Sad truth for you, earthlings

All human social  systems only produce waste and difference. That's it.

The predicament of identity: to join or not to join them

Cultures are defined against each other. As long as you define yourself as "belonging to" this or that culture, you set yourself in opposition to all others, driven by a subliminal urge to flock that you are hardly aware of, except for its external consequences. In human groups, this dynamic becomes a social fact beyond the control of the individuals comprising the group. Individuation, in the Jungian sense, helps the individual become aware of their place in a group as a fully realised individual: it becomes an ongoing conscious decision-making process to cooperate with others without succumbing to the "herd instinct".

Most branches of anthropology and sociology look into purely social facts, knowingly or unknowingly ignoring psychological facts. They are sciences of group cultures, not individuals. I personally am interested in a holistic, philosophical understanding of the human condition, rather than in lining up social facts in the most rational way. That, perhaps, makes more biased towards individuated persons, as I'd rather find out how an individual finds sense and purpose living among other humans, rather than research the infinite variation of the basically same human activity: flocking into groups, creating intra-group social difference and engaging in inter-group relations.

Ritual and its meaning

We do need more than "thick descriptions" of the social embeddedness of rituals, unless we assume that external bells and whistles are all there's to a ritual or a belief.

Thing is that the Dreaming (the primary process thinking) is always present within the mind, albeit unbeknownst to or ignored by the conscious. Initiation ceremonies provide an immediate experience of it, connecting the individual to their unconscious mind and its timeless archetypes. Monotheistic religions and later scientific rationality have ruthlessly uprooted those under the rubric of paganism, thus depriving us of an essential human experience, necessary to experience one's life meaningfully.

That said, many rituals have been hollowed out, become mere motions to go through, acquired or were assigned a different meaning to serve purposes different to the original ones, or are experienced as mere cultural/social conventions even by those who are put through them.

How can we shut down racism?

Flocking into groups based on any shared, real or imaginary, trait is a basic human drive. The good side of it is that humans can only survive by cooperating. On the flipside are racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, groupthink, etc. It takes a self-realised individuated human to become aware to what extent one needs to be part of a group and when it is time to say, 'I'm out of here'. Overcoming group dynamic by propaganda and mass education will mostly create knee-jerk reactions of the anti-political-correctness kind. Even when suppressed very effectively, sooner or later this will burst into something ugly (kind of like suppressed wish pops up elsewhere as a neurosis): just look at how rampantly and shamelessly xenophobic have become the supposed bulwarks of tolerance like Holland and Denmark.

Seeng both sides: combining social and psychological approaches in understanding the human condition

From my experience, it appears that only those who have looked  into both the social and the psychological, achieve any kind of meaningful understanding of how society and humans work. When the scientist's blind spot includes an entire dimension of the human condition, all their work will amount to an exercise in futility. In (the more familiar to me) case of anthropologists, often deliberately ignoring the psychological aspects of observed practices (e.g., in  Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco) results in culturalist reductionism, where perhaps the most important aspect of a ritual is omitted. 

This understanding, however, is hard to win allies for. I remember Scott Lash, who himself studied both sociology and psychology, warning me that I would hardly come across academics even aware of the issue, let alone interested in any aspects or implications of it. Looking on both sides of the dark veil separating social and psychological facts, creates a transformational experience, a true Zen moment, a temporary dissolution of the object/subject separation, whose memory, however, lasts and influences all your perceptions for the rest of your lifetime. That is why, I would never be truthful, should I have to stick to only one part of the proverbial elephant. The blindfold may have been off for just a moment, but after that there's no way back. 

Ideal types: psychology vs. social sciences

All social theory is Invisible Pink Unicorns, because none of those ideal types actually exist. However, they help think about those invisible things, social facts, that often are more important than the visible and the obvious. Human psychology too can be understood in a similar way, by way of ideal types and theories (their veracity is gauged by their therapeutic effect). It's just as huge universe as the social one. However, even a better way to understand inner worlds is empirical, by directing your investigative gaze from the outside to the inside. There are many methods of doing that, definitely more surefire and empirical than many methodologies from social sciences at that. Kind of like Weberian Verstehen, only directed inwards.

What is identity?

... an illusionary habit of an unawakened mind and reaffirmed by a collective belief in its reality, somewhere between the minimum group paradigm and the mirror stage..

Social sciences and the culturalist bias

The assumption that enculturation rationally responds to/replicates social structure is itself a product of rationality and is thus only self-referential at best, and most of times very misguiding. It bypasses any awareness of psychological processes and how responses are produced and internalised. This lack of self-knowledge/reflexivity (from the famous "know thyself" maxim) is the main obstacle in the modernist scientific method, the blindfold that keeps the blind men from seeing the entire elephant.

One keep getting reminded of that beautiful Dostoevsky's question (to the effect of): "So what happens once we've fed everyone?" Is it going to be a better society once wealth is redistributed more evenly? Not that I'm against it, by the way. It's just that the effects will be mostly limited to welfare and economy, more purchase power and people engaging in ever new consumerist frenzies, inventing new hierarchies and guarding their wealth from outsiders. Same ole, same ole...

Whatever logical reasoning is brought froward to justify social policies, the underlying divide is always the pre-conscious choice of "the deserving vs. the undeserving". It rests upon denying humanity to other humans, stereotyped as an arbitrarily chosen group.  To do that, an easily recognisable attribute (race, gender, disability, religion, sexuality, employment status) is picked to turn into catchy replicable soundbites and headlines. Although superficially "rational", such catchy slogans appeal directly to pre-rational, non-verbal affects, usually something very powerful and negative like envy, fear of the Other, anger, neurotic frustration, etc. That way, such slogans provide a channel for pent-up, unprocessed affects to surface on the verbal level accessible to the "rational" mind (aka, the secondary thinking process). The link between the slogan and the affect stays very powerful, strengthened further by media exposure and confirmation bias.

In the parlance of Russian spin doctors, such couplings are called "schizo-blocks", false dilemmas cooked up with the help of focus groups and brain-storming sessions.

Is habitus actually Karma? Bourdieu through the Indic and psychoanalitical lenses

As quoth the poet:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

                                      Philip Larkin

This is, sans doute, a poetic account of habitus transfer on the subjectivity level. I imagine, Bourdieu would be nodding approvingly.

Social studies only observe and comment on that state of affairs, with no suggestions as per how social change would occur here (aka the trap of Post-Structuralism). The Indic and psychoanalytical traditions, however, take it that there is a way out of it and beyond it, it just takes the right kind of concentration, awareness and effort. Whether psychotherapy or yoga and mediation, ultimately it is about trying to stop that karmic buck or to shed the luggage of life scripts passed on generation after generation.

Or, as good wise Karl would say, a technological change in the material base (relations of production +  mode of production)  would cause a shift in the superstructure of values and ways of biding time until we die.

Would you go  into a yoga retreat/psychotherapy or rather wait until post-industrial society changes your lifestyle?