond to layers of inequality, which are referred to as sociocultures. Thereby, the volume explains why and how structures of inequality differ between contemporary collectives in the global South, even though all of them seem to have similar structures, institutions, and economies.

The volume is aimed at academics, students and the interested public looking for a novel theorization of social inequality pertaining to social collectives in the global South.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baumann, Benjamin

Bultmann, Daniel

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Altersgruppen Alterssoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction; 2. Rethinking the Social: Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Social Inequality; 3. The South Against the Destroying Machine: An Interdisciplinary Attempt to Theorize Social Ontology for a Decolonial Project in the Social Sciences; 4. Reconceptualizing the Cosmic Polity: The Tai mueang as a Social Ontology; 5. Developmentalism and the Misacknowledgement of Socio-Ontological Difference: The Coloniality of Being in the Colombian Pacific Basin; 6. The Social Ontology of Caste; 7. Colonial Social Ontology and the Persistence of Colonial Sociocultures in Contemporary Indonesia; 8. Social Ontologies as World-Making Projects: The Mueang-Pa Duality in Laos; 9. Clashing Social Ontologies: A Sociological History of Political Violence in the Cambodian Elite; 10. Social Inequality, Sociocultures and Social Ontology in Brazil; 11. Collectivity and Individuality in Contemporary Urban Kenya: Social Ontologies in Nairobi; 12. Pre-Modern Local Collective Structures and their Manifestation in Contemporary Society: A Case Study from Japan; 13. The Sociocultural Making of Inequality in Today’s China: Symbolic Construction and Collective Habitus.

Über Autor(innen)

Benjamin Baumann is postdoctoral associate at Heidelberg University’s Department of Anthropology. Before joining Heidelberg University in April 2020, he was research associate at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Institute of Asian and African Studies. Trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist, his work examines rural life-worlds, socio-cultural identities, and local language games. His ethnographic research has focused on the interrelationship between religion, social reproduction and communal belonging in the border regions between Thailand and Cambodia.

Daniel Bultmann is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and research fellow of the Department of Social Sciences at Universität Siegen. His work focuses on the political and historical sociology of violence and armed groups, peace transformations, and social inequality as well as on the production of knowledge in (post-)conflict zones, with his regional focus centred on Southeast Asia and Cambodia in particular.