Sociology Lens

In his newest book, Elijah Anderson turns his micro-sociological attention to those places in the modern US city that foster racial understanding and harmony. In The Cosmopolitan Canopy Anderson claims that a pluralistic embrace of social difference is supported most readily by the titular “canopies” that he explores in contemporary Philadelphia. Over the span of an astounding thirty years of observation, Anderson attempts to convey an image of how people “live race” (xvi) in ways that challenge old forms of inequality.

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As is often the case with graduate students, I just spent several months in a dissertation-induced haze and only recently had a chance to go through the latest issues of Gender & Society. Among these was the February 2011 issue that included a symposium on Paula England’s 2010 article on the “uneven/stalled gender revolution.” England’s over-reliance on the structural and institutional aspects of gender was underscored by several savvy pieces of Sociology, including a response by Sara Crawley that emphasizes the cultural and micro-level pieces of the puzzle. Crawley takes England and other scholars to task for the assumption that institutionally-derived identity frames (such as mother, principal, or senator) are more specific and organized than those identities not bound directly to a single institution (i.e. race, class, gender, sexuality, subculture—or, “cultural identities”). The latter identity projects may be more diffuse but are arguably omni-relevant: their meaning is embedded in all social action.

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