Teaching Sociology at a Tribal College: Navajo Philosophy as a Pedagogy

This article begins with a brief history of Dine College, the first tribally controlled college in the nation. I then provide an overview of Dine College’s educational philosophy, called Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoon, and give examples that demonstrate how I apply this SNBH philosophy in my teaching. I discuss my own Dine identity, and explain how that fosters a greater understanding among the students I teach. I also introduce a concept called “the Navajo time bind” that illuminates the challenges I face in teaching sociology to a Navajo population. Overall, this article provides insights about the unique aspects of teaching sociology in a tribally controlled college.     

Unfeeling knowledge: Emotion and objectivity in the history of sociology

The theoretical concern of this paper is with the relationship of gender, personal life, and emotion to the social construction of sicentific knowledge. I examine this question through biographical research into the life and work of William Fielding Ogburn (1886–1959), a major figure in the history of American sociology. Ogburn believed that emotion was inimical to science and that statistics could help control what he considered to be its distorting effects. My analysis suggests that there was a personal component, reflecting Ogburn's search for masculinity, to the development of his ideas about how scientific sociology should be defined and practiced. I also suggest that Ogburn's ideas were favorably received by his mostly male audience because they spoke to broad cultural and historical currents. My analysis shows the need for a view of scientific knowledge that takes into account the effects of gender relations and emotion on intellectual activity.     

For a sociological philosophy

Conclusion Sociology, then, should prove to be relevant to a host of issues within the traditional purview of philosophy: Epistemology and philosophy of science, of course; the issue of solipsism and other minds (as Habermas has already seen, invoking Mead); ontological issues of the mind/body relation, of person/self/identity (on which there is a wealth of untapped materials, from Goffman, Mead, and in the lineage of Durkheim and Mauss now being rediscovered); and more deeply the questions of materialism/idealism, realism and anti-realism. All questions in the philosophy of ethics, ranging from conceptual analysis to critical and constructive ethics, make sense realistically only if handled with a sociological understanding of where moral ideals and feelings emerge from. The extent of possible success of sociological explanations is a crucial point for any discussion of determinism and indeterminism, and relatedly for the notion of will, free or otherwise. (Obviously the sociology of the self is implicated in the free-will issue as well.) The micro/ macro issue is a wonderful ground on which to consider questions of universals and particulars, of the different orders of causality, of reification and reductionism.Though it may seem presumptious to say so, sociology has implications right across the board in philosophy, even in its stronghold of metaphysics: space and time, existence and non-existence, the Ideal and the immediacy of lived experience are all parts of our current sociological controversies. As yet we have not been very bold in bringing such implications of sociology to attention. But there is recent work such as that of Preston on the sociology of Zen practice, which is relevant to a philosophy of ontology at its deepest levels. Furthermore, I feel optimistic about sociology's capacity to contribute to these issues philosophically, that is to say within the problem-space of philosophy itself.Tools like Goffmanian frame analysis, with a nested and grounded relation among levels, should cast light even on tricky issues such as infinities and logical indeterminacies, ontological foundations and unfoundedness. After all, if reality is socially constructed, why shouldn't our professional understanding of society reveal something central about the universe? As of now, these implications remain only potential. But to buttress my claim for the relevance of sociology in just one area, epistemology and the reflexive issues that arise within it, let me close with a brief reflection on what the sociology of science implies about the nature of philosophy itself. We can hardly expect that sociology will give a final and definitive answer to philosophy's problems. I say that, not because of any pessimism about our intellectual tools, but because of the very nature of intellectual communities. Intellectuals make careers by gaining fame for their original contributions; there must be problems to solve if there is to be something to contribute. This of course is true of all areas of science and scholarship. But whereas the empirical disciplines can go on to create new specialties and research areas, philosophers do not have the same way out of the professional problem posed by a field's own past success.Philosophy has handled this problem in a deeper way. For philosophers have taken as their turf precisely those problems that are themselves inherently deep and, in some sense, intractable. Philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the understanding of knowledge itself, with the most fundamental categories of existence and experience, with the bases of value. These are the boundary problems of all the other fields of intellectual inquiry, and of human life itself. They are intractable, not because significant things cannot be said about them, but because they are located at the open edges of everything; they reveal themselves full of reflexivities, which constantly reemerge at a new level whenever a conceptual solution is proposed, much as in Gödel's incompleteness theorem - and in the most highly transformed level of Goffmanian frames.It is for this reason that the history of philosophy is full of complaints that previous philosophers have come to no agreement, along with new beginnings that attempt to finish its business at last. There is a striking repetitiveness to these claims: we hear them from Descartes, and again from Kant, from the Logical Positivists, from Wittgenstein, in their different ways; there is more than an echo of this intellectual strategy in today's extremists, such as Rorty and Derrida, who again are abolishing philosophy. But philosophy has not been abolished; each previous claim to bring the uselessly warring sects of the past into a final resolution has failed to stifle philosophy's perennial inquiries. Just as strikingly, each such effort at ending philosophy has given rise to a period of renewed philosophical creativity.I think this is not an accident. It is because the structure of the intellectual field in general (across the disciplines, not only philosophy) is being restructured at a particular historical time that figures like Descartes, Kant, and others appear; the crisis of intellectual restructuring is what gives them the intellectual capital (and the creative energy) to reconceptualize the fundamental boundary problems in a new way. In this sense, philosophy is indeed foundational; it concerns itself with the ultimate questions, the borderlines of all inquiry and all of life. But there is another sense of foundational, the claim that philosophy is the discipline necessary for putting all other knowledge upon a secure foundation. This is certainly not true in a practical and historical sense; the other disciplines have gone ahead quite well without guidance from philosophy. Kant's claim to provide a secure foundation for the physical sciences against Hume's scepticism was really a rhetorical ploy, a way of building up the importance of what philosophy is doing; it really made no difference to the growth of science in Hume's day, or in Kant's, just what the philosophers said about the foundations of their knowledge. The same is true for all such claims about the significance of foundational issues.But this is not to dismiss the importance of what philosophers are doing. Theirs is the great intellectual adventure into the edges of things. The rest of the disciplines, the rest of what we consider to be knowledge, nestled in a pragmatic acceptance of whatever seems to work for us as intellectual practitioners, do not rest upon philosophy. The structural relation among intellectual fields is more the other way around, as far as the dynamics of intellectual change are concerned. But philosophy has nevertheless positioned itself in the intellectual space where the deepest explorations are launched. This will continue to be so, even as sociology adds its own impetus to the philosophical project.

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Looking Backwards into the Future: Mathematical Sociology Then and Now

I reflect on the last 30 years of mathematical sociology from my point of view as a student of the field 30 years ago and how I expected the field to grow and develop. I discuss how the problems and prospects that concerned me 30 years ago are still relevant today. In particular, I elaborate on the intellectual frustrations faced by formal sociologists, the need for new mathematics to capture social science insights, the diversity of inquiry and lack of unification in mathematical sociology, and the need for formalists to offer empirically grounded models that appeal to the general reader on the basis of the empirical puzzles they explain.     

Dwelling in epistemic disobedience: A reply to Go

In Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory, Julian Go continues his vital work on rethinking and redirecting the discipline of sociology. Go’s piece relates to his wider oeuvre of postcolonial sociology – found in works such as his Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016) as well as multiple journal articles on epistemic exclusion (Go 2020), Southern theory (Go 2016), metrocentrism (Go 2014), and the history of sociology (Go 2009). In this response article, my aim is to think alongside some of the central themes outlined in Go’s paper rather than offering a rebuttal of any sorts. In particular, I want to think through how the recent work on ‘decoloniality’ may play more of a central role in Go’s vision of sociology and social theory than he acknowledges. In doing so, I hope to engage in Go’s prodigious scholarship through centering discussions of the geopolitics of knowledge, double translation, and border thinking. Before proceeding to this discussion, I will offer a brief review of my reading of Go’s paper.     

Saving the Savior

This article begins with an autobiographical reflection about what sociology has meant to me as an Iranian intellectual. Sociology has enabled me to think critically about my country's politics and culture, appreciating its strengths without overlooking its unjust and injurious aspects. That experience shapes my answer to the question “Saving Sociology?” If there is anything in sociology that I would like to save–in both senses “to keep” and “to rescue”—it is sociology as a critical, reflective discipline, a discipline that not only studies society but also contributes to its change. As the contemporary world moves toward a “global” society, we are increasingly facing the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Sociologists often investigate other societies or (like myself) look back at their own from a spatial and cultural distance. This situation has created a dilemma for many scholars: Should we criticize problems stemming from “indigenous” beliefs and practices of other societies? Cultural relativism argues that different cultures provide indigenous answers to their social problems that should be judged in their own context. While this approach correctly encourages us to avoid ethnocentrism, it has led to inaction towards the suffering of oppressed groups. Reflecting on the relativist approach to sexual dominance, I question some cultural relativist assumptions. Discussing how “indigenous” responses to male domination in many cases disguise and protect that domination, I will challenge the “localist” approach of relativism and argue for a universalist approach.     

Facing Each Other: Japanese and Russian Sociologies

The history of sociology as a subfield has long aimed to describe the historical developments of the discipline, within which national traditions offer unique voices while also contributing to a global sociology. How do various sociological paradigms and national traditions approach social reality in similar and different ways? This paper examines Russian and Japanese contributions to the history of sociology by reviewing some of their major concepts and perspectives. On this basis, this paper seeks to probe into the past and present self-understandings of the two sociological traditions, as well as their potentials for a more active role in global sociological discourse. Both countries have a history of protracted isolation, which has made them more or less invisible in the international sociological community. However, Russian and Japanese sociological traditions exist and are ready to be tapped, even as their production and mobilization of intellectual resources remain strongly embedded in their politics, cultures, and societies. A broader aim of this paper is to enhance mutual understandings and future collaborations between sociologists in Russia and Japan.     

The sociology of popular music, interdisciplinarity and aesthetic autonomy

This paper considers the impact of interdisciplinarity upon sociological research, focusing on one particular case: the academic study of popular music. 'Popular music studies' is an area of research characterized by interdisciplinarity and, in keeping with broader intellectual trends, this approach is assumed to offer significant advantages. As such, popular music studies is broadly typical of contemporary intellectual and governmental attitudes regarding the best way to research specific topics. Such interdisciplinarity, however, has potential costs and this paper highlights one of the most significant: an over-emphasis upon shared substantive interests and subsequent undervaluation of shared epistemological understandings. The end result is a form of 'ghettoization' within sociology itself, with residents of any particular ghetto displaying little awareness of developments in neighbouring ghettos. Reporting from one such ghetto, this paper considers some of the ways in which the sociology of popular music has been limited by its positioning within an interdisciplinary environment and suggests two strategies for developing a more fully-realized sociology of popular music. First, based on the assumption that a sociological understanding of popular music shares much in common with a sociological understanding of everything else, this paper calls for increased intradisciplinary research between sociologists of varying specialisms. The second strategy, however, involves a reconceptualization of the disciplinary limits of sociology, as it argues that a sociology of popular music needs to accept musical specificity as part of its remit. Such acceptance has thus far been limited not only by an interdisciplinary context but also by the long-standing sociological scepticism toward the analysis of aesthetic objects. As such, this paper offers an intervention into wider debates concerning the remit of sociological enquiry, and whether it is ever appropriate for sociological analyses of culture to consider 'internal' aesthetic structures. In relation to the specific case study, the paper argues that considering musical specificity is a necessary component of a sociology of popular music, and some possibilities for developing a 'materialist sociology of music' are outlined.     

Academic odyssey: The training of an African sociologist

This article describes my experience of graduate training in sociology at an elite American university. As an African, I faced cultural and intellectual pressures to adopt white middle class cultural norms and a Eurocentric worldview. The article critiques American sociology, including symbolic interactionism, the sociology of the Third World and the study of race and ethnic relations. I describe my personal encounter with American racism and the process that led me to conduct research on black immigrants. I argue that my exposure to American sociology and experience of American society transformed me into a black marginal sociologist, specializing in teaching and research on the African-American experience in the New World. His forthcoming book,Becoming Black American, is being published by AMS Press.     

But it’s not all about the sex: mothering,normalisation and young learning disabled people

This paper is about mothering, young learning disabled people, their sexualised and relationship lives and normalisation – not through the lens of the disabled person, but via a mothers perspective and theoretical discussion. As a mother who has a learning disabled daughter, a feminist and an academic my own mothering experience, my Ph.D. research and social theory are woven throughout this paper with the intention of opening up debate about sex, intimacy and normalisation, and how these impact upon young learning disabled people. I suggest that the relationship between sex, reproduction, intimacy and intellectual impairment and a project to decipher what it means to be human in all its dirty glory are also part of the discourse that needs to be discussed experientially and theoretically. So much so that the messy world within which we all live can be variously and differently constructed.     

Does the death of the sociology of deviance claim make sense?

Colin Sumner (1994) argued that the sociology of deviance “died” in 1975. This paper critically examines Sumner’s argument and finds that it does not mean what it he claims it means. In fact, it is about a decline in the supposed ideological function of the field for the ruling elite and not its declining intellectual vitality. Miller, Wright, and Dannels (2001 ) claim to test Sumner’s argument and find some empirical support for it. This paper finds Wright et al.’ s tests flawed and suggests alternative explanations for their findings. Some implications of this issue for the current state of the field are discussed. While the sociology of deviance has declined in theoretical vitality since the 1960s and 1970s, it leaves a legacy of influence in other fields, it remains an ongoing academic enterprise, it still attracts a fair number of students, and its textbooks ate cited in the field of sociology.     

Foundations of British sociology 1880–1930: contexts and biographies

‘This paper provides an overview of aspects of the history of British sociology. In particular, it tries to answer critical historical work by among others, Perry Anderson and Philip Abrams, which sought to explain the supposed indigenous ‘failure’ to develop academic sociology in Britain before the 1960s. It is argued that a narrowly academic reading of the history of sociology cannot do justice to its role in the service of social administration and public enlightenment and may exaggerate the degree to which sociology from its foundations was conceived as a purely intellectual discipline. The paper points to a thriving sociological culture in Britain in the generation before the First World War, though it was one in which many contributions came from philosophers, natural scientists and political economists rather then self‐proclaimed ‘sociologists’. It ends with a brief review of Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, a founder of the Sociological Society and editor of the Sociological Review, whose biographies and eclectic social and international interests tell us something about the personalities and political interests of early British sociological pioneers.’     

Interpretations and critiques of modernity

Peter Wagner has been one of the foremost theoretical sociologist for more than two decades. In particular, he has outlined an innovative way of linking social philosophy, political philosophy, and normative concerns to comparative- historical sociology. His overall goal is to describe modernity as different interpretations of modernity as an alternative to an institutional analysis of modernity. Wagner also draws heavily upon Boltanski's and Thevenot's sociology of critical capacities, in which members of society create institutions through disputes, evaluations, and everyday critiques of problematic experiences; therefore social critique is immanent in all modern institutions.     

An accidental journey: Becoming a sociologist

This sketch describes how I accidentally became a sociologist. More importantly, it describes undergraduate sociology training at a private liberal arts university during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The University of Maryland began a Ph.D. program in sociology just before World War II began. I report on graduate training there, as well as the social and intellectual life of the department. C. Wright Mills began his academic career at Maryland. I consider his place in the department, my experiences with him as my dissertation director, and how he influenced my lifelong study on the bearing of social stratification to politics.     

Moments in the Methodology of Meso History

Meso history is that branch of the history of sociology that focuses on social relations, that is, patterns of connection among groups, group members, and group meanings, as explanatory factors in the shaping of sociology. The methodology of meso history consists of strategies for discovering, documenting and patterning connections. This paper explores those strategies in terms of three moments generic to the research process in social science– moments of movement from intellectual curiosity to conceptualization, from research question to data collection and from data to presentation of findings–focusing on the distinctive permutations on this research process that occur in the practice of meso history.     

Comments on Sociology of Religion in America: a History of Secular Fascination with Religion

Anthony J. Blasi’s concise history in Sociology of Religion in America: A History of Secular Fascination with Religion provides a valuable journey through the evolution of the sociology of religion. He used self-created databases (1859–1959) of early American dissertations in the sociology of religion or religion more generally as well as journal indices (1959–1984) for sociology of religion articles to trace this history. Blasi did not merely create a timeline dotted with accolades alone. He detailed the early location of the sociology of religion in the “backwaters of sociology” and documented the struggles for scientific credibility and public as well as professional recognition. I centered my comments on three highlighted issues: the tension between empiricism and religion as reform (e.g., science versus sympathy), intersectionality of race and religion, and Blasi’s lived experiences in the sociology of religion.     

Bourdieu’s political sociology and the politics of European integration

The purpose of this article is to explore what Bourdieu’s political sociology could bring to the study of European integration. I first present, very briefly, some of the traditional approaches in European integration studies. Then I move to my interpretation of Bourdieu’s structural constructivist theory of politics through a discussion of political capital and political field, drawing parallels between these concepts and some of Max Weber’s ideas. In the third part, while discussing the works of some scholars inspired by Bourdieu’s theory, I present some structural constructivist studies of European integration. Structural constructivism provides theoretical tools for a critical analysis of European integration.     

The Sociologies of Knowledge,Science, and Intellectuals: Distinctive Traditions and Overlapping Perspectives

This article reviews sociological approaches to the production, evaluation, and diffusion of knowledge in the arena of scholarly production – the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. At first glance, sociological approaches to scholarly knowledge production seem to congeal around the hard sciences, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other. I eschew this polarization and construct an analytic frame of reference for analyzing the sociological dimensions of scholarly production more generally. This article maps successive phases of sociological approaches to scholarly production, by overlaying and distinguishing among theories in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, and sociology of intellectuals. I analyze classical theorists’ emphases on class analysis and the social function of intellectuals; mid-century adaptations of functionalism, social structure theory, and institutional theory to analyze intellectual and academic life; critical and reflexive theories, including feminist critiques of science and knowledge; recent emphases on how social movement politics and social networks influence intellectual change; theories of the university as a professional arena and a field of culture production; and studies of knowledge-making practices in group research situations. In addition to arguing for more theoretical and methodological precision in analyses of scholarly and scientific knowledge-making, I conclude with cautionary tales and future prospects for sociological studies of modern academic life.     

Cognitive dissonance and risk denial: The case of cannabis use in adolescents

This paper integrates insights from both sociology and psychology into the economic approach of drug use. Within this theoretical framework, the utility provided by cannabis use depends on the ability to deny its riskiness, and this ability is a kind of human capital accumulated through earlier consumption. This assumption is tested with a dataset of French adolescents. A simultaneous equation model is estimated, with one equation for cannabis use, and one for risk denial. The results provide some empirical evidence in favour of the tested assumption, and they also cast doubt on the efficiency of preventive information at school.