The Use of the Conceptual Category of Race in American Sociology, 1937–99

We examine how mainstream sociology has used race as an explanatory factor by examining papers in the American Sociological Review between 1937 and 1999. We find a dramatic increase in the likelihood that sociologists will take race into account, and we suggest that methodological innovations are largely responsible for creating an environment in which it is taken for granted that analysts in many fields will control for race. This pattern of usage may reinforce an implicit conception of racial differences that we call broad but shallow, in that race is expected to matter almost everywhere, but its effect can be neutralized by the addition of a control.     

The Impact of Cross-Race Mentoring for “Ideal” PhD Careers in Sociology

This article reports the results of a study of the impact of two kinds of mentoring, as in individual, instrumental mentoring by white male advisors versus supportive/communal, homophilous (same race/ethnicity) mentoring on the likelihood of minority scholars having an “ideal” or “archetypal” career trajectory when compared to two other control groups. Using unobtrusive data, we test a series of hypotheses concerning the likelihood of attaining selected aspects of an “ideal” career including employment at a research-extensive institution, scholarly publications, tenure, grants, and disciplinary recognition. We find that having a white male instrumental advisor increases the likelihood of having an “ideal” career for participants in the American Sociological Association's (ASA) national pre-doctoral Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) who have the advantage of having access to both types of mentoring when compared to a random group of largely white PhDs.     

The Corpus Status of Literature in Teaching Sociology: Novels as “Sociological Reconstruction”

Using fiction in teaching sociology involves what Harvey Sacks calls “sociological reconstruction”. Numerous comments on teaching sociology provide advice and suggestions on the use of literature and “what counts” as “sociological” literature, including specific titles. This paper goes further: while the use of literature is a routine feature of sociological accounts, discerning the relevance of a novel, or a passage within a novel, to sociological themes is an analyst’s achievement. It requires work both by the teacher and the student to recognize the relevance of fiction to sociology. Previous studies on fiction in sociology focus on the pedagogic aspects of using novels but fail to acknowledge the key problem of “sociological reconstruction” attempted through the use of novels. The paper explicates the crucial and generic issue of “corpus status”, which is fore-grounded by the use of non-sociological materials in sociology.     

The “hurried child”: The myth of lost childhood in contemporary American society

The hurried child writers argue that childhood has changed fundamentally for the worse in contemporary American society. The authors assert that today's youth are too adultlike: they behave like adults and are treated as adults by parents, schools, the workplace, the media, and society in general. While offering some perceptive insights, the thesis poses numerous methodological, substantive, and empirical problems. These include (1) a limited historical perspective on the changing nature of American childhood, (2) a failure to identify exactly who the hurried children are, and (3) the use of a deterministic model and negative bias in their work. Our analysis indicates no large-scale destruction of childhood and adolescence hypothesized by the hurried child writers. For the vast majority of contemporary American children, the hurried child is more myth than reality.     

Public Sociology or Partisan Sociology? The Curious Case of Whiteness Studies

This paper identifies the common themes in 245-plus refereed articles on whiteness studies that were published in academic journals after 1992 in an attempt to assess the implications of whiteness studies for the discipline of sociology. Of special interest is the relationship between whiteness studies and Michael Burawoy’s call for public sociology. I argue that the emerging field of whiteness studies identifies itself as a public sociology that is infused by the moral vision of critical sociology. Nevertheless, the field does not accept professional sociology as Burawoy defined it. The ontological, epistemological, and soteriological foundations of whiteness studies encourage the field to pander to one segment of the public—the marginalized—and condemn another segment of the public—“privileged whites,” thus rendering impossible a democratic dialogue on one of the most basic social issues of our time. Conflating Western epistemology with whiteness encourages a misreading of American social scientific work on race relations, thus opening the door to a so-called hermeneutics of suspicion. The result is not an innocuous “pop” sociology, but a partisan sociology, whose implications should caution sociologists against an uncritical embracing of public sociology.     

Guardians of the Golden Age: Custodians of American Military Culture and the Fortified “Home” in Time and Space

ABSTRACT

The Heritage is a gated retirement community for military officers and their wives. This “defensive space” is modeled on elite Anglo-American military culture rooted in the American Revolution. The military “family” and “home” are re-envisioned in this liminal space: a military culture into which they were born, into which they chose to marry, and now, the home into which they have chosen to live until they die.     

“Whom to blame?” The Culture of Loss Following Crisis: Culture Shifts in the Bereaved Parents‐State Relationship

This article delineates three models of public behavior exhibited by parents of fallen soldiers in Israel:

1. the “hegemonic bereavement model” that emerged after the War of Independence (1948);

2. the “political bereavement model” that appeared in the wake of the Yom Kippur War (1973);

3. the “no‐confidence model” that materialized following major accidents and revelations of negligence during the 1990s.

These paradigmatic behaviors emerge in the wake of crisis situations that took a heavy toll in military dead and wounded. The article traces the public initiatives of those bereaved parents who, following their personal tragedy, became social and media activists and formulators of public consciousness. It opens with a review of relevant theoretical literature in the field of culture and state pertaining to cultural codes and the impact of crises on them. The initial model exhibits a conformist code that reproduces state‐sanctioned behavior for representative mourners in national commemorative endeavors. This is followed by two behavioral codes that are essentially counter‐establishment, one directing its critique towards incompetent military implementation and the second charging the formulators of government policy for the tragedies of the fallen. The concluding section presents some generalizations on the topic of time and bereavement in Israel.     

‘It’s Quite Stylish’: Representations of American English and American Culture in English-Training Milieus in Delhi,India

English-training institutes seem to be ubiquitous in India, and they often index the United States through reference to ‘American accent’ training, American teachers, or simply American flags on their storefront signs. Against the broader backdrop of globalization, and through an examination of institute signs and advertisements and interviews with institute students and teachers, I show how ‘America’ is represented, produced, and consumed as a symbolic and cultural category within the cultural domain of English-training institutes.     

An Analysis on “The American Scholar”

This paper aims at analyzing and exploring in what way this inspiring speech gains the real key to success and why it wins the admiration of people.     

The Effects of Marital Culture and Social Structure on Marital Aspirations and Attitudes in “Fragile Families”

This research brings together insights from the fields of sociology and social work, providing an integrated study of marriage as a cultural and structural institution. The goals of the study are twofold: first, to empirically assess the predictive power of cultural versus structural elements of marital aspirations and attitudes among “fragile families”; second, to determine if the aforementioned relationship and outcomes differ by immigrant status. The results offer more support for the role of structure than the function of culture, suggesting that rather than demonizing disadvantaged families for having “defective” cultural values, policy planners and human service providers should recognize the importance of educational attainment and economic productivity in fragile families. Even populations most disposed to hold more “traditional” views of marriage and family life are constrained by the realities of structural disadvantage.     

Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

This paper examines how businessmen and educators in Hawai'i have semiotically ‘translated’ sustainability to promote sustainability practices. Using data gathered from an educational institute that was co-founded by a corporation and a college, I analyse how the source discourse was, using Silverstein's term, ‘transformed’ so that the target discourse (or the signs used in the target discourse) invokes Hawaiian imageries rather than imageries of capitalism. Analyses reveal that changes to keywords of sustainability occur in a way that shifts possible local interpretations of them as cultural heritage, that is, as something ‘of Hawaiian’ and not ‘of white capitalists’. I argue that this translation effort assisted the concept's transmission by making ‘sustainability’ an inhabitable category of identity and by providing a model of a future in which locals can participate because it is now interpretable as having been modelled on the narrated past.     

The making of African‐American Protestantism

Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. SYLVIA R. FREY and BETTY WOOD. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xiv, 285pp. $37.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8078–2375–9; 0–8078–4681–3.

A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro‐Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840. JON SENSBACH. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xxiii, 342pp. $45.00. ISBN 0–8078–2394–5.     

The Dark Side of “The Nose”: The Paradigms of Olfactory Perception in Gogol'’s “The Nose”

The article focuses on the ways in which Nikolai Gogol'’s famous story “The Nose” can be viewed meaningfully after being designated as the token of nonsense and illogicality by representatives of structuralism and hermeneutics in Slavic studies. Instead of interpreting the story’s symbolic significance or establishing its connections to other texts, the present article examines the story literally and asks what it means to lose one’s olfactory capacity in the Russian capital in the first third of the nineteenth century. The article’s answer is that Gogol'’s story can be seen as marking the moment during which the traditional olfactory-rich values of Russian culture gave way to a more vision-oriented Western sensory paradigm that tended to denigrate the sense of smell and its cognitive potential.     

Sociology of “primitive societies,” evolutionism,and Africa

Sociology of primitive societies has revised its earlier views about kinship, lineage, or lineage mode of production. It attempts now to show that lineage did not pervade African precolonial societies and that other relations, such as capitalist and class relations, were also present. This article seeks to reestablish, contrary to the revisionist view, the centrality of lineage in African precolonial societies to allow for a paradigmatic shift that repudiates evolutionism and brings precolonial societies back to the center of the African debate. Because in such a reoriented debate Africa ceases to be marginalized and on the fringes of other historical experiences, the shift allows, paradoxically, the integration of scholarship on Africa into universal social theory.     

The Politics of Space and Culture in Santiago, Chile’s Street Markets

Recent discussions of contentious politics have focused on struggles in and over space and place. This article builds upon these concerns by using ethnographic, interview, and documentary data to analyze the spatial politics of street market vendors in Santiago, Chile. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s concepts of perceived, conceived, and lived space as well as ideas drawn from research on space and protest, I show how street market vendors build upon spatial routines, a sense of place, political alliances, and scale jumping in their self-defense strategies at the local, national, and international scales. The findings illustrate Lefebvre’s argument that the advance of abstract space (constructed by dominant economic and political elites) provokes resistance by groups who defend and seek to reconstruct lived space.