~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was unheard of when Erving Goffman published Stigma in 1963. It was first identified as shell shock (WWI) and later as combat stress reaction (WWII), always associated with the trauma of battle. Now, we know that PTSD can arise from experiencing a natural disaster, rape, child abuse, racism, a serious car accident, and exposure to a violent event. Trauma, as they say in the lit., is a normal response to an abnormal event.…
Today and for the following three Mondays, we offer you a series in five acts and four blog posts. “The Order of the Eternal Social Conscience” by guest writer Jerri Bedwell presents a tale of redemption and transformation and features some of our favorite sociologists plus a guest appearance by Charles Dickens.
So listen in dear readers, for in a world of decreasing social capital we are reminded by Ms. Bedwell that there is something to be learned from our ghosts.…
The Order of the Eternal Social Conscience
Part 2 is here
A Ghostly Play in Five Acts
Featuring
Karl Marx, of London, England
Max Weber, of Heidelberg, Germany
Emile Durkheim of Paris, France
W.E.B. DuBois of Atlanta, USA
Special Guest Appearance
Charles Dickens of London
As Narrated to Jerri Bedwell of California, USA
Welcome to the Parlor of the Ghosts of The Order of the Eternal Social Conscience
We have entered a world separate from Earth — a world where time is irrelevant, and philosophers mingle with writers and poets, with each made the wiser for it.…
We lose students all too often at Chico State. Some die from accidents, some from overdose, some by their own hand. Not many die as Melinda Driggers did last Thursday, though, on campus, in the middle of the day, in the middle of our Student Services Center.
We got an email Monday from the University, telling us of Melinda’s death, and my breath caught in my throat as soon as I saw the subject of the email: Passing of student Melinda Driggers.…
It’s Monday and I don’t know what you did this weekend but I finished one book (Americanah) and started another (Descent). Since I quit teaching, reading has returned as my favorite thing to do. I always had the time but never took it, something about the frenzy of teaching that made it so I could only make time to read books I wanted to during the summer. Several summers ago I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.…
…“The Toothache” is excerpted from Marianne Paiva’s book Breathe: Essays from a Recovering Paramedic which tells of her life as a paramedic in rural areas of northern California in the 1990s. This particular story tells of the time she was called to take a man by ambulance with a toothache to the emergency room at 3 a.m. You’ll need to read the whole story to find out why this was the case!
Two weeks ago, we posted a really great essay by David Van Huff “A Tale Within a Tale: The Dual Nature of Ebenezer Scrooge.” David wrote this story for my class, and it helped me see Durkheim concept of the “Dual Nature” of humanity in a new way, which is why I wanted to post it. Anyway, in coming days we will post more such stories. What they will have all in common is that they are all fiction.…
From fieldnotes, October ninth, 2004: The Red Tent: A gathering of women
According to the program, it’s time for the final event at The Red Tent, titled: “Living our wholeness” with Donna Carlson-Todd, certified life coach. Before us is a petite blond woman in her fifties who is passing out business cards and telling us about herself and that we are here to celebrate what it is to be a woman.…
I remember the first time I had the horror and pleasure of reading Martin Luther King Jr’s, Letter from Birmingham Jail. I was somewhere in graduate school, buried in the depth’s of Taylor Branch’s epic Parting the Waters, when a passage that Branch mentioned drove me to find the letter King wrote in the margins of a newspaper while he was jailed for participating in non-violent protest in Birmingham in 1963.…
Max Weber writing in the early twentieth century marveled about the advantages that modern societies have over the earlier societies. One of the things Weber remarked about was the “stable peacefulness” that are found in large areas of the country protected by the police. No longer when you, your brother, or your sister were assaulted did you need, or want, to take matters into your own hands and seek your own revenge on behalf of your clan and its gods to whom you were tied to by blood oaths of loyalty.…
As a writer, I have an obsession with words, speech, poetry, songs…really, anything written or spoken or sung. My dream class to teach would be one that would analyze great speeches in history, and analyze them given their context in time and place. We would analyze one speech a week, and try to understand why the speech was written, what was happening at the time and place to find meaning behind the speech.…
George Ritzer proposed one of the most significant contemporary sociological theories when he developed the theory of McDonaldization.
We have a tendency to McDonaldize, or rationalize traditional processes in Western culture. We like being able to bet on an outcome following a set pattern of small steps, that lead to a larger outcome. Through this rationalization process, we compartmentalize tasks, evaluate at each level, specialize skills and in the process de-skill individuals, which makes us better at our individual jobs, but less competent overall.…