Charles Lemert claims that social structures are obscured from the people who participate in them and on whose lives they exert constant influence. Such structures are difficult both to define and to observe; Lemert refers to them as routinely appearing like “a mysterious fog.” Yet structures are important to define because of the force they exert, as social structures “inexorably determine what individuals can and cannot do.” The “social energy” of structures to make such determinations is what Lemert calls their “power.”
One factor that masks social structure is belief systems. Lemert uses the example of white settlers’ justification of the North American land grab as a matter of divine providence. Rather than admit that desire for power and greed over the land were reasons that whites tried to take it from Lakota people (and overall succeeded), Lemert observes, white people understood “the theft of land and life as a right of their god’s providence.”
This example, the author continues, is actually easier to see through than most other applications of social structure. Whites clearly did take Native lands. Competition over a scarce good, land, resulted in one competitor achieving it. The structural influence on outcomes is not always manifested in material terms but in abstract concepts that in turn shape material gains.
The importance of prestige is another factor in both expressing and obscuring social structure. People feel the benefits of prestige as they acknowledge their superiority—or sense of superiority—over others but rarely question the broader forces through which that prestige accrues. They tend to internalize the benefits, especially when they derive from everyday forces such as family connections.
One key element of social structural power is authority. The idea that the authority that others hold over us is a limiting factor in our experiences is more likely to be understood by people with relatively little power. Those who have more power, in contrast, either cannot or will not see the importance of authority; this is the case precisely because it is rarely exercised overtly and negatively on them. Those who exercise authority are likely to accept the deference of others as their due and to associate disrespect with individual deviance rather than an expression of structure. In contrast, people who are used to having authority exercised over them are likely to understand the structural bases of that behavior; a contemporary example is mistrust of the police in poor neighborhoods.
https://books.google.com/books?id=8Bboanc2l6AC&dq=lemert+social+structure&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Given all the reasons people have trouble seeing the power of social structure according to Lemert's "The Mysterious Power of Social Structure," formulate an explanation for why some people do come to see this power.
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