Social Life: Comparing Berger And Luckman

There are many ways to define social life, most people see it as the part of a person's time spent doing enjoyable things with others. It entails building relationships and giving meaning to the world, through our interactions with everything and everyone in it. There are a couple of social theories that help explain how, we as a society and as individuals are able to do this. The two that I am going to be talking about is phenomenology and poststructuralism. From phenomenology I am going to be explaining the works of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and their idea of the social construction of reality. From poststructuralism the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, such as the habitus and theory of capital are going to be used to explain social life and how it works. There are similarities

The basic definition of phenomenology is, the study of conscious human understanding in day-to-day life; it is the connection between the shape of social life on the one hand and how people perceive, think, and talk about it on the other hand. Berger and Luckman believed that, “society was a human product, society is an objective reality, and that man is a social product” (P.341). From this sociological truth they developed the social construction of reality. This is the process whereby people continuously create, through their actions and interactions, a shared reality that is experienced as objectively factual and subjectively meaningful. In other words, the social world is not given, not natural, not revealed, and not fully determined, it is made up by people. Everything we haven’t learned by ourselves or on our own, we learn from other human beings and a lot of what we accept to be real is from what others have told us to be real. Therefore, the social world we experience can be altered, it can be deconstructed and reconstructed. In attempts to explain how things are accepted as real Berger and Luckmann distinguished three phases. “Burger and Luckman use