>
> Like I said: it'd help to define what it is you're _talking_ about
> before we start assigning phrases to it. Brian Siano
>
> ---------
>
> While I am profoundly suspicious of your motives for this profession
> of ignorance, I'll give you a definition of social construction and
> take it all the way down for you.
>
> To the extent that desire, whatever its origin, is expressed through
> an individual's manifested activities with other people, the
> expression of that desire is entirely a social construction. Just as
> art, language, and myth are predominately social constructions that
> both manifest and express some fundamental psycho-social realm in
> symbolic form, so to with social conventions, which are merely the
> ritualistic and dynamically acted out reflections of apparently more
> fixed symbolic forms, for example in language. None of these forms
> exist in their proper or full potential as expression until they are
> conjoined in the concerted acts of social relationships. The mask is
> dead without the actor, the music, and the dance and none of these are
> complete without the chorus, the audience or its analogue as a
> de-individuated consciousness of society, that is to say the gods or
> history.
Here's a toss at summing the above in simpler language: Anything that humans do (speak, create, design, whatever) is partially influenced by the world around it. Also, without humans to provide a social context, nothing humans do (speech, art, design, etc.) is fully expressed.
> Human beings simply do not exist in any humanly meaningful form in
> absentia of their specific spatio-temporality as a socio-cultural
> gestalt, period. The totality of our individual ontological dependence
> on human society is inseparable from every conceivable point of view
> that seeks to understand human beings and their activities as human.
I think you could have said this without a lot of jargon, such as "their specific spatio-temporality as a socio-cultural gestalt." Why not just say "Humans exist in an environment?"
> To argue that our biology must have existed prior to society is
> probably not empirically verifiable nor correct. It is quite likely
> that our biological evolution was at least as channelled by the social
> configurations of our ancestors as the variety of eco-systems they
> inhabited. So the apparently enigmatic dichotomies between biological
> or social determinations are quite likely not mutually exclusive
> polarities, but rather an inter-penetrating dialectic.
It's an interesting argument, but this strikes me as nonsense. To begin with, the comment about the existence of biology prior to society is just solipsism. One might as well say that the Universe did not exist prior to our being able to comprehend it; sure, it can't be refuted, but it's not falsifiable, either.
I'd also disagree that the dichotomies of biology and social factors are "enigmatic." They're actually fairly recognizable. (For one thing, we know language has a biological basis, that grammars are constrained in this regard, but individual languages are the result of history.) And there has been considerable progress in understanding their interaction with one another (say, nutrition on height, bone length, lifespan, etc.).
For a dandy explication of the interaction of biology and environment (and which thankfully, doesn't take a hard-line biological-determinist argument), have a look at Matt Ridley's _Nature Via Nurture_.
> For example, grooming seems to be a common feature of social primates,
> and in fact it appears to be a fundamental expression of their social
> character. Grooming is merely one activity among a host of other
> social interactions that bind, express, and tautologically constitute
> primate society. What the adaptive significance or biological origins
> are of grooming in particular seems to ask the wrong question. Seen
> strictly from a causal biological point of view, grooming as such
> appears as a fortuitous artifact. On the other hand, grooming activity
> seen from the social construction point of view appears to serve a
> manifold of social purposes that depend on other social relations such
> as mating hierarchy, age rank, and relative group status.
Um... I hate to break this to you, but this isn't something that social theorists can really take much credit for. Observations about grooming habits, and their relations to power and social hierarchies, are mainly due to careful field observations made by naturalists, many of whom subscribe to what you call a "causal biological point of view." (Matter of fact, most of the more biologically-oriented theorists of human behavior, like E.O. Wilson or Matt Ridley, tend to rely on such examples to a far greater extent than social theorists.)
To take this back to your earlier description of "socially constructed." There are things in human cultures which are pretty much universal-- they occur in every known human culture. These are things like courtship, grooming, hospitality, community organization, death rituals, personal names, puberty customs, etc. The way these things are done in any particular society will be informed by that society's situation; for example, Native Americans couldn't domesticate horses because horses in North America had died out.
This is what prompted my earlier questions about what "socially constructed" specifically _meant_. Does it posit a relation between the environment and something innate in the organism? Or-- as indicated by your comment about there being no biology before culture-- does it argue that there is _no_ innateness, no central thing upon which the environment acts?
And these questions are actually separate from the issue of meaning outside of human culture. For example, if we took a chair, and sent it to some remote area of the Universe where nothing like humans will never exist, it'd simply be an odd-shaped object. So for anything to have meaning, there has to be a culture around it, or at least, an intelligence regarding it. But that's not the same question as where that meaning comes
from _within_ the regard of an intelligence. (And questions about the nature of meaning have very little application to politics.)