Sociology of HIV/AIDS Embodiment: Epistemological Encounter- Emotion with the Social Space

  Joydeb Patra

How do we know what we know? From Sociological perspective has a simple response that: We have learned it. Since our childhood, we have learned to relate to the world through categories that our social environment readily supplied for us (Durkheim 2001; Durkheim and Mauss 1963; Martin 2000). Our sense of time, of Body, of space, of emotion or of the sacred—all of this came mediated by the people and institutions that surround us. It formed our judgment and shaped our social space, our morality and emotion. Our bodies were also trained in the process, too. We came to recognize and experience certain physical sensations, to move and use our limbs in this or that manner, and know when to feel disgust and revulsion (Mauss 2006; Elias 2000). The things that feel natural to us are not natural at all. These clashes are exposed daily in the small and large symbolic struggles that pervade life in society (Bourdieu 1987; Lamont 1992), and reveal the one meta-rule that governs it all: body politics. This paper examines whether the theoretical position and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions through the epistemological queries associated with their parent discipline. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilize non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the ‘lived experience’ of embodiment from PLWH. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists.

Keywords- Sociology of Embodiment, PLWH, Epistemological encounter, emotion, Social space

Unique Identification Number - IJEDR1802061
Page Number(s) - 346-356
Pubished in - Volume 6 | Issue 2 | April 2018
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) -   
Publisher - IJEDR (ISSN - 2321-9939)

  Joydeb Patra,   "Sociology of HIV/AIDS Embodiment: Epistemological Encounter- Emotion with the Social Space", International Journal of Engineering Development and Research (IJEDR), ISSN:2321-9939, Volume.6, Issue 2, pp.346-356, April 2018, Available at :http://www.ijedr.org/papers/IJEDR1802061.pdf