Ontological ‘Reflexivity’ in Southeast Asian Cultural Studies

서지정보

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· 저자명 : 김예겸

초록

The aim of the paper is to reflexively examine the ontological approach to the lifeworld [lebenswelt] in Social Sciences, and then to seek an appropriate ‘reflexivity’ in it, thereby eventually attempting to connect its implication to ‘reflexive’ methodology for the academic enterprise, Southeast Asian Cultural Studies. Given the fact that the paper primarily reflects on experiences of ethnographic research, the term ‘Southeast Asian Cultural Studies’ is adopted with a view to distinguish it from other macro-level or quantitative Studies. Moreover, bearing in mind that it kicks off primarily from research experiences of an anthropological approach, in terms of epistemic triangulation, the paper also attempts to reflexively accommodate ontological properties of Sociological Cultural Studies.
The core idea of this paper is based on the very first field research experience of the author as a Southeast Asianist in a Minahasan region, Tomohon, in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, between June 1999 and July 2000, and its ontological reflexivity of epistemic application to Southeast Asian Cultural Studies. The reason why the field research was selected and presented in this paper is because it clearly shows a stereotyped example of the epistemic nature in transition of Southeast Asian Cultural Studies at the beginning of the 21st century.
After briefly presenting Tomohon as the setting of the paper, in search of an alternative ‘reflexivity’, the paper critically examines the three major ontological paradigms in Social Sciences in the analysis of the relations between the two main determinants of social outcomes, ‘social structure’ and ‘human agency’ as follows. The first paradigm [functionalism and structuralism] is based on the ‘realist’ assumption that human agency is largely determined and regulated by social structure. The second paradigm [interpretive-actor perspectives] emerged as a critical reaction to the ‘realist’ perspective; it emphasizes the flexibility of social actors in constructing their lifeworld in relation to social structure. The third paradigm [reflexive approaches] attempts to compromise between the two perspectives, stressing structural influences on social actors and the capacities of social actors to reconstruct social structure. Especially, having examined the ontological perspectives of the relations between human agency and social structure in Giddens’s concept of ‘structuration’ and Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’, the paper suggests them as a ‘sensitizing’ reflexive theoretical framework that is an alternative paradigm to the ‘realist’ and ‘interpretive-actor’ paradigms.
As a conclusion, the paper argue that the premises of ‘reflexive approaches’ seem to provide a means of tackling the ontological dilemmas in the ‘realist’ and ‘interpretive-actor’ paradigms. Nevertheless, the life-dynamics of people still demand a more ‘actor-centered’ account of reflexive and homogeneous interaction between actors and social structures.

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