…
Children are the peculiar raw material which schools put on their production line. When they arrive at five years old, they are typically illiterate, innumerate, cannot locate themselves in the national order, and believe in the tooth fairy. As one teacher also noted, they are “leaky” in the sense that they excrete various bodily fluids unexpectedly during the day (Kozol 2007, 84). Thirteen years later, virtually all are literate, some can do calculus, and others volunteer to preserve an abstract national order in the military.
Conversations with My Son: on Death and Becoming an Angel
“Mommy, why do people die?” he asks me as he snuggles next to me just before falling asleep.
“Well,” I tell him, “people get sick and they get hurt, and sometimes that causes them to die.”
His body starts to hitch with tears, so I pull him closer.
“My grandpa died!” he sobs, and I try to shoosh him as I wipe tears from his face.
“Yes, Grandpa got sick and died.”…
Trauma Culture: Who’s a “Normal” Now?
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.…
February Series: The Order of the Eternal Social Conscience
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 I
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.…
America’s Cemeteries are Filled with Good Folks
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.…
The Best Book of the 21st Century (so far)
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
…“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!
Why we Make Stuff Up at Ethnography.com, and by the way, the American Anthropological Association Decided to Dissolve Itself
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.…
Yes, Feminism Has a Class Problem
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.…
Remembering Martin Luther King Jr – Letter from Birmingham Jail
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.…
Are Police “God’s Representatives on Earth?”
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.…