Pete's Definitions (Reification, Legitimacy, & Plausibility)

Reification

• “apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things” Berger & Luckmann(1967) in Bailey & Gayle(2003)
• Forgetting the human origins of phenomena [from glossary in Bailey & Gayle(2003)]
• “Reification is the act of making an abstraction concrete. If participation is playing the game, reification is the rules and tools and records of the game. Wenger says ‘the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness’’(p.58).” Tagg(2003)

Legitimacy & Plausibility
• Legitimacy is to give public credibility and currency to ideas, people, objects, icons. Often legitimacy refers to that which is established within status quo arrangements of society. [from glossary in Bailey & Gayle(2003)]
• “plausibility structures become most evident and precarious in cases of acculturation” Bailey & Gayle(2003)