Elusive Concepts of the Social. Simultaneous Analysis from Different Socio-Cultural Contexts.

Throughout its complex history and in different Southern and Northern socio-cultural contexts, sociology has produced a heterogeneous range of concepts, terminologies and images of “the social”. In certain cases, collective forms have been characterized by more “organic” figures, endowed with a consistency and boundaries sometimes overlapped with the modern nation-state. The most renowned of these are classic versions of “society”, “social structure”, “social system”, or even “citizenship” or “bureaucracy”. However, alongside or on the margins of these conceptualizations, much more elusive figures have been conceived and promoted, with more slippery shapes. Such is the case of “community”, in which reverberates the echo of some primordial entity, a nucleus or foundation of all possible sociality (both in romantic/traditional/charismatic/“warm” variants and in contractual/liberal/“colder” ones). Another good example are “crowds”/“masses”/“mobs”/“multitudes”. If community refers to some degree of “stability”, supporting more “artificial” forms, crowds and masses imply much more dispersed directions, without a border or container to hold them firmly. This session calls for contributions which reflect on elusive figures of the social, both on those just mentioned or on many others (e.g. “people”). This elusive quality is sensitive to the specificities of each social configuration, with its singular political and cultural forms, crossed by complex simultaneous relations of production and circulation of knowledge between the South and the North. Thus, we welcome contributions analyzing the characteristics and reasons that define a concept as elusive, or its possible metamorphosis from organic-stable to elusive (or vice versa), in diverse socio-cultural contexts and epochal crossroads.