Starting where you are
The “hello world” post
Starting where you are
Analyzing Social Settings, by John Lofland, David Snow, Leon Anderson, and Lyn R. Lofland (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 2006) in its earlier edition, was an indispensable guide for writing my dissertation. It is a thorough guide to qualitative observation and analysis, most notably observational field research and qualitative interviewing. Its first chapter, “Starting Where You Are,” provides many examples of how researchers used “remote accidents of biography” as a starting point for interesting research. In an interview with Lyn Lofland, the sociologist Everett C. Hughes described the genius of Robert Park in teaching “naturalistic inquiry” to sociology graduate students of the 1920s and 1930s.
Most of these people didn't have any sociological background.... They didn't come in to become sociologists. They came in to learn something and Park picked up whatever it was in their experience which he could build on. ... He took these people and he brought out of them whatever he could find there. And he brought out of them very often something that they themselves did not know was there. They might be Mennonites who were just a little unhappy... about wearing plain clothes... girls who didn't like to wear long dresses and funny little caps;... or children of Orthodox Jews who really didn't like to wear beards anymore (that was a time of escaping a beard, the beard was the symbol of your central Russian origin and you wanted to get it off). And he got hold of people and emancipated them from something that was inherently interesting but which they regarded as a cramp. And he turned this "cramping orthodoxy" into something that was of basic and broad human interest. And that was the case for a lot of these people. He made their pasts interesting to them, much more interesting than they ever thought they could be. (13) [emphasis added]
One summer at Boston College I had the job of surveying Hughes’s manuscript collection for the University archives. I think he is a great unsung scholar of transitional periods of the discipline. He forms a link between the heyday of the Chicago School and a succeeding generation through the upheavals of the 60s and 70s. Among the many fascinating things in that collection was the first draft of the dissertation of Erving Goffman, whose obit I’d read in the New York Times when I was a newly minted undergraduate sociology major.
A “liberatory” perspective
This was not the only sense in which sociology could be seen as contributing to human liberation. The sociological imagination of C. Wright Mills has come to be considered a foundational concept in the discipline, linking history and biography. Of particular interest in the current era is the sense that
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remainspectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. (Mills, 1959)
But indeed, the liberatory “promise,” the title of the first chapter of The Sociological Imagination, lies in
[t]he first fruit of this imagination - and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it - is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.
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The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.
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Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure.' This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.
“The world needs public sociology"
This is what Michael Burawoy intoned twenty years ago at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in his Presidential Address. He had spent his year as President of the Association traveling around the country talking to departments of sociology about needs within the discipline. This address was published in both the American Journal of Sociology and the British Journal of Sociology. He located public sociology as a reflexive part of the discipline facing extra–academic audiences.
He also contrasted its concerns with those of other forms of sociological labor.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2005, VOL. 70 (February:4–28)
I would consider this blog in part to be an exercise in public sociology, referring its findings for reflection by extra–academic audiences.
My axes to grind
When I was doing library research for my doctorate, I came across this poem, which I now sometimes share with my students to give them an idea of who C. Wright Mills was as a person.
The rasp of my claws on the soft wood is partly related to my encounters with the creep of US hyper–individualism into discussions of public policy, and into wellness circles. I find the contributors of Conspirituality admirably explore and describe how wellness culture has veered into conspiracism, but in the task of explanation, veer off into psychologically reductionist explanations like the narcissism of the cult leader or the trauma bonding of the follower, and hence fail to escape this trap of individualism. Speaking of naturalistic inquiry, John Lofland himself began his analysis of the Unification Church by looking at the individual characteristics of the adherents, shifted to a concern with organizational strategies for recruitment, and ultimately to “motifs” of identification with a marginal religious movement. So perfectly good sociological theory already exists to analyze and counter the drift of other otherwise liberatory perspectives. So I expect to write also about “decolonizing” wellness movements such as yoga, which I practice.
Provisional Understanding
Why do I call this blog that? In the capstone to an illustrious career that saw him progress from a Trotskyite to a public policy analyst—he cut his teeth on the Tennessee Valley Authority which brought rural electrification—Phillip Selznick called sociology “a humanist science.” As a science, sociology must cultivate the willingness to being proved wrong by the data it has collected. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, for example, put Gene Sharp’s theories of nonviolent action to an empirical test. Chenoweth set out to prove that violent civil resistance succeeded where nonviolent action failed, but found exactly the opposite in the Why Civil Resistance Works (New York, Columbia University Press: 2011) . But this points to the idea that in science, our understanding is only ever provisional. We see through a glass darkly, to paraphrase the Christian scripture. But not knowing everything is never an excuse for failing to write what we know provisionally. In that there is “humility,” I suppose, but in our contemporary milieux, in which conspiracism abounds, it is more important to counter the sense of knowledge as static and of scientists changing their minds for political reasons.
In an interaction on social media some stranger actually made this claim and I asked for proof. “They said the COVID vaccine would prevent transmission.” What then CDC director Michelle Wilensky actually replied in answer to a question was that “the data we have now” indicates it does. Now we have more data, so we know that while the vaccine decreases the likelihood of infection, the worst symptoms, and transmission to others, it is not infallible. Particularly as the virus mutates, particularly because, in the way public health is like sociology in thinking of aggregates rather than individuals, it mutates precisely because vaccine acceptance could be higher.
I have two blogs on Wordpress already, and I may import some or all of that writing, but I was drawn to the community and subscription basis of “publications” here. That is my provisional orientation to this platform.
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