This book develops a radically new way of understanding the social by focussing on different experiences we have of the everyday empirical reality. This book offers a new way of understanding the social processes of societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, all of which have complex experiences of the everyday social. The authors begin with the argument that the everyday social is the domain where the first experiences of the social are formed and these experiences influence to a great extent meaning-making of the structural social. Following a critique of some dominant trends in social ... More

This book develops a radically new way of understanding the social by focussing on different experiences we have of the everyday empirical reality. This book offers a new way of understanding the social processes of societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, all of which have complex experiences of the everyday social. The authors begin with the argument that the everyday social is the domain where the first experiences of the social are formed and these experiences influence to a great extent meaning-making of the structural social. Following a critique of some dominant trends in social ontology, they discuss in detail, and with many common examples, how the social is experienced through the perceptual capacities of sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. They then discuss the relation between experience of belongingness and the social, and show how the social gets authority in a way similar to how natural gets authority in the natural sciences. Moreover, the social appears through the invocation of we-ness, suggestive of a social self. The everyday social also creates its sense of time, a social time which orders social experiences such as caste. Finally, the authors explain how the ethics of the social is formed through the relationship of Maitri (drawn from Ambedkar) between the different socials that constitute a society. This is not just a new theory of the social but is filled with illustrations from the everyday experiences of India, including the diverse experiences of caste.