Force, Power, And String Being?
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Force, Power, And String Being?
| Author(s) | Reyna, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Abstract | Physics has recently begun to formulate a string theory that unifies in common explanation the most insignificant of sub-atomic particles with structures involving the entire universe. At the heart of this new physics is an ontological conviction that physical realities are analyzable as super strings (Greene 1999). If physics can have its super string theory, why not for anthropology, a more modest discipline, a string being theory. Physical being has its strings. Social reality has its string being, in the sense that subsequent spaces of social form are strung together with their antecedents. The previous sentence contains a major ontological claim. Social being, minimally a place with more than one person, is not a reality that simply is. People do not just stand around motionless. They do this. They do that. So what is is what gets strung together, this and that. Such an ontology privileges inquiry to explain: what gets strung together and what does the stringing. A theoretical project that addresses these questions pushes inquiry, as in the case of physics, into micro- and macroscopic spaces. In social reality the microscopic realm is interior space (hereafter I-space), roughly structures of the “mind”; while the macroscopic realm is exterior space (hereafter E-space), roughly structures of human “society”. These two spaces are not separate – after all minds are in people, and people are in society- so that string being theory is about a social monism. Thus anthropologists who investigate it are appropriately referred to as social anthropologists. However, this is not the social anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Rather, because structures of the mind ultimately involve the brain, analysis of the social monism concerns the formulation of generalizations explaining the inter-relationship of social and biological structures. Franz Boas (1938) stressed the centrality of explaining such relationships, so string being theory is ultimately a Boasian sort of social anthropology. This paper first ventures into E-space where it seeks to explain, “What is out there”? Next the paper seeks to account for, “what strings it together”? It is the answer to this question that leads to talk about force and power. Something between force and power strings antecedent social events with their consequents, but I believe that there has been confusion in these terms that obscures recognition of this something. So the two concepts are in part re-thought in terms of causation. This accomplished the analysis goes “indoors” to I-space and shows how force and power make string being possible. These two related arguments are presented in four following sections. The first section makes a case for regarding social reality as string being. The second section rethinks force and power in a manner that both clarifies the different explanatory roles of the two concepts and revives a Hobbesian, causal approach to them. The third section presents certain specifics of force and power in E-space, arguing that there is no escape from them. Finally, the fourth section concludes the argument. A notion of a cultural neurohermeneutic system is introduced, and it is shown how it in the I-space of the human nervous system allows force to have power in E-space and, then, how this accounts for why social reality is string being. A conclusion advertises some of the benefits of this approach. |
| IssueNo | |
| Pages | 1-31 |
| Article | Access to Article |
| Source | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers # 20 |
| VolumeNo | |
| PubDate | 2001 |
| ISBN_ISSN | |
| Browse Path(s) | Anthropology —-Methods and Approaches ——–Other |
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