embedded sociology

Spring break brings time for reflection. Last week during my days at home in Minnesota (where it still does not feel like spring), I spent a little time reflecting on what we’ve learned about sociology in doing The Society Pages. And in that process, I came across this line, which can be found in the “About Us” that runs in the banner on our home page: “we’re talking about society with society.”

I haven’t always been enamored with this phrase. In the past, it has read to me as a bit trite, and probably kind of functionalist. Truth be told, I’ve tried to edit it out of existence several times. But somehow—largely, I think, due to the insistence of our masterful associate editor and coordinating producer Letta Page*—it has hung around, and recently, it has begun to grow on me. Part of its emerging appeal is that I have had folks use it to introduce me and TSP at several public events recently. Clearly it works, it has appeal. It means something. Why is that? What is that?

Besides the catchy turn of phrase, I think the reason it resonates is because it stands in contrast to the usual “detached ivory tower intellectual.” It signals a vision of sociology and scholarly activity that is embedded and engaged in the worlds and with the people that it studies—or, even better, engaged and involved in the communities of which it is part and parcel.

One of the readings that has been a staple of the senior capstone sociology course I teach regularly has been a piece from Minnesota public affairs scholar Harry Boyte. The basic gist is that social scientists should not think of themselves as legislators (who come from on-high, bearing truth to the people), but  as interpreters, whose job it is to produce information and ideas that can enrich public discussion and policy. Even better, they should be part of those processes of deliberation and public policy formation. In other words,  social studies scholars should understand ourselves as part of the public, working with everyone else to refine our understandings of the worlds we all share and live in together.

This more involved, reflective orientation isn’t just about producing a more accessible and useful sociology for society (which we talk about a lot here at TSP), but actually—in its engagement with real people in the social world—a better sociological understanding of society itself. In short, it’s about creating a better sociology.

*I knew he’d come around. –Ed.

Just one more, late addition to last week’s round-up: the TSP Media Award for an article in The Atlantic earlier in the spring. The piece described the growing trend in market research of hiring anthropologists to do fieldwork on how people actually use and talk about the products they consume.

In addition to the phenomenon itself, there was a lot of great food for ethnographic thought in the piece. Some highlights include: more...

Having spent much of the last week of 2011 out of town and away from my usual, everyday routine provided me prime time to ponder and reflect on things I often otherwise forget about or take for granted. In this unencumbered mindset, I happened upon the following line in a New Yorker piece by James Wood: “At present, the American magazine essay, both the long feature piece and the critical essay, is flourishing, in unlikely circumstances.” The comment caught my eye because it crystallized something I have kind of been thinking myself in recent years (though I didn’t have the audacity or reading range to actually say so).

Folded into a review of a recent collection by the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan,Wood’s central theme is to explore how a new generation of essayists and reporters employs the conventions of fiction writing honed in and usually reserved for “literature.” Indeed, the piece can be read as much as a commentary on the limits of contemporary fiction as of the creative applications of the journalistic, non-fiction essayist.  (Wood enlists Milan Kundera and others to develop the point.)

My thinking actually goes in the opposite direction.  I am more interested in the parallels and overlaps of the magazine essay with social scientific writing and analysis, especially in its more ethnographic and interpretive forms. I am interested, in other words, in the lessons and applications and provocations of great magazine writing and reporting for those of us working with the methods, conventions, and expectations of social science.

Three points that Wood makes about Sullivan’s representative body of work shaped my reflections. The third, on which Woods spends the most time, is about the nature of reality in contemporary life. (The piece is titled: “Reality Effects.”) Sullivan develops the theme in dialogue with David Foster Wallace’s “lost in the fun house” framing most directly and extensively in context of an extended treatment of the television series “The Real World,” the essay with which I was most familiar.  This is a deep and important theme—and has significance and consequence well beyond my end-of-year speculations. But my basic thought was this: we sociologists are both well positioned and absolutely obligated to make a contribution here (especially in connection with our notions of identity and authenticity). Still, we have only done so sporadically and in pockets since the founding of the discipline.

Nonetheless, it was actually the other two aspects of Sullivan’s writing, as rendered by Wood, that really set my mind ranging: his attention to detail and his serious, non-ironic engagement with the subject (and subjects) of religious belief and practice.