Sociogeny (
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
: ''sociogénie'', from the
Latin ''socius'', i.e., "association" or "social," and the
Greek γένεσις, denoting "origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, or creation") or sociogenesis is the development of a social phenomenon. That a phenomenon is sociogenetic thus indicates that it is socially produced, as opposed to
ontologically given, immutable, or static. The concept was developed by
Frantz Fanon in his 1952 book ''
Black Skin, White Masks''.
Fanon was a
Martinican writer, revolutionary, and
psychoanalyst
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek language, Greek: + . is a set of Theory, theories and Therapy, therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a bo ...
whose work focused on the
pathologies and
neuroses
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving chronic distress, but neither delusions nor hallucinations. The term is no longer used by the professional psychiatric community in the United States, having been eliminated from th ...
produced through European colonialism. In ''
Black Skin, White Masks'', Fanon expanded upon
Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in ...
's concepts of
ontogeny and
phylogeny, alongside which Fanon placed sociogeny. Freud employed ontogeny, a term borrowed from the field of
biology, to describe the natural development of the individual subject; phylogeny, Freud proposed, could be used to understand the development of groups of subjects, such as
families or
societies. Building upon Freud's work, Fanon developed the concept of sociogeny, which he employed to articulate how socially produced phenomena, such as poverty or crime, are linked to certain population groups as if those groups were biologically, or ontogenetically, predisposed towards those phenomena. The conflation of sociogeny and ontogeny - i.e., the conflation of a sociogenetic phenomena with an ontogenetic or "natural" predilection - plays an important role in the
social construction of
race, according to Fanon.
Since the time of Fanon's writing, the concept of sociogeny has been taken up by many scholars in disciplines such as
sociology,
psychology,
Black studies,
Women's studies, and
Postcolonial studies. In particular, sociogeny has been a cornerstone in the thinking of
Sylvia Wynter.
["Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation - An Argument," Wynter, 2003.]
References
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Sociogeny
Sociological terminology
Frantz Fanon