Upvoted for the cool concept; I reckon Reification is a great word to play around with and have in your conceptual toolkit. Interestingly, it comes up a lot in Marxist theory as a common mistake made whilst analyzing society. Reification occur when social systems are defined in terms, or attributed to, facts of nature, manifestations of Divine Will or the supposedly inherent traits of the individuals within them, in contrast to something that arises from specific material conditions and relations to production. For example, attributing the prevalence of the Church in medieval Europe to an inherent Godfearing property of the peasant, or attributing the dominance of markets today to a competitive streak in ‘human nature’ would file under reification in the Marxist sense.
Upvoted for the cool concept; I reckon Reification is a great word to play around with and have in your conceptual toolkit. Interestingly, it comes up a lot in Marxist theory as a common mistake made whilst analyzing society. Reification occur when social systems are defined in terms, or attributed to, facts of nature, manifestations of Divine Will or the supposedly inherent traits of the individuals within them, in contrast to something that arises from specific material conditions and relations to production. For example, attributing the prevalence of the Church in medieval Europe to an inherent Godfearing property of the peasant, or attributing the dominance of markets today to a competitive streak in ‘human nature’ would file under reification in the Marxist sense.