The general idea is "endowing abstract entities with material concreteness, in a way that's misleading or misguided" (res, rei means "a thing", "making them into a thing" as it were). It can have different emphases in different discourses, for my purposes it means taking the social categories of a certain culture and applying them elsewhere as though they could have concrete application outside their social context. That's more or less how it's used after the Frankfurt School guys.
|