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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3557032" data-attributes="member: 7240">That's what you're doing now. But it's a pretty hard sell for you to suggest that this is what you were doing earlier in the thread in the post to which people were reacting.It depends what you mean by this. One can absolutely make statements about how people categorized and conceptualized things in the past. At all times since the beginning of writing, people have had the habit of sorting things into categories and explaining the criteria used to place one thing in category (a) and a different thing in category (h). So, the written record leaves us with a very rich, explicit and detailed set of documents that demonstrate that people in the past did not sort phenomena the way we do now and that these sorting systems deprived past societies' intellectual discourses of certain concepts, just as our present-day categorization systems deprive our society of certain concepts.Sexual orientation, for instance, did not exist as a category until the recent past. Does this mean that people had no concept of same-sex relations? No. But they did lack sexual orientation as a concept. Men in gay relationships were not a set of people who all shared the same sexual orientation; rather, they were two distinct and dissimilar groups: men and male to female transsexuals. And these ideas were not just a social imposition from above -- people in this group conceptualized their sexuality radically differently because they had no concept of sexual orientation.So, you reject everything EP Thompson, Max Weber and everyone else who has theorized about class has to say on this subject? Even non-Marxists agree that one's relations to the means of production condition his culture. It matters a whole hell of a lot what your relations are to the means of production. For one thing, in a society where people are not alienated from the means of production, they don't "go home at the end of the day for a few beers" not because they're not drinking but because the forge is continuous with their domestic space. Your experience of work is hugely affected by the degree to which it is entangled with the rest of your life, spatially, familially, etc.I can see what you are saying here. But I don't see how this is anything other than a total recantation of your previous statement.</blockquote>

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