ABSTRACT
The literature of the notion of social representation in a formal sense began with the work of Serge Moscovici and others, such as subaltern scholars. I came to this notion as a result of a field study I and several colleagues carried out in 2013, which examined a controversy over the coming of a Whole Foods market to a Latino neighborhood in a Boston community—Jamaica Plain. The study focuses on gentrification and representation, that is, how that event concerning the replacement of a Latino supermarket by Whole Foods was perceived and responded to by local activists and residents. In the process of analyzing this event I began to delve into the notion and theories concerning representation, which, as it turns out, is a notion representing a convergence of European—read Durkheimian—sociology with symbolic interactionism. Interestingly, the discussions surrounding the emergence of the notion cover the exact ground traversed by Cooley’s discussion of methodology and his development of an episteme based on the ontology of the social world that is the focus of this chapter.
