Perceiving other people: notions on social constructivism

Even though my ongoing project is rather old-school "hands on history" I still would mainly label myself as an primarily a migration historian working from constructive approach. One of my core beliefs is that social categories, whatever they are gender or race, is the result of our inherent tendency to place other people into categories. There have been written miles of research on this theme and one of the things that is the most clear to me is that whilst labels seldom change, the meaning of the labels are themselves quite dynamic and subject to  change. 

The label I am most familiar with is the label of immigrants in 20th century Sweden, a category which I wrote my thesis on. For a person like myself, born in the early 1990's, the word itself carries two meanings. The first is the dictionary meaning - a person who have crossed a national border and then obtained citizenship or lived for a long time in a different country than they were born in - and the second is more of a common sense definition: immigrants are mostly perceived south of western Europe. A clear example of this is mentioned in Hans Wallengrens book "socialdemokrater möter invandrare"  (social democrats meets immigrants) in which the author states that no swede would identify a german bakery as an immigrant shop. However, when I started dissecting the term immigrant it became quite clear to me that our contemporary immigrant-label have a totally different meaning in today's society than in the 1960's and 1970's. Back then immigrants were mainly conceived as germans, finns and jugoslavic people who came to Sweden to work. Later on this was changed when immigrants from outside of Europe came to Sweden and to a increased degree, they became known as muslims or asians living in isolation of swedish society. 

This far you might think "thank you captain obvious" since this in itself is not a very original line of thought. Instead it would be sufficent to look at statitics from the 1960's to see this trend. What however is interesting is that the notions of immigrants plays an important role in how society create policy. By a certain definition of the term "immigrant" certain social measurments becomes possible, whilst other becomes impossible or incomprehensive. Thereby the main interest for me has never been to gain understanding of what the labels contain, but rather how this content becomes instrumental in governing the population. From this perspective, largely derived from Carol Lee Bacchi, it becomes impossible to fully understand politics without understanding the language of politics at the time studied. 

Picture from Flickr

Still I would like to go even further. This understanding is not in itself worth something if it is not applicable to the social situation of today. And here is why social constructions matter: it is only through understanding them that we can understand why society looks a certain way. And by this understanding it becomes possible to criticize and re-develop society, since this understanding also makes it possible to understand how social life would be organized if it departed from a different route of thinking. And this is all in all not only applicable to immigrants, but rather to society as a whole. 

In Sweden homosexuality were for a long time seen as an mental illness. Up until 1944 it was criminalized and then it became the subject of psychatry, thus minimizing the potential for poltical action from the LBTQ-community. In 1979 homosexuality were however declassified as a mental disorder and hence could be normalized. Still it would wait up until 2009 until non-hetreosexual couples could be married in Sweden. Yet, this is a development that would not have been possible without changing the content of homosexuality from illness to acceptable. Thereby, social constructions largely affects our own lifes and perhaps it is only through fierce studies that they can be subject to change. 

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