~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Fellowship (Gemeinschaft)
by Franz Kafka
1909
…We are five friends, one day we came out of a house one after the other, first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, and placed himself near the first one, then came the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. Finally we all stood in a row.
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.…
Every once in a awhile, I get to write an excited blog because after some years, a new book is published. Or rather a book I wrote is published! This is one of these blogs. The pretentiously titled Vocational Prison Education in the United States by Andy Dick, Bill Rich, and Tony Waters is now available for your reading pleasure! The title not quite catch your attention? Well ok, here is what we really wanted to call it: Three Professors Go To Prison.…
Those who say “That’s life” should understand that there is nothing natural about a system that kills the spirit of large numbers of people by first putting them in a position where they need opportunity, then promising them virtually unlimited opportunity and finally making them losers. Jeff Schmidt. Disciplined Minds (Kindle Locations 3045-3047).
One of the best parts of Jeff Schmidt’s analysis of graduate school he borrows from Erving Goffman who in 1951 published an article about con men, and how they get their mark to go away by blaming themselves.…
Last week as an April Fool’s Day post, the American Sociological Association announced the end of Sociology as a discipline here at Ethnography.com. For those of you not in on the joke, it didn’t happen. No one announced the end of Sociology as a discipline.
Having said that, I will admit to a brief bit of reverie imagining a world without Sociology Departments. And I think that the answer that followed was actually a bit accurate: Take out the Sociology Departments, and just maybe the Sociological approach/imagination would be strengthened across the academy as people with training in sociological theory, methods, and imagination would start teaching the “sociology” classes.…
Or, perhaps this post could be sub-titled, “Why Bill Gates can’t believe what anybody tells him,” simply because no one can really be honest around big money.
Or, as the young Karl Marx wrote in 1845:
…That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power.
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.…
I have been staying in Germany the last few weeks, hanging around academic types. Two that I came across were Chinese PhD students are studying at German Schools of Theology. Christian theology. One is trying to figure out the nature of Eschatology in a Chinese context. Eschatology is about the what happens to people after death, judgment, and final destiny (it is true—I just checked the dictionary). The other dissertation is a historical thesis about the nature of tolerance and intolerance in Augsburg, Germany in 1520-1530.…
Colonial Burma has a strange hold on the colonial British imagination—it is a remote and exotic place where the British were not very successful in holding sway. And the place it emerges occasionally is in the inability of the west to “understand” the east. Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler in the film Batman Returns (2008) had some experience in colonial Burma which sheds some light on how the British might have thought about their imperial adventure there.…
I am teaching a Population class here in Chico, California, this semester. Sometime during the class, I generally ask students about how many children there are in their families, and what their own fertility intentions are. To avoid the complications of the modern family, divorce, remarriage, and so forth, I break it into three questions, which are:
1) How many children does your mother have?
2) How many children does your mother’s mother have?…
This blog was originally posted in 2010. However, the issues raised I think are timeless. “Debates” about crime and immigration reappear it the presses around the world periodically, usually without much context. Rather a person who happens to be an immigrant is caught doing a crime, and then inferences is made to all members of a group. The fact of the matter though is that immigrants tend to be ore law-abiding than native born populations. …
Schools primarily teach vocabulary and inflection, styles of dress, aesthetic tastes, values, and manners only 1 percent of American teenagers attend independent private high schools of an upper class nature. (G. William Domhoff Who Rules America? 1998, 80–81).
The schools for the “1 percent” of teenagers, in America or elsewhere, are isolated from the rest of us, and in these cocoons the ultra-rich cultivate norms and connections. In 2007, I had a peak inside one such institution in St.…
