A sense of place: Vico and the social production of social identities

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Currently there is a need for an account of the socio‐psychological or socio‐historical processes which produce not just single individuals but ‘collective individualities’ or ‘social identities’. This paper explores Vico's contribution to the solution of this problem. His account of such socio‐historical processes is unique in suggesting that socio‐historical processes develop neither by chance nor by necessity, but providentially, i.e. by the ‘organized settings’ people construct in their own past activities, providing a set of enabling constraints for their current activities. Thus social processes are based, he claims, not upon anything pre‐established either in people or their surroundings, but in socially shared identities of feeling they themselves create in the flow of activity between them. These identities he calls ‘sensory topics’—‘topics’ (Greek topos = ‘place’) because they give rise to ‘commonplaces’, i.e. to shared moments in a flow of social activity which afford common reference, and ‘sensory’ because they are moments in which shared feelings for already shared circumstances are created. These, he claims, constitute the prelinguistic origins of a social order, the paradigms or prototypes from which more organized, conceptual forms of communication may be derived. His account of socio‐historical processes has implications for how we, as social psychologists, (1) should ‘place’ or situate ourselves in relation to those we study in our investigations, (2) for how we might formulate our topics of study, and (3) for the form in which we should communicate our results to those we study.

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit: