Symbolic Interaction

The big question of the class, the lowest common denominator as we move from school of thought to school of thought has been “What is?” As pseudo-theorists, we are in the business of making ontological assumptions. (Am I allowed to talk about business in sociology?) Some ontological assumptions have been that we are what we make, or that we are what we do, or that we are what we consume. All of those are famous and important and somewhat explanatory. But they don’t completely envelope and explain everything about who we are. They all seem to be politically charged in some way (like Marx’s Communism), or the theorist wants to rationalize questionable or selfish behavior (like Freud’s complexes), or the theorist couldn’t take it into other academic fields, so he just dropped it off to with Sociology, like a kid at daycare (like Peter Blau’s Exchange Theory and Nietzsche’s Atomism, which are actually Economics in disguise.)

But finally we have come in our class to the most applicable, meaningful, and substantial of theories; outside of the ontological assumption that we are all children of God and “He has sent [us] here,” of course. Symbolic interaction is true sociology at work. It defines every thing, whether actions or objects or people, in terms of independent meaning depending on independent situations. We first identify what is, and from that we identify what we know. What is so fantastic about this is that here we are studying social science (testing an hypothesis, in the simplest of terms), and we have a theory that by definition is the opposite of scientific. Essentially, any thing could have any meaning in any situation. It’s fool proof: nobody can prove it wrong, so nobody has an obligation to prove it right.

However, what makes symbolic interaction to useful is that it doesn’t claim to be predictive; but rather, descriptive. We act in our natural ways, and it conforms to those actions. The symbols conform to our actions. S.I. doesn’t force us to justify our actions or get us riled up and motivated to change the world. (Really, that’s why we have the other social sciences. Let them boss us around.) S.I. reminds us that we are different people in different situations.
One of my best friends acts completely different around friends than he does around his uncles, who mostly raised him on account of his deceased father. Other theories would take the role similar to that of the disappointed girlfriend who might break up with him because he’s “a completely different person when you’re around your uncles.” But S.I. seems to tell the girlfriend off. “Well,” S.I. says. “His uncles take him as a different object, and so he acts differently. Of course he is a completely different person! He’s being treated completely differently!”

My mission president made an attribute out of being taken as a different object to different people. I served in Taiwan, and they speak differently there than the Mainland Chinese do, much like the difference between the US and Britain. So, when speaking to someone from China, President would match that person’s accent. When he met a native Taiwanese person, he would speak and act to mirror that person.

The moral problem to be dispelled with this idea of changing from interaction to interaction is that we are not being true to ourselves. Or at least that’s the sanctimony that your neighborhood motivational speaker is reciting. But what defines a ‘self?’ Where does a ‘self’ come from? Is there a ‘self’ factory in China and we all have to keep the same ‘self’ that we are issued from childhood? S.I. says that our relationships are our respective ‘selves.’ If we act the exact same way regardless of the situation, then we are limiting our ‘selves’ to one kind of group. That may explain why people get awkward: they are not willing to have their ‘selves’ be taken in a different way than they usually are.