One of my favorite sociological essays is Teodor Adorno’s 1941 “On Popular Music.” Adorno didn’t much like the popular music he heard on the radio in Los Angeles, and said so. He found it simplistic, monotonous, limited and manipulative. With an emphasis on manipulative. For besides being a classically trained musician, Adorno was also a leading critic of capitalism, and especially its need for endless consumption so that large corporations could generate profits.…
Category: General Sociology
Cowboy Nation
A few nights ago, my husband and I saw the new sci-fi film, The Martian. We arrived early, grabbed our pairs of 3D glasses and set off to find seats, towards the back and on the aisle. I’d felt somewhat nervous as we sat there, paranoid with thoughts about Thursday’s mass shooting in Oregon and because back in August, employees at the theater I was sitting in had called the police to report a suspicious person who was later found to be carrying a loaded .45.…
The Problem With “Teaching Like You Do in America” While Abroad
What are the limits to globalization? Does it apply to the university systems of the world, or is one university system just about the same as every other?
My experience is that at least for sociology, it is not “always just the same. I have taught abroad in Tanzania and Germany, and in each place, I ran up against different cultural expectations about what a university education involves. Recently, Palgrave Communications published my article explaining why it is in fact difficult to teach abroad.…
More Drama at Chico State: Bullies, Bullying, Administrative Power, Incivility, Cheese Cubes, and Cookies!
The meeting about shared governance at Chico State that Julie attended and reported on here at Ethnography.com “Shared Governance or Managed Dissent,” in the form of a letter from California State University Chancellor Timothy White has run into a brick wall. The dispute has turned into an argument over the meaning of the word “civility,” and almost incidentally, the nature of bullying.Not a good frame work for addressing problems raised by the Academic Senate!…
What Your Teeth Tell Me About Your Social Class
A recent sorority recruitment video from the University of Alabama last month was critically received on the internet for what some claimed were racist overtones. The nearly all-white, bikini and lingerie clad sorority sisters portrayed pranced happily throughout the over-5 minute long video, never opening a book, attending a class, or even appearing to be affiliated with a learning environment. As a college instructor, the mother of a young girl, and self-proclaimed feminist, I mentally ripped the video apart when I saw it.…
It’s Not How Many Times You Fall….
I began writing my dissertation in 2003 or so. My first year in graduate school at Kansas State University, I had the good fortune of enrolling in Dr. Robert K. Schaeffer’s graduate Social Change course. When Dr. Schaeffer assigned the requisite term paper due in every graduate level course I have ever taken, he gave me the best advice I could get: every paper you write in your classes should in some way contribute to your dissertation.…
Almonds in the Desert
August 2nd, 2015
This is the principle reason why California has a water shortage: agriculture where it shouldn’t be. One side of the freeway is the natural, unirrigated terrain; the other side is irrigated almonds. We should never be growing luxury crops in desert climates.
We’re in the San Joaquin Valley. There’s no natural source of water here, like in Chico; these almonds have to be watered about three times the amount of the trees in the northern Sacramento Valley.…
Is There Humor Hiding in the Translations of Bourdieu or Weber?
There’s an interesting discussion about how to translate Bourdieu from French to English at the Scatterplot blog. In English at least (I don’t read French), the translations of Bourdieu often seem circular and confusing. What Steve Valsey seems to be asking is, is this really necessary? His answer is no, and he offers a translation of Bourdieu’s definition of habitus in more “standard” English. As one of he commenters on the blog notes, similar questions can be asked of Bible translators.…
Artichokes
By Guest Writer: N. Jeanne Burns
A friend said recently that one definitive marker of social class is whether you know how to eat an artichoke. This probably isn’t true for migrant farmworkers who toil in or around Castroville, California, the self-proclaimed “Artichoke Capital of the World.” Or even for people who grew up on the Mediterranean, where the plant is native. But M.F.K. Fisher, who herself grew up surrounded by fields of artichokes, recognized the class-climbing rank of the thistle in her essay “The Social Status of the Vegetable.”
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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stigma, and Learned Helplessness
Does the stigmatized individual assume his differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable. This is an important difference.” Erving Goffman, 1963
I don’t have anything new to add to the thoughts I had when I wrote about PTSD in “Trauma Culture: Who’s a Normal Now?…
Max Weber on the Politics of Wives
One of the weaknesses of Classical Social Theory is that it deals poorly with the nature of gender and the family (for exceptions see Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriett Martineau). In two places in his essay “Politics as Vocation,” though Max Weber brings up the subject of wives. The first reference is near the beginning of the essay where he defines the term “politics.” He admits that there are a range of politics which encompass “independent leadership functions.”…
RIP Sociology, or the Most Successful Discipline of the Twentieth Century?
Last December, Julie lamented the decline of Sociology as a discipline in an essay provocatively titled “RIP Sociology.” As Julie noted in her post, it seems that the discipline no longer had the vim and verve she remembers from her undergraduate and graduate days of only 10 or 20 years ago. She laments with Les Back the dominance of “the audit culture” in sociology which avoids big questions in favor of some arbitrary metric, and in particular refuses to ask students to wrestle with big problems, or engage the broader society with a sociological imagination.…