“Body-As-World”: Kenneth Burke's Answer to the Postmodernist Charges against Sociology

Abstract

Postmodernism charges that sociological methods project ways of thinking and being from the past onto the future, and that sociological forms of presentation are rhetorical defenses of ideologies. Postmodernism contends that sociological theory presents reified constructs no more based in reality than are fictional accounts. Kenneth Burke's logology predates and adequately addresses postmodernism's valid charges against sociology. At the same time, logology avoids the idealistic tendencies and ethical pitfalls of radical forms of postmodernist deconstruction, which acknowledge neither pretextual and extratextual worlds nor the ways in which experience is embodied. While not fully articulated, Burke's logology gives primacy to an embodied, social world prior to text (Body-as-World). Sociology can strengthen both its theoretical arsenal and its response to postmodernism by reacknowledging and reclaiming Burke's logology.

From Walkabout to Meditation: Craft and Ethics in Field Inquiry

“…The term craft is preferable to methodology because the methods that are successful are of necessity innovative and are not usually "off-the-shelf." As Valerie Bentz and W. Kenny (1997) commented, "Methodology, as a description from the past of how to investigate the present or anticipate the future, is never anything other than the already-thought seeking its own reflection" (p. 82). Methodology in this sense ensures that little more than old news will be reported.…”