Beyond the Collective: Reimagining Durkheim's Social Facts through Individual Experiences and Global Perspectives
Öz
The present article analyzes Emile Durkheim's concept of social facts, emphasizing their collective nature and the coercive influence they exert on individuals, and then offers an updated criticism from the social constructivist perspective. Durkheim's work, mainly presented in "The Rules of Sociological Method", presumes that social facts are entities external to and powerful over individuals and they are the ones who maintain the society's order. Nevertheless, this analysis is in favor of including subjective experiences, meanings and understandings of individuals that influence each other in the process of collective model reproduction at the individual level. It shows the limitations of Durkheim's Eurocentrism, in which he seems to be focusing on externality, coerciveness, and generality, while he ignores the differences in experience that exist in the non-Western world. The paper suggests an interpretive approach to social facts which acknowledges the complexity of individual experiences from the North and the South, in order to achieve a broader and more inclusive generalization. Through the inclusion of phenomenological aspects and the necessity of decolonization, the paper is trying to develop Durkheim's scheme to take into account subjective experiences and diverse viewpoints which will result in a more comprehensive and sensitive comprehension of social facts. This approach, therefore, is not only an honor to Durkheim but also a tool that enhances sociological analysis of social facts by paying attention to individual experiences and global perspectives in the collective understanding.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Social Facts, Durkheim, Social Constructivism, Decolonization, Phenomenology
Kaynakça
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