~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Last June, I published an article about the role of the CIA in the post-World War II world order. I rather liked it, but no one seems to read it! So here’s a link, so that anyone who follows Ethnography.com might check it out!
This post is mainly though to get myself re-engaged with Ethnography.com, and perhaps you too. We have had several excellent submissions posted since just 2020 from Tunisia, Madagascar, Dominica, Tanzania, and India.…
When I first taught in Thailand in 2011, I sought Thai sociologists to help me figure out what was different from my American-style sociology. In California, I taught many years of Classical Social Theory, focused on Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and wondered: what might Thai Classical Theory look like?
The Thai sociologists I asked about Thai Social Theory often gave me a blank look and noted that they too used at least Weber and Durkheim. …
This challenging mind bender puzzle is great fun to do over coffee, with friends, or on the toilet…alone. Imagine you are working as a cashier at a liquor store, late in the evening, the night after St. Patrick’s Day. Note: all California Super Lotto transactions are not entered in the cash register, but they must be paid for and so entered in the debit/credit machine only; lotto cannot be played on “credit” and there is a 50-cent “debit” fee.…
Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in America is about young African-American boys and men on the run from the police in Philadelphia. The situation is a product of the United States’ skyrocketing incarceration rates—in the poor undereducated black neighborhood Goffman studies, something like 10% of the young men are incarcerated at any one time. More are on probation and parole—in short everyone in the neighborhood is themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system, or someone close to them is.…
Last Friday, I went to an Education conference to talk about my book Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child. It is a book which emphasizes that questions whether schools can change as fast as school reformers have often wish. The point is to explain that as bureaucracies, schools are embedded in persistent habitus, which resists changes, even of the most articulate and passionate reformers.
Somehow, this degenerated into a discussion of what social scientists call agency.…
Hey, hello. I haven’t been here for a while.
For the last year, Tony and Bill have been keeping things running here at ethnography.com while Marianne’s piece, “The McDonaldization of Higher Education” continued to be our top post week after week. You probably also caught Chunyan’s series on the Sociology of food and how we might all consider getting to know what we eat a whole lot better. Or, how about Michael Engelhard’s piece about polar bear’s in environmental art?…
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.…
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.
Culture: The values, beliefs, behaviors, and expectations of behaviors or social norms of a given population of humans.
Do you know what I find amazing? I find it amazing that I never see people burning couches and cars in the streets of my neighborhood. And I find it amazing that I never find discarded red plastic cups in the gutters outside my house. And I never find my neighbors passed out in the bushes in front of my house.…
In my Criminology class, I used to lecture about “ecological theories” of crime. For example, the “ecology of bars” lend themselves to violence. Basically, ecological theory says that if you put together young males, alcohol, and guns, someone is more likely to get hurt than if any one of the tree elements is removed. Remove any one of the three, and the danger goes down. Which is why the youngest males are not allowed in bars, there are hours after which alcohol is no longer served, and you are to leave your guns outside the bar. …
I like the “On this day” app on facebook. I don’t teach anymore but I’m reminded of things I taught or read and what I thought about them, it’s good to reflect now that I’m an official “post-ac” (that’s a former academic, mostly adjuncts, who got fed up with the b.s. and left academia for greener pastures).
In today’s facebook feed I was reminded of an article I read in 2010, “What do we mean by leadership in an academic institution?”…
This is a rather odd post for a blog which typically addresses national and international issues. This blog is about my own university, Chico State, in California, which has worked very hard to qualify for federal money to be a “Hispanic Serving Institution.” This is a good thing, as California is rapidly changing ethnic composition as California has always done in the last 200 years. The idea is that Chico State will get extra money if it can attract and serve at least 25% full time “Hispanic” students (in California this typically means students who have a family history in Mexico, or Central America who are typically referred to as Chicano or Latino).…