“Critically analyse the contributions of G. H. Mead to ‘symbolic interactionism’.” (2013, 2010)
George Herbert Mead, a Chicago pragmatist, called his approach social behaviourism. His student Herbert Blumer coined “symbolic interactionism” in 1937, building on lectures published posthumously as Mind, Self and Society (1934). Mead laid foundations that also explain the perspective’s blind spots.
Core contributions
- Pragmatism applied to conduct. Meaning lies in the response an object calls out. The human act (impulse, perception, manipulation, consummation) is not a fixed reflex, and the pause within it allows reflection.
- Gesture and significant symbol. Two dogs snarling adjust to each other without meaning anything. A gesture becomes a significant symbol when it arouses in the speaker the response it arouses in the listener, which makes role-taking possible.
- Society, then self, then mind. The self is reflexive: a person can be an object to themselves. It develops through play, then the game, and finally the generalized other. Mind is inner conversation.
- “I” and “me”. The “me” is the internalised community and carries social control. The “I” is the creative response to it and brings novelty. Mead’s actor is therefore social without being a puppet.
How the perspective was built on Mead
- Blumer’s three premises (Symbolic Interactionism, 1969): people act towards things on the basis of meanings; meanings arise in interaction; they are modified through interpretation.
- Chicago school (Blumer): naturalistic, qualitative study of a self in constant process.
- Iowa school (Manford H. Kuhn): a stable core self that can be measured with the Twenty Statements Test.
Critical assessment
- Astructural bias. Bernard N. Meltzer, John W. Petras and Larry T. Reynolds (Symbolic Interactionism: Genesis, Varieties and Criticism, 1975) argued that the tradition neglects power, class and history.
- Consensual generalized other. Mead offers one community standpoint. Caste, class and gender create unequal and competing “others”.
- Vagueness. The “I” is knowable only after it acts, and the core concepts resist measurement, which is exactly why the Chicago and Iowa schools split.
- Source of meanings. Marxists argue that structure, not the encounter, produces meanings.
Indian relevance
- The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 labelled whole communities criminal. Denotified in 1952, they still carry a stigma in how police and neighbours define them, a meaning that has outlived the law.
- In NALSA v. Union of India (2014), the Supreme Court upheld self-identified gender. The reflexive, negotiated self entered law.
Conclusion
Mead gave symbolic interactionism its core ideas: the significant symbol, the reflexive self and the dialectic of the I and the me. Its neglect of power is a gap in scope rather than an error. The perspective works best when set within structures of power, as the Indian cases show.