ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 identifies and describes seven modes of social defamiliarization. (1) Comparative-historical defamiliarization: Relativize the given society or social phenomena by comparing it with different past societies or social phenomena. (2) Scopical defamiliarization: Adopt a different level of analysis than the one suggested by sociological tradition and/or lay convention. (3) Metaphorical defamiliarization: Use the language from a different experiential domain to describe the given society or social phenomena. (4) Suspicional defamiliarization: Look underneath the typical meanings people assign to social action for unintended outcomes or more essential social dimensions. (5) Sympathetic defamiliarization: Examine the given society or social phenomena from the perspective of a different social location. (6) Critical defamiliarization: Compare what the given society claims to be—and what it could or should be—with what it is. (7) Nonhuman defamiliarization: Make the environment, animals, and/or technology sociologically relevant. Numerous examples of each mode of social defamiliarization are given, many from classical sociology. In contrast to the phenomenological path to making the familiar strange (the epoché), the sociological path is necessarily comparative because the sociologist does not assume immediate epistemic access to the world due to the social origins of cognition and experience.
