SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

First Semester S.Y. 2020-2021

MODULE 12
Discipline and Ideas in the
Social Sciences

Name: _______________________________ Date :__________

Grade/Section: ________________________ Week : 12
Track/Strand: _________________________

Lesson AFTER SOCIETY: HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE OF AN

12 EVER-CHANGING “US” AND “THEM”? (A GLANCE AT
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORIES)
WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?

This lesson brings us to a very important stage of our journey that is where
there is no invalid interpretation and no exclusive framework to cover for all
human phenomena and societal affairs. Social theory has come to a point where
most of the loopholes in social thought, over the last century, have been
covered, loose ends tied, shortcomings addressed, and gray areas illuminated.
This is the time where the world itself has gone into an unparalleled
transformation; sustained by the gains earned in the previous centuries; and
characterized by mobility of people, technological advancement, globalization,
and widespread commodification. This is the time when the notion of society,
as both a category and an analytical concept envisioned since the dawn of
modernity, is being challenged from all fronts making it an insecure and
volatile idea. In the midst of all these macro societal changes, micro processes
involving intimate human relationships and embodied individual assertions of
rights and identity exist as parallel outcomes so that society appears to be
multifaceted and layered with each one of them, affecting the course of the
other. Society has never been more fluid and dynamic than now.

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT TO LEARN?

Content Standard:
The learners demonstrate understanding of:
1. key concepts in the Social Sciences rooted in Filipino language/s and
Experiences; and
2. the role of Social Science in the real world.

Performance Standard:
The learners should be able to:
1. carry out an exploration of personal and social experiences using
indigenous concepts; and
2. illustrate situations and contexts in which Social Science can be
applied.

Objectives:

After the lesson, the learners should be able to:

1. define a glance at contemporary social theories;
2. identify the breaking rules and debunking canons; and
3. develop critical analysis in examining the changing social world.

PRELIMINARY ACTIVITY
Let’s start!
Hello learner. Please sign the learning agreement before reading the topics and
answering the different activities. ENJOY!

DISCUSSION

This section provides us one last glance at Western Inspired social theory;
the latter segment of a long philosophical and sociological treatise about the
nature of society and essence of humanity, which both serve as commentaries
and prescriptions of how the world and human life should be seen and
imagined. By now, you should be able to discern that by “Western” we do not
intend to oversimplify the whole of the West as a monolithic culture with
homogenous worldviews. We recognize the fact that the West has common
empirical, historical experience with intersecting lines of thought drawing from
their overlapping intellectual and cultural spheres. Having a common and deep
experience with expansionism in foreign lands, which were under their political
and economic spheres for a very long time, gave this Western a realistic and
tangible value; those who belong to it contend with the same issues and
struggled with similar challenges of maintaining and keeping their overseas
possessions. Historically and geopolitically, the notion of Wester’ created its
own being in the mold of Western Europe and the United States of America,
which all contributed tremendously to the formation of global social theory and
methodology.

Breaking Rules and Debunking Canons

Society has clearly been the subject of much reflection all throughout
social theory. According to those theories (read: big ideas), society strikes us as
a delicate system yet a very efficient bunch of integrated elements-a well-oiled
machine, so to speak. Some aspects ' of society do appear to us as solid
testaments of authority, factuality, and reality. Though being abstract concepts
and mental models of ourselves and the world in which we live, they impress
us as if they were indeed natural, innate, and inherent in all of us and in all of
what we do, say, and think. What if society is indeed passé for our time? What
if with certain social concepts we cast more doubt than light? Key words or key
terminologies will easily come to mind: Culture-the said fulcrum of all of our
thoughts, actions, and interactions; Modernity-the means through which we can
grasp the present and envision the future of our human and social existence,
and Gender-the unabashed way of dividing the world between male and
female, something that we learn from the very moment that we learned to talk
and responded to our surroundings. For centuries, and more significantly in the
latter decades, Western thought grappled with those three concepts that became
fixtures of both social theory and social action.

As society seemed to be founded upon such big ideas, a change in ideas

too-of how we look at the world-will shake up our understanding of it-the locus
of our humanity. By the post-World War Il era, the force of earlier analytical
tools will weaken and the preconditions and premises of a single framework
will be eroded. Is culture still 4 relevant discourse when we try to make sense of
an ever-changing “us” and “them”? In our present era, this diametrically
opposed pronouns (read: concepts)—product of external labels and artificial
categories-no longer capture how we represent and engage our world today.
Culture will come to be under attack in a manner, probably, not foreseen by its
major theoretical founders and creators of the late 19th century to early 20th
century. What about modernity, have we ever gone beyond the promise of
modern society? The West surely is looking beyond this concept as modern
society is already being reconfigured and revamped based on new ways of
creating, doing, behaving, and interacting.

Thinking about it, it seems amusing to note how we, in the context of our
country, can think past modernity when we have not really reached full or high
modernity in the same way as Western societies already did in the past. As both
a concept and a model, not everyone rode alongside it as a large portion of our
country is still in the rural, agricultural, and traditional mode of life.
Postmodernism offers insights about Western society more than it does for
Philippine condition.

For instance, it took a decades-long struggle for the Reproductive Health

(RH) Bill to be finally passed in Congress (as of this writing, it awaits the
President’s signature and the result of an anti-RH bill petition to the Supreme
court from certain sectors). At the same time, gender equality policies and
programs still have to be fully implemented throughout the country and gender
biases finally eradicated in society. Still a long road ahead but there are
indications that we are getting there.

In our world today, rules and canons are increasingly being challenged
and reoriented to suit new trends and new ways of looking at the world. What
used to be considered standard modes and procedures of knowledge
production, authoritative canons and accepted tenets, are now reconfigured and
reimagined to fit new systems of living and existing characterized by
unprecedented economic, technological, social, cultural, and environmental
transformations. A whole new ontology is upon us-new ways of knowing and
interpreting; a novel way of dealing and engaging with human existence. Not
that we would throw away whatever we have built in the past but recognizing
several truths are possible. It says that there is now plurality in our meanings
and meaning makings. Along this line of thinking, everything is possible and
acceptable because the truth is a possession of no one. It is not an exclusive
property of a group or nation nor a creation of a particular historical era.
Individuals and their subjectivities are brought to the fore. Studies and
researchers about society are more reflexive now than they were before. The
notion of knowledge itself is no longer a creation of a given influential group or
a dominant school of thought but can also be found in the minority, in general.

Like what the place marker of the Talaandig ethnolinguistic group of

Bukidnon in Mindanao implies, being “conscious” about culture is actually a
call for preserving tradition, history, environment, life ways, and consciousness.
The subtext in the roadside marker is the imminent and constant challenge to
tradition and culture-encroachment into ancestral domain by outside forces,
militarization, exploitation, and environmental degradation, among others. The
concept of culture, which has served as a primary tool of colonization, state
control, and objectification by the academe and the scientific community, is the
same concept that can be used to respond to and address those pressing issues.

The Era of Many “Posts”

Three strands of contemporary social theory figure quite prominently in

our glance: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and gender theory. Contemporary
theory is understood here as social ideas that have emerged in the last 30 years
(hence, in the mid-1980s), some of them even harking back from earlier decades
of post-World War II period. Generally speaking, contemporary social ideas
bring into the discussion a lot of attention to primary concepts such as
modernity, gender, society, humanity, progress, etc., and look at it with
hindsight-something that is unique to our situation today. Hence, ours is a time
of many “posts” -meaning, seeing humanity being ushered into a new stage of
history, into an era of self-conscious and reflexive rediscovery. According to
contemporary theory drumbeaters, we are said to be already past and beyond
the dominance of science and empiricism, of rigid frameworks, and of limited
intellectual constructions. The horizon of methodology and interpretation has
been broadened bringing into the fold of academic theorizing those ideas
coming from native or indigenous knowledge; that there are many truths and
no single truth shall tyrannize our thinking and mode of behaving.

Postmodernism, a school of thought that developed out of architecture

and literary criticism in the 1980s, has created ripples in Social Science,
especially in the way researchers view their data set, prior assumptions about
the world, and everyday phenomena experienced by humans. It brings about a
new epistemology: that knowledge is no longer patterned after a firm belief in
science (the epitome of positivism and empiricism of the centuries before the
20th century). Instead, postmodernism believes that science is, itself, a human
construct, a product of a particular time, specific sociocultural context and
situation. Postmodernism, judging from the label, is a reaction to the dominant
theme of modernity, which has been a cornerstone of 19th-20th century social
theory.

The problem with this theory is that it remained a loose set of arguments,
heterogeneous attacks on the concept of modernity and science. There was not a
clear program of knowledge production, so to speak, like a contribution to and
advancement of knowledge, but scathing critiques of prior knowledge system
exemplified by science and modernity. We can say that for a brief moment,
postmodernism became a fad among scholars and academics, but over the
course of years, it went out of style nonetheless.

Postcolonialism is closer to our hearts and experiences as a nation simply

because we were at the receiving end of colonialism for almost 400 years under
two different colonial masters, the Spaniards and the Americans respectively.
Not to mention, there was a very brief Japanese interlude during the war years
so we are very familiar with what colonialism really entails as a concept and as
a real historical experience. So what is this concept about? Again, drawing from
the label itself, postcolonialism is a reaction to the idea and effects of
colonialism not only in terms of how it created visible and tangible forms of
power relations between the colonizers and the colonized, but also in terms of
how it was able to manufacture invisible and ideological forms of unequal
relationship between the colonizers and us, Filipinos. Armed with hindsight
and better understanding of the historical process, postcolonial analyses made
use of colonial production and creations in reinterpreting and retelling what
happened in the past, this time, with the Filipino in mind and not the foreigner
or colonizer.

Meanwhile, gender theory is pretty much about breaking old rules and
reorienting our traditional and long-standing notions about individual
identities. “Sex” becomes a major category that was given much attention and
analysis under this framework. From the idea of sex, the concept of “gender”
was enriched and cultivated not only by social theory but also by certain
concerned sectors of society. These gender scholars come from a wide spectrum
of individuals and groups ranging from academics, advocates, health
practitioners, legal officers, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers,
among others. The gist of this framework is that gender is different from sex;
the former drawing more from the side of culture and social construction while
the latter is still confined with heteronormativity (or the “normal” system of life
based on two sexes, male and female) and all the repercussions and
implications of this mindset. With a more heightened awareness and sensitivity
to gender, society shall not be limited to what biological two-sex category will
offer. It will require the fact that the two-sex category-a heteronormative
system-is not sufficient to fully account for the diversity and fluidity identities.

Let us take a look at a more recent definition of sex and see how it is
being seen nowadays not only by the academe but by advocates of gender
equality and sexual rights.

Clearly, based on the definition above, the idea of gender is a total

concept that aims to address the physical but also the mental side of how we
perceive human nature. Gender, since it is a set of ideas pertaining to
differences between and among people, has been regarded as an ideology that
is embedded ideas in being a man or a woman, or being a person categorized as
neither man nor woman. Gender ideology clamors to make us aware that in
society there are automatic, traditional, and dominant ideas that must be
challenged and addressed in order to create a more just and fair society that
promotes individual happiness.

Globalization-Beyond Economics

Going back to our mental play around the of idea of global culture, it is
useful to reflect on the catchphrase “The World is Our Culture,’ which was
originally meant to aid in the marketing of a popular fashion commodity. But,
honestly, this not only speaks well of the genius behind capitalist goals of
reaching and creating more markets but also reflects what is going on in the
world today-blurred boundaries of nations; free flow of goods, commodities,
products, and capital; plus, a free flow of ideas and values that come along with
those goods or ideas marketed as commodities. Of course, we can easily
associate globalization with economics and material wealth, but how do we
really identify it with or experience it in our everyday life processes and events?
You may be surprised but, actually, we have been experiencing globalization
since the time we started using cellphones, surfing the worldwide web, and
other products of the digital world.

With globalization, physical geography and time shrink. Thanks to

unparalleled progress in science and technology, especially in the fields of
transportation and communication, what used to take too long to do or
accomplish is easily carried about a minute ago out at the tip of the finger.
Computers and the Internet blossomed and forever changed how we view and
experience life in general. Think, too, of the number of times we saw DVDs
being sold in the tiangge or busy sidewalks of populous districts. Perhaps, at
one point (or several points) in time, we had been swayed to watch pirated
movies. That is an expression of globalization as well. How about the Social
Media (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) boom that is currently taking the
globe by storm? These applications, programs, and software have not only been
helping people to do multiple useful and leisurely tasks but also create new
meanings and subcultures-say, the new dimension of being a “friend.”
Globalization works positively for us, but it can also create new problems to
worry about in the present and in the near future.

ASSESSMENT
ACTIVITY I – MY THOUGHTS!
Directions: Write some thoughts about the words below and follow the guide question.
Write your answer on the circle.

Q – What are the differences between Breaking Rules and Debunking Canons?

Breaking Rules Debunking Canons

ACTIVITY II- ESSAY

Directions: Answer the following questions concisely. Write your answer on the space
provided. Your answers will be rated by the following criteria:

Content 2 points
Construction 2 points
Originality 1 point
TOTAL 5 points
1. What do you mean by this line “The World is Our Culture”?
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2. What do you understand about “The Era of Many Posts”?

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FEEDBACK
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REFERENCE
Rex Book Store “Disciplines and Ideas in the Social Sciences by Carlos Peña Tatal
Jr. 2016 Edition