What is a social construct? Can anyone in anthro give a good

>>9090195
The Social Construction of What? by Hacking opens with a very lucid explanation.

Social constructs are spooks

All of them are social constructs because none would exist without society.

>>9090199
there we go

>>9090195

If society were structured differently would X mean the same thing?

Suppose everyone on Earth got total amnesia at the same time. Does the thing still exist? If no, then it's socially constructed.

>>9090217
>>9090201
i think success is factually determined

if a species fails to survive, it was not successful. if a species propagates, it was. this sort of thing isn't subjective

>>9090236
By that logic, moss is kicking our ass, it's been around for like 500 million years and still kicking ass and we are failing miserably after a few thousand years of civilazation.

We are kinda shit at evolution, way too fragile. Applying evolutionary logic to humans just ends nowhere.

>>9090399
>We are kinda shit at evolution
The ONLY criteria is that we are still here. We are on par with moss. End of story.

>>9090399

We could probably easily kick the shit out of moss if we put our minds to it. Come on, don't be so ashamed of your humanity. I bet you're white too :^)

muh dih is a social construct

>>9090195
Not studied, but I would consider a social construct to be a system or idea with no instrinsic value that allows society to function more efficiently.

>>9090195
It is something which only has meaning based on context given by a society.
For example all those things you put down there are social constructs because they are based on arbitrary actions which society deem of worth having.

>What is a social construct? Can anyone in anthro give a good definition for the term?
Sure. It's a primitive buzz word and synonymous to saying "here's the human inventions I don't like because I am a fucking loser".

Seriously though how can there can exist a satisfying "deeper" definition everyone agrees on for a word that is so analytically evasive? That which is constructed through social convention and norms. What about a simple get-together? What about language itself, isn't that a social construct too? You see it is so poor in contrast, uncritical, applicable to anything if you put your mind into it. How about I start calling everything a linguistic construct, an economic construct, a natural construct, a godly construct? Oh wait, that's what the other idiots are doing. Forget it. Going back to my cave (which is not a social construct because I don't have any friends).

>>9090643
>yfw there's a social construction of boulders and rocks

Remember that a social construct =/= a psychological construct. The success/failure dichotomy is hardwired into the way we (As individuals) grasp the world, so success is not technically a social construct, but a psychological one.

So a better litmus test for something's being a social construct is not "would this still exist if there were no people" but "would this exist if there were no associations between people".

/vague positivism

>>9090195
It's a stupid blanket term for all the socially learned behavior of humans, compared to non-socially-constructed instinctual behavior. Basically the idea is: remove a group of children from society before they get socialized, put them somewhere in the wilderness and they would display non of our social constructs, besides maybe those that they create themselves.

Therefore all of the things you have listed would be socially constructed.

Agenda driven sociologists use this buzzword to justify destroying established cultural norms like gender roles. It is a weird appeal to nature, for instance they think people just decided that women have to act a certain way, so they can similarly just redefine how women should act. They think women aren't 'naturally' different from men and you could just socialize a male human like a female human and he would think and act like a woman in the end.

Of course this idea is inane. Most social constructs arose from biological realities. Similar kinds of labor divisions by sex can be observed in basically all cultures on earth on all continents. Similarly long-term monogamous relationships between one man and one woman arose independently in different cultures around the globe.
Also both human and rhesus monkey infants choose different toys based on their sex. The males choose the masculine toys, the females choose the feminine toys. So were too young to be already socialized into this behavior, so there is obviously a biological bases.
The list goes on and on.

>>9090733
>social constructionists think you can get rid of social constructions
>or would want to
wat

>>9090201
/thread

>>9090751
that's not what a social construct is...

>>9090743
Most of the time they just want to replace what they define as 'social constructs' with their own social constructs.

But there actually are people who want to get rid of the concept of genders all together. You can see this in the ever extending list of gender identities and associated pronouns. If a gender is just something you can make up and change however you feel like, then there is nothing preventing you from having a unique gender for every individual person. It's insane and renders the concept of genders useless.

>>9090759
getting rid of the concept of gender would be another social construction. i think you've associated the term with a group of people who don't know what it means either.

that's like trying to learn what nietzsche meant in thus spake zarathustra from a fifteen year old fedora who never read him but thinks he's ubercool like metallica and marilyn manson.

>>9090781
Only if you assume that not having genders isn't the natural state of human beings.

>>9090797
sorry didn't realise these people came from a time before recorded language and before the concept they are objecting against and that they are objecting to a concept they have no social construct of already.

it's kind of weird you didn't mention that you had time travelling friends from before recorded language who managed to explain the concept of social construction to you but couldn't come up with one for gender, or that they didn't understand what gender could mean until you taught them. it's a pity if you have interacted with them about it though, they do now have social construction of it.

we'll have to wait for the next batch of them and observe them from a distance to make a social construction of their lack of social construction of gender. they must be a special group though because even monkeys can make their own social constructions of money if humans show them a human social construction of it.

natural states have little to nothing to do with social construction. both things that were here before humans and things which only humans created can have social constructions put on them.

you cannot remove yourself from social construction by referring to natural states- it will just lead you to construct "natural states" as another one. the easy way to see this is that either side of the sexism extremists think the naturally dominant sex is themselves, and even though their social constructions of what constitutes either sex is the same as each others (radfems think trannies are sick men as much as christian male led family men do), but both have different and less flexible than the social constructions of the people who aren't either sjws or redpillers. and both think the other is wrong about the natural state of sexes and their hierarchy.

tl;dr- neat, you probably found aliens!

>>9090837
Why do you get angry at me for other people's retarded ideologies? I think I made it clear that I don't believe any of that horseshit.