By Diane M. Rodgers

ISBN-10: 0807133698

ISBN-13: 9780807133699

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, common and social scientists started evaluating convinced bugs to human social association. Entomologists theorized that social bugs -- resembling ants, bees, wasps, and termites -- set up themselves into hugely really good, hierarchical divisions of work. utilizing a enormously human vocabulary that mirrored the dominant social constitution of the time, they defined bugs as queens, employees, and infantrymen and categorised their behaviors with phrases like marriage, slavery, farming, and factories. even as, sociologists operating to enhance a version for human association in comparison humans to bugs, counting on an analogous premise that people organize themselves hierarchically. In Debugging the hyperlink among Social idea and Social bugs, Diane M. Rodgers explains how those co-constructed theories bolstered each other, thereby naturalizing Western conceptions of race, type, and gender as they won prominence in pop culture and the clinical world.

Using a serious technology reports standpoint now not formerly utilized to analyze on social insect symbolism, Rodgers makes an attempt to "debug" this theoretical co-construction. She offers adequate historical past info to deal with readers unusual with entomology -- together with in-depth causes of the phrases utilized in the study and dialogue of social bugs, quite the insect sociality scale. the total premise of sociality for bugs depends upon a dominant knowing of high/low civilization criteria -- fairly the tenets of a really expert department of work and hierarchy -- comparisons that seem to learn by way of nineteenth-century colonial notion. putting those theories in a old and cross-cultural context, Rodgers explains why hierarchical rules received prominence, regardless of the lifestyles of opposing theories within the literature, and the way they led to an inhibiting vocabulary that is predicated extra seriously on metaphors than on description.

Such research is critical, Rodgers argues, since it sheds gentle either on newly proposed medical versions and on destiny adjustments in human social constructions. modern scientists have started to problem the conventional figuring out of insect social association and to suggest new interdisciplinary types that mix principles approximately social insect and human organizational constitution with computing device applied sciences. with no thorough knowing of the way the previous versions took place, residual language and embedded assumptions may perhaps stay and proceed to augment hierarchical social constructions.

This fascinating interdisciplinary e-book makes a massive contribution to the background -- and destiny -- of technology and sociology.

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Debugging the Link between Social Theory and Social Insects by Diane M. Rodgers


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