“Normal People”: The Constitution of Social Normality

What is it about?

Classical phenomenology (Husserl, Scheler, Schutz, Merleau-Ponty) and its later followers (Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Harold Garfinkel) has contributed enormously to the understanding constitution of the social world and of sociality in general. Within the concept of the social there is the crucial distinction between normality and anomality. It is almost a dogma of current sociology that all social identity is socially constituted; and a similar dogma of post-Foucauldian social thought that all social construction inherently privileges a certain elite. But what is given in our experience of normality? What is presupposed by our normal experience in bodily, perceptual, intersubjective, and institutional settings? In this paper I will try to develop the notion of the bodily constraints on social normality.

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