Reification |
Anthropologists are often concerned to show that social and cultural phenomena are results of underlying processes that we have a tendency to overlook, and that they are thus "something other than what they seem to be". Reification stands for the opposite: that we take phenomena for given, as they appear to us. It is often claimed, for example, that the concept of culture is a reification, since we have a tendency to think of "a culture" as a completed object, a "thing" we can "touch and feel", which all members of the culture share - rather than a complex aggregate of processes, which different people participate in, to a greater or lesser extent. When we reify, we do not see the details, because they are overshadowed by the whole. We think, e.g. of "Norway" as if it were one thing, while in reality it is a near-infinite agglomeration of people, projects, actions, expressions and objects, in constant movement and conflict, within a landscape which is neither homogeneous, stable or geographically bounded. When I say "I am a Norwegian", this is a reification, which hides the countless other things I also am. Similarly, Marx claimed that money was a reification (a fetish) of the production processes - the labor - that creates the values that money measures. (See also postmodernism, process analysis.)