Social theory in anthropology is the enterprise of explaining what constitutes a human being, what holds a society together, and how the individual is linked to the collective, and its methodological signature is the demonstration that the minute details of everyday life encode and reproduce large-scale social forces. Within the Frankfurt School's critical theory — a synthesis of Marxist political economy with psychoanalytic premises (the historical formation of the psyche, its division into conscious and unconscious strata, and the unconscious determination of attitudes) — a theory counts as critical when it helps liberate people from the conditions that enslave them, and the Enlightenment is read dialectically: the same rationality that emancipates also generates instrumental rationality, in which reason turns against itself. Applied to mass culture, this framework treats popular forms as an ideological mechanism producing social conformity, an illusory freedom defined as voluntarily taking upon oneself what is inevitable anyway, and an authoritarian dependency on depersonalized abstract authority — "insight without insight."
Social theory in anthropology is the enterprise of explaining what constitutes a human being, what holds a society together, and how the individual is linked to the collective, and its methodological…