[lbo-talk] Nepal gays and Maoists/Marxist Approach

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Mon Jan 22 19:13:03 PST 2007


andie nachgeborenen wrote: [snip]
>
> Ipso facto: there were no classes before capitalism,
> ranks, etates, maybe, etc. To say that serfs were a
> class is like` saying that a hunter gatherer was a
> capitalist.
>
> Please explain to me, Miles, why these standard
> objections to the extreme Winch-Wittgenstein
> linguistic relativism you are advocating don't commit
> you to these reductios, or why they aren't reductios.

That's a fair question. I'm not advocating "linguistic relativism", though; I'm saying that social categories are creating though ongoing social interactions (not limited to language). I still insist my analogy is apt: just as the psychological characteristics of someone in a hunting and gathering society cannot make that person a capitalist, the sexual desires and preferences of someone in a society without the stable sexual identity "gay" cannot make a person gay. Identities are possible because of certain patterns of social relations. In my view, this is a crucial sociological insight: people do not initially have identities, which are then disrupted/distorted/twisted by social influences; rather, social interactions make possible the creation of individual identities. (--Looking glass self.)

So if you show me a society in which people have distinct, stable sexual identities, and that norm is clearly enforced and passed from generation to generation by agents of socialization, I will say that gay people exist in that society. --And just the contrary for societies that do not identify people as belonging to distinct, stable sexual categories.

This is an empirical/historical/anthropological question, in all cases.

MIles



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