Constructivism

Constructivism is a theory according to which social phenomena are constructed through interactions among humans, who interpret one another's actions and define situations based on those interpretations. Thus, constructivism offers a way of studying social phenomena, which people tend to treat as though they were objective entities. However, from the viewpoint of constructivism, what people believe to be objective entities are actually accomplished through interactions between human actors who interpret those phenomena within specific social and historical contexts.

Constructivism is not a theory composed of a series of hypotheses but a perspective that studies discourse in order to analyze phenomena. This perspective gained prominence following the publication in 1966 of Peter Berger's and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality. Since then it has become widely influential throughout the social and human sciences. For example, in anthropology and sociology, there were the debates between “essentialism” and “constructivism” concerning sex, race, and ethnicity. The debate made it clear that sex and race cannot be differentiated using only biological standards nor reduced to unchanging essences. People use these categories in practical ways, contingent on the context: Depending on the situation, a certain gender or racial category is attributed to a particular person.

Thus, it is impossible to identify sex using only an objective biological standard. There are people who experience an inconsistency between their biological sex and their subjective consciousness of the sex to which they think of themselves as belonging. In Japan, a law was passed in 2003, by which people who undergo gender reassignment surgery and who do not have any juvenile children can be categorized legally as being of their new sex by getting permission from the family court. They can marry people of their previous gender. Similar laws, some of which allow more lenient conditions for changing one's legal sex, were legislated in a number of European countries.

Race (usually understood as rooted in biology) and ethnicity (understood as cultural) also prove hard to classify. Many people are so-called mixed race, and ascribing racial categories to them is not easy. For example, the U.S. Census treats “Hispanic” and “Latino” as ethnic categories, and Hispanics or Latinos may classify themselves as belonging to the racial category of White, Two or More Races, or Some Other Race. However, in informal contexts, Latino and Hispanic may be considered to be either ethnic or racial classifications.

Ethnicity is characterized by cultural traits such as language, religion, customs, and social behavior, but standards for ascribing ethnicity also are uncertain. In the United Kingdom (UK), Chinese are sometimes considered an independent category, differentiated from the separate Asian category, while there are different ethnic groups among Arabic people. Also, as ethnicity has become the focus for many nationalist movements in the world, it becomes apparent that the concept of ethnicity itself is a historical product.