The Abstraction Problematic of The Body, Ours And Parsons

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Abstract

The problem of embodiment has long been sociology’s inscrutable asses’ bridge. It remains so despite decades of interest in the body and more than a few young Turks having taken a crack at it. This paper argues that no solutions with staying power exist because scholars have only sought to reinvent the square wheel: no one has learned from earlier mistakes, and no one has tried to recover parts of the solution earlier authors worked out. To make headway requires moving forward from back, starting with Parsons. He, more than anyone, set the terms for solving the problem. He did by laying it out as one of abstraction and realism emphasizing syntheses of cultural, structural, and psychological elements. Regarding abstraction, only some aspects of the body influence, or are influenced by, social action and social life. Those are the only aspects social science needs to abstract. Others can be left out, much in the way sociologists filter out from explanations, atoms, hydrogen bonds, meiosis, kreb cycles, and all other necessary but not sufficient conditions. On the other hand, the part of the bodily substrate that is socially influential and relevant—what Parsons came to call “behavioral organism”—must be an object of abstraction that is realistically calibrated to the substrate’s consequential properties. Such properties, in turn, must be analyzed in terms of their mutually conditioned interrelationships with culture, structure, and social-psychological components. Parsons provided an abstract framework for these things—all of which are necessary for studying embodiment. But, the framework was fundamentally flawed. While he laid down the proper path to solving the problem and took several crucial steps toward that end, to go further we also need to abandon specific aspects of his framework, for example its abiding “functionalism.”

Author

• Michael E. Bare, University of Chicago