Full Description
Challenging the assumption that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South.
Each social collective comprises an interpretation of itself - including the meaning of life, the concept of a human person, and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various social collectives have of themselves. This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. All chapters of the edited volume focus on the relation between social ontology and structures of inequality. They argue that each society comprises several historical layers of social ontology that correspond to layers of inequality, which are referred to as sociocultures. Thereby, the volume explains why and how structures of inequality differ between contemporary collectives in the global South, even though all of them seem to have similar structures, institutions, and economies.
The volume is aimed at academics, students and the interested public looking for a novel theorization of social inequality pertaining to social collectives in the global South.
Contents
1. Introduction; 2. Rethinking the Social: Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Social Inequality; 3. The South Against the Destroying Machine: An Interdisciplinary Attempt to Theorize Social Ontology for a Decolonial Project in the Social Sciences; 4. Reconceptualizing the Cosmic Polity: The Tai mueang as a Social Ontology; 5. Developmentalism and the Misacknowledgement of Socio-Ontological Difference: The Coloniality of Being in the Colombian Pacific Basin; 6. The Social Ontology of Caste; 7. Colonial Social Ontology and the Persistence of Colonial Sociocultures in Contemporary Indonesia; 8. Social Ontologies as World-Making Projects: The Mueang-Pa Duality in Laos; 9. Clashing Social Ontologies: A Sociological History of Political Violence in the Cambodian Elite; 10. Social Inequality, Sociocultures and Social Ontology in Brazil; 11. Collectivity and Individuality in Contemporary Urban Kenya: Social Ontologies in Nairobi; 12. Pre-Modern Local Collective Structures and their Manifestation in Contemporary Society: A Case Study from Japan; 13. The Sociocultural Making of Inequality in Today's China: Symbolic Construction and Collective Habitus.
