What makes us to be individuals? A post-human, pragmatic and relational framework

Abstract

The crisis of the idea of society and the turn towards the individual as the unit of problematization of contemporary western societies, eminently individualistic, have placed research on individuals and subjectivities at the core of social sciences’ work. With the aim of contributing to the renovation of this field’s theoretical and methodological tools, in this article I introduce a post-anthropocentric, pragmatic and relational framework for the study of individuals, based on multi-sited ethnographic inquiries and supported over principles that draw from post-constructivist and post-social sensibilities. As a result of the turns this proposal entails in relation to conventional approaches, new lines of inquiry open up adding complexity to this field of study. I illustrate this proposal with data from a research on the entrepreneur in Santiago de Chile.