Us et abus de la notion de fait social total.

Wendling, Thierry

doi:10.3917/rdm.036.0087

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…This paper has argued for a paired understanding of riots as a set of physical incarnated (re)actions and as ‘total social fact’ (Mauss, 1978 [1950]; see also Wendling, 2010), switching from ‘urban riots’ as a descriptive notion to the total rioting as an analytical tool. Drawing inspiration from Mauss, rioting combines four distinct properties of totality: multidimension, concentration, alteration and indexicality.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Total rioting: from metaphysics to politics

Truong

2017

The Sociological Review

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This article further develops understandings of urban riot as a social and political symptom to consider the riot as a situated and situating biographical moment, a personal experience which is both signifying and significant. It argues for a paired understanding of riots as a set of physical incarnated (re)actions and as ‘total social fact’ – involving ‘society as a whole’ and putting its institutions at work ‘all together and at once’ (Mauss, 1950). It switches from ‘urban riots’ as a descriptive notion to total rioting as an analytical tool. Total rioting consists of intertwined social upheavals and exchanges, writ through the metaphysical, sociological, poetical and political. It assembles people of a particular kind forever, hence manufacturing social solidarities and subjectivities. As a particular response to specific problems, it reveals how a contemporary state of metaphysical, social and political insecurity generates new forms of empowering projections and intimate policies; and why what is destroyed is precisely what matters. As an attempt to make and unmake society at the same time, it has become the pinnacle of a paradoxical political socialization process. Being less a language for a broader political communication than an insider trading activity, its long-term outcomes reshape the politics of recognition and claims for visibility.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Total rioting: from metaphysics to politics

Truong

2017

The Sociological Review

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“…In contrast to Mauss's concept of the 'total social fact', which has been used to define the various phenomena associated with the COVID-19 pandemic (Wendling, 2010), the metaphor of the pandemic 'as a portal', acting as a gateway to the new world, allows for a closer examination of and reflection on the changes triggered by the facts associated with COVID-19 per se and its management. Latour (2021) has recently used the word 'metamorphosis' to describe the vast changes and transformations that occurred overnight with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related lockdown(s).…”

Section: Reflections On the Covid-19 Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

social landscape after the pandemic crisis in Southern European societies

Consoli

Fernández-Esquinas

Παπαδόπουλος

2022

RES

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The COVID-19 pandemic has become one of critical junctures of our times. The social sciences, and sociology in particular, are making important efforts to understand how the crisis is evolving and to foresee how our societies may be affected. The impacts of the crisis are unevenly distributed among geographic areas, activity sectors and social collectives. In particular, several areas of Europe have been affected in distinctive ways. This special issue is dedicated to investigating a range of social effects in Southern Europe with a focus on the “social landscape” that is emerging post-crisis. The background assumption of this editorial and the articles in this special issue is that socioeconomic conditions, social arrangements, and institutions have shaped the social impact of the pandemic, together with the capacities to react in the public sphere and citizens’ resilience. Southern European countries are a strategic research site for observing such effects, because of their distinctive social configurations. The five articles in the special issue study in detail the hidden unemployment in vulnerable collectives, the reactions expressed on digital social networks, the effects on and collective action of cultural workers and artists, health perception during confinement, and social innovation related to caring for childhood. Some contributions are of a comparative nature and look at several countries. Others focus on specific countries and regions. They provide key insights for understanding the social significance of the pandemic and the peculiarities of Southern Europe.

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“…In the past, the version of local anthropological theory that I’ve used to explain deals and transactions in finance (Souleles, 2019b) drew on Marcel Mauss’s (1990 [1950]) idea of a total social fact – that is some event in a society that draws in people, wealth and things, rearranges them according to some value scheme, and then redistributes that set of people, wealth and things in such a way that the society is changed (see further Wendling, 2010). I’ve also used Graeber’s (2001) articulation of value theory to characterize this sort of movement as an instance in which different groups of people’s values, their ideas of how the world should be, come into contact, and get hierarchically rearranged according to dominant power dynamics in a given society.…”

Section: Anthropology 102mentioning

confidence: 99%

How to think about people who don’t want to be studied: Further reflections on studying up

Souleles

2021

Critique of Anthropology

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It is now routine for anthropologists to study those who exercise power and control wealth and status in any number of societies. Implicit in anthropology’s long-standing commitment to apprehending societies in their totality, and explicit in the call to study up, paying attention to power is just one of the routine things that anthropologists do in the course of their fieldwork. That said, many theoretical and ethical norms in the discipline are calibrated to allow researchers to both know about and protect those with relatively little power who made up much of anthropology’s original topical area of interests. By contrast, studying people who exercise power entails special ethical and theoretical consideration. This article enumerates some of those considerations, and suggests that anthropologists need to have coherent theories of social action in addition to theories of social meaning. The article also suggests that some canonical disciplinary ethical norms are inappropriate for the study of the powerful for empirical and practical reasons.

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Us et abus de la notion de fait social total.

Cited by 15 publications

References 8 publications

Total rioting: from metaphysics to politics

Total rioting: from metaphysics to politics

social landscape after the pandemic crisis in Southern European societies

How to think about people who don’t want to be studied: Further reflections on studying up

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