Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 62

Symbolic interactionism is concerned with the interaction of two or more people through the use of symbols (Quist-Adade 2018). Interaction is clear enough. We all engage in interaction with many others on a daily basis, whether it be face-to-face or more indirectly via cell phone, e-mail, or social media. But interaction could not take place without symbols: words, gestures, internet memes (Benaim 2018), and even objects that stand for things. Symbols allow the communication of meaning among a group of people.

Although we can interact with one another without words, such as through physical gestures like the shrug of a shoulder, in the vast majority of cases we need and use words to interact.

Symbolic interactionism has several basic principles:

 Human beings have a great capacity for thought, which differentiates them from lower animals. That innate capacity for thought is greatly shaped by social interaction. It is during social interaction that people acquire the symbolic meanings that allow them to exercise their distinctive ability to think. Those symbolic meanings in turn allow people to act and interact in ways that lower animals cannot.

 Symbolic meanings are not set in stone. People are able to modify them based on a given situation and their interpretation of it. The Christian cross, for example, is a symbol whose meaning can vary. Christians throughout the world define it in positive religious ways, but many in the Islamic world view it as a negative symbol. Muslims associate the cross with the medieval Crusades waged against their world by the Christian West.

 People are able to modify symbolic meanings because of their unique ability to think. Symbolic interactionists frame thinking as people’s ability to interact with themselves. In that interaction with themselves, people are able to alter symbolic meanings. They are also able to examine various courses of action open to them in given situations, to assess the relative advantages and disadvantages of each, and then to choose among them.

 It is the pattern of those choices of individual action and interaction that is the basis of groups, larger structures such as bureaucracies, and society as a whole. Most generally, in this theoretical perspective, symbolic interaction is the basis of everything else in the social world.

While symbolic interactionists deal primarily with interaction, they are also concerned with mental processes, such as mind and self, that are deeply implicated in those processes.