Bakhtin and the Human Sciences

Michael E Gardiner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Michael Mayerfeld Bell is Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For his day job, he is principally an environmental sociologist and a social theorist, focusing on dialogics, the sociology of nature, and social justice. These concerns for the world have led him to studies of agroecology, the body, community, consumption, culture, development, food, democracy, economic sociology, gender, inequality, participation, place, politics, rurality, the sociology of music, and more. He is also a part-time composer of grassroots and classical music, and a mandolinist, guitarist, and singer.

INTRODUCTIONS Bakhtin and the Human Sciences - Michael Gardiner and Michael Mayerfeld Bell An Introduction PART TWO: DIALOGICS A Bakhtinian Psychology - John Shotter and Michael Billig From Out of the Heads of Individuals and into the Dialogues between Them The Dialogics of Narrative Identity - Jennifer De Peuter Culture as Dialogue - Michael Mayerfeld Bell Bakhtin and the Dialogic of Society - Dorothy Smith An Investigation PART THREE: CARNIVALS The Grotesque of the Body Electric - Peter Hitchcock Bakhtin's Dialogical Body Politics - Hwa Yol Jung Knowing the Subaltern - Michael Bernard-Donals Bakhtin, Carnival and the Other Voice of the Human Sciences PART FOUR: CONVERSATIONS 'The Incomparable Monster of Solipsism' - Michael Gardiner Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty Bakhtin and Mannheim - Raymond A Morrow An Introductory Dialogue The Death and Rebirth of the Author - Ian Burkitt The Bakhtin Circle and Bourdieu on Individuality, Language and Revolution PART FIVE: ETHICS AND EVERYDAY LIVES Bakhtinian Perspectives on 'Everyday Life' Sociology - Courtney Bender The Shock of the Old - Barry Sandywell Mikhail Bakhtin's Contributions to the Theory of Time and Alterity The Norms of Answerability - Greg Nielsen Bakhtin and the Fourth Postulate

What are we to make of Bakhtin? Nearly twenty years after his death, the full richness of his ideas has still not been digested. For many people working in the social sciences he remains a mysterious and impenetrable writer. Many are conscious hat his ideas are relevant for sociology and cultural studies, but would be hard pressed to give chapter and verse. Others regard Bakhtin to be figure who contributed to the literary and philologic fields of study. This accessible and thoughtful text aims to demonstrate the relevance of Bakhtin to the human sciences. It argues that most of the current literature has been characterized by a superficial appropriation of Bakhtinian ideas and neologisms. What has been neglected is a serious engagement with his core ideas and a sustained reflection on their implications for social and cultural theory. A lively introduction discusses the importance of Bakhtin as a major intellectual figure and situates his ideas in current theoretical trends and developments. This is followed by essays from a diverse group of contributors, organized around the four main themes in Bakhtin's work: dialogics, carnivals, conversations and ethics and everyday life. Bakhtin and the Human Sciences is an accurate and insightful attempt to extend Bakhtin's ideas into the mainstream social sciences and to reconsider Bakhtin as a social thinker, not just a literary theorist.