Chicago: Chicago University Press. Reflexive turns, then, are implicated in the very construction of social actors, social actions, and the disciplines and professions that study and monitor them. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind. The concept of reflexivity has a longer history in sociology than in anthropology. 2005. Signs about Signs: The Semiotics of Self-Reference. To be reflexive is to be reflective; but one is not necessarily reflexive when one is reflective, for to reflect is simply to think about something, but to be reflexive is to think about the process of thinking itself. Dwyer, Kevin. Reflexive inquiry tends to blur the very distinctions between observer and observed and between representation and reality upon which conventional inquiry is predicated. Garfinkel, Harold. Kripal, Jeffrey John. Encyclopedia.com. Azande explanations of the occasional failure of oracles to correctly predict future events were predicated on the cultural assumptions that contributed to belief in the efficacy of oracles in the first place. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Merton, R. K. 1948. Further, explication of the embedded and entwined features of social scientific inquiry threatens to initiate an infinite regress in which each successive reflexive turn calls forth yet another to explicate its predecessor. Crapanzano, Vincent. This study assumes that reflection is “a turning back onto a self” where the inquirer is at once an observed and an active observer (Steier, 1995, p. 163). 1987. At the simplest level, a relationship is reflexive if the relationship is self-referring (i.e. Unsurprisingly, social scientists vary in their enthusiasm for taking the reflexive turn and exposing themselves to these (and other) problems. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Natanson, Maurice. New York, 1981. Marcus and Clifford, for example, were critical of the lack of formal experimentation in writings by feminist anthropologists. It became a central theoretical (and practical) concern during the mid-1980s in response to a distinctive conjunction of events both within and outside of the discipline, which problematized the production of ethnographic texts. Cultural Studies 17 (May 2003): 539–554. Turner was interested in the ways in which social action was accomplished through the manipulation of symbols. In his work, reflexivity is understood as a strategic agenda, that of utilizing the tools of the discipline in order to demystify sociology as a power saturated social practice. Mannheim, Karl 1968. Marcus, George E. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. In his work, reflexivity is understood as a strategic agenda, that of utilizing the tools of the discipline in order to demystify sociology as a power saturated social practice. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. These concerns were articulated in two publications of the period, Dell Hymes's collection Reinventing Anthropology in the United States and Talal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter in Britain. While it is still associated primarily with experimental works, reflexivity is also found in mainstream cinema and theater. ." This speculation on philosophical issues contains a superb chapter, "The Identity of the Self," and the best single, summary discussion available of reflexivity. The so-called reflexive turn in anthropology came as the outcome of three distinct disciplinary crises, beginning in the early 1970s. Reflexive inquiry bids researchers to address themselves, their inquiries, and the inquiries’ products in terms of the processes found elsewhere in social life. Turner, Victor, ed. Studies in economic sociology and kindred fields identify how lay and professional economic reasoning shapes financial markets and even the reasoners themselves. First, rather than mirror a preexistent domain, reflexive turns are constitutively entwined with the form, dynamics, and even existence of what is observed or described. When, for example, Kenneth Burke defines humanity in the first chapter of Language as Symbolic Action (1966), he describes as "characteristically human" this "'second-level' aspect of symbolicity or 'reflexive' capacity to develop highly complex symbol systems about symbol systems, the pattern of which is indicated in Aristotle's definition of God as 'thought of thought,' or in Hegel's dialectics of 'self-consciousness'" (p. 24). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Like Turner's "Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama," this essay expands upon the concepts of liminality and reflexivity and examines a variety of genres of cultural performance as instances of and occasions for metasocial commentary, for public and plural reflexivity. (October 16, 2020). A prodigious zeal for work, combined with enormo…, Albion WoodburySmall (1854-1926) did more than any other American sociologist toestablish the recognition of sociology as an academic subject, and he…, Giddings, Franklin H. 19–41. "Life History Among the Elderly." Woolgar, Steve, ed. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. . Mannheim, Karl. In addition to this ineluctable reflexivity of religion's collective representations and plural expressions, many singular religious practices are explicitly reflexive. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Behar, Ruth, and Deborah Gordon, eds. With reference to mental operations, the adjective is frequently confused and used interchangeably with its near synonym, reflective. Individuals interact with one another in light of their reflexive understanding of the contexts and consequences of their actions. New York, 1973. Retrieved October 16, 2020 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/reflexivity. It would be wrong, however, to regard linguistic self-reference as either the cause or the explanation of reflexivity. Encyclopedia.com. Trans. Innumerable professionals—social scientists among them—audit, analyze, and forecast the functioning of organizations, institutions, and the society itself. On the institutional level, reflexive inquiry examines how various contexts or fields foster intellectual dispositions and prejudgments that form what Pierre Bourdieu in 1992 referred to as “the collective scientific unconscious” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Some interpretivists and particularly postmodernists note that the researcher is not able to be genuinely objective because they are as much a part of the society that is being studied as the "subjects" of the research.