My wife and I recently completed re-translating Max Weber’s classic essay “Politics as Vocation” which is part of a book Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society. The essay is about how the nature of politics, which is about the exercise of power, creates the type of human-being who is accustomed to telling other people what to do. Bill Clinton also lists it on his Presidential library site as one of his favorite books of all-time.…
Author: Tony Waters
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.
Max Weber was a funny guy!
That’s right, Max Weber, the dour looking social theorist on the cover of your social theory text made jokes. How do I know this? Well, my wife and I just published a new book Weber’s Rationalism: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification, and this post is an essay about why you should read it!
In particular, Weber’s classic essay “Politics as Vocation” has real zingers in it.
Some examples of the wit and sarcasm of Max:
…Vanity is a very widely spread trait and probably nobody is entirely free of it.
Something Happened At My Son’s School: Guns in a Backpack!
By Chunyan Song
March 30th Thursday was a regular teaching day for me at Chico State. After I finished the last class of the day, I went back to my office and checked my emails. My son Lucas’ 4th grade teacher Mr. Pembroke had just sent a really odd email minutes before. “Folks, I want to assure you that your children were always safe today and that, in fact, we had a good day of learning. …
“That was a Real Nice Truck” Vigilante Justice in Skidmore, Missouri, USA
(Last week I posted about vigilante justice in Tanzania. It happens in the United States, too, which is what this story is about. As with the previous post, this is an extract from my book When Killing is a Crime, 2007 Lynne Rienner Publishers).
Ken McElroy was shot and killed while sitting next to his wife Trena in a Chevy Silverado in downtown Skidmore, Missouri, USA, in August 1981.…
More about Erving Goffman and my German Language Problems
As I wrote before I am living in Germany and learning German. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings I spend 2.5 hours with ten strangers from all over the world. We have little in common except that we are foreigners living in Germany struggling to integrate. Our conversations with each other are in German, and inevitably about such topics as why it is so difficult to remember how to get the right ending on a comparative adjective (is it –e, -en, -er, -em, -es, etc.?).…
Language Learning, Stigma, and Protecting a Potentially Spoiled Identity
This blog is about why ethnographer Erving Goffman’s observation of stigma are important not just to ex-cons, but also to professors like me on foreign exchange programs. Goffman, as many sociologists and anthropologists know, observed the maneuvers of the marginalized and stigmatized in society, and then wrote about how they thought about their disability. He saw that the marginalized were constantly managed their spoiled social identities because they feared public exposure of their disability.…
Conclusion: The American Diet by Chunyan Song (Part VI)
by Chunyan Song
It took a long journey and a health crisis to turn my diet and health around. I am married to a vegetarian. Together we try to raise two health-conscious kids. I haven’t eaten a Whopper Jr. Sandwich for years. Nowadays, I have a dozen fruit trees and a vegetable garden in the backyard, along with fourteen free-range chickens. I love my hens. They are hardworking and lay all the eggs for my family and a few friends.…
Identity–You Are What You Eat (Part V)
by Chunyan Song
What we eat and how we eat is part of the self-identity construction process that expresses and defines who we are. When we eat, we not only eat with our mouths for nutrition, but also to replenish our beliefs, mindsets, and social beings[1]. Look at the TV if you do not believe me. Advertisements on TV often portray masculine men, instead of women, eating big burgers and red meat.…
The Sad SAD Diet (Part IV)
by Chunyan Song
The fast-paced modern life we live in America does not encourage healthy eating. A lot of us get food from where our cars get fuel, meaning we buy gas, and then dash into AM/PM to load up on hot dogs and chips. We eat last night’s leftovers in front of our computers. When we are too busy to go inside a restaurant, we pick up our orders at the windows of the drive-through.…
Mass Food Production and Its Ills (Part III)
by Chunyan Song
In 1999, on my first American grocery shopping trip at Safeway in Tempe, Arizona, I marveled at the size, shape, and color of the bell peppers, carrots, eggplants, apples, grapes, and cauliflowers. They looked too big, too round, too bright, and too perfect to be real. I had to touch them and feel them to convince myself that they were not fake. Behind the too-perfect-to-be real presentation of American produce in supermarkets is the genetically modified (GM) food industry and food marketing system.…
Edibles and Non-Edibles (Part II)
by Chunyan Song
Although many Americans have to be on restricted diets due to religious or health reasons, many others voluntarily avoid certain foods because material wealth and food abundance grant them the opportunity to pick and choose. When I first came to the U.S, I was struck by how limited Americans’ food choices were. As a popular saying goes, Chinese eat everything that flies except the airplane and everything with four legs except the table.…
We Are What We Eat, Part I
We Are What We Eat (An Introduction to Six Essays!)
by Chunyan Song
“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”
—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarian, The Physiology of Taste (1825)
America has opened my eyes to a variety of diets that I had never even known before my immigration from China to the United States seventeen years ago. It seems that most Americans I have encountered are either on one type of diet or another due to weight concerns or allergy issues.…