A Boy’s Journey: Public Sociology for in and Out of the Classroom

This essay is a response to Stein (2019; 2020) and his use of lived experience to tell the story of violence and the Holocaust. I discuss these works’ contributions to public sociology and teaching.     

Durkheim's Response to Spencer: An Essay Toward Historicism in the Historiography of Sociology*

Merton has made an important distinction between the “history” any “systematics” of sociological theory, and outlined the valuable functions of the former. Most histories of sociology, however, have been “presetist” or “Whiggish” in perspective; we propose an “historicist” alternative. Within this perspective, Durkheim's response to Spencer is analyzed in three areas: (1) the relation between “individual” and “society;” (2) evolution and social change; and (3) the scope and method of sociology. In these areas, Durkheim's critical style reveals a repetitive theme which is termed “inversion.” The essay concludes by re-affirming Merton's distinction and urging that the “historicist” perspective is the most valid and useful approach to the history of sociology.     

Toward a Sociology of Nature

Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociology's neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on “the sociology of nature.” I argue that sociology's disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing society's “Great Transformation” from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft: while early anthropologists studied “primitive” societies that allegedly had not yet completed “the passage from nature to culture” (Lévi‐Strauss 1963 : 99), pioneering sociologists presumed that industrialization and urbanization liberated “modern” society from nature and therefore focused their attention on “urbanism as a way of life” (Wirth 1938 ). As exemplified by the articles in this symposium, environmental sociology critiques the nature‐culture and town‐country dualisms. One of environmental sociology's core contributions has been demonstrating that nature is just as much a social construction as race or gender; however, its more profound challenge to the discipline lies in its refutation of the sociological axiom that social facts can be explained purely through reference to other social facts. “Environmental facts” are a constitutive feature of social life, not merely an effect of it.     

Translator's Introduction to Max Weber's Essay on Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology*

The essay on “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology” is Max Weber's first systematic statement of his own sociology. Weber had written earlier as an economist and as a methodologist of the social sciences. But in this essay, he sets forth the method and indicates the scope of his interpretive sociology. He delineates the boundaries between it and two neighboring disciplines (psychology and law) and defines some basic concepts or categories of social action. The essay first appeared in 1913 in Logos, an interdisciplinary journal of which Weber was an editor.     

Katabasis,adult betrayals and liminal identities in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life

In Child Soldier, China Keitetsi recounts her experiences as a child and a soldier during Yoweri Museveni’s guerrilla war against then Ugandan president, Milton Obote. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of katabasis, this paper examines Keitetsi’s portrait of adult betrayal and parental abuse of children at home, and as child soldiers. I argue that Child Soldier is a text that lends itself to a katabatic analysis, and that Keitetsi is a katabasist who frames her experiences as a child and a soldier “within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and return” . I argue that “hellish” elements in the memoir are more than just incidental: they point to a world where tenderness and love have long given way to cruelty and cynicism, and where madness and violence and despair are the order of the day. I also draw on Sigmund Freud and Homi Bhabha’s notions of the unhomely, to suggest that the memoir introduces interesting parallels between the unhomeliness in the home and that brought on by the civil war. Subconsciously, then, examining the memoir under the tropes of katabasis and the unhomely allows us to view her life as floating in-between the child she wishes she should have been and the abused and rejected young woman she becomes.     

Driving in a dead-end street: critical remarks on Andrew Abbott’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Processual Sociology</Emphasis>

In his book Processual Sociology (2016), Andrew Abbott proposes a radically new theoretical perspective for sociology. This review essay discusses the strengths and weaknesses of his “processual” approach, in comparison with other dynamic perspectives in sociology such as, in particular, Norbert Elias’s “process sociology.” It critically questions central ideas and arguments advanced in this book: the reduction of social processes to “events,” the focus on stability as the central explanandum of sociological theory, the implicit separation of individual and social processes, the proposition that the social world changes faster than the individual, the idea that “excess” rather than “scarcity” is the central problematic of human affairs, the strong emphasis on the inherent normativity of sociological concepts, the focus on values as the core of human social life, the neglect of human interdependence, power, coercion, and violence, and the distinction between “moral facts” and “empirical facts.” Detailed criticisms of the arguments in various chapters are given, and alternative viewpoints are proposed. The conclusion is that Processual Sociology fails to provide a fruitful approach for understanding and explaining social processes, and that it even represents, in several respects, theoretical regression rather than progress.     

„The study of population offers something for everyone“

Despite a significant overlap between sociology and demography, “sociology of population” is not well-established in Germany yet. This is very distinct from the development in the US where research at the intersection of sociology and demography is united under the umbrella of “social demography”. This introductory chapter of this KZfSS Special Issue first explores the synergies of both disciplines. We then present the special Issue’s content of the volume. It is structured along demography’s core fields of “Fertility and Partnership” (Section I), “Migration and Mobility” (Section II) and “Mortality and Morbidity” (Section III). The volume contains furthermore a section on “Welfare State and Demographic Change” (Section IV) as well as cutting-edge research in the realm of “Sociology and Biodemography” (Section V).     

Bourdieu in Contention and Deliberation: Response to Lamont and Lizardo

This essay responds to Lamont’s (2011) article “How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United States,” and Lizardo’s (2011) essay “The Three Phases of Bourdieu’s U.S. Reception,” both of which appear in this issue.     

Paternal domination and the mafia state under post-communism

This review essay discusses Bálint Magyar’s most recent book, Stubborn Structures: Conceptualizing Post-communist Regimes (Budapest: CEU Press 2019). Bálint Magyar first published in Hungarian in 2015 (published in English by CEU Press in 2016) a path-breaking book on The Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary. This was the first major attempt to move beyond political controversies and offer a systematic critique of post-communist states. The book also went beyond the usual accusation of “corruption.” Magyar’s key point is that—at least in Hungary—a mafia style of “upper-world” was created, with a “godfather” at the top of it and an “adopted family” below it. This fascinating idea was followed by edited books that included contribution by other scholars. The latest such book is Magyar’s Stubborn Structures: Conceptualizing Post-communist Regimes (CEU Press 2019), which includes articles applying the “mafia state theory” to a great variety of post-communist countries.

     

Beyond the Comtean Schema: The Sociology of Culture and Cognition Versus Cognitive Social Science

In this essay, I argue that the very form of the grammatical construction “a sociology of culture and cognition” (which is a specification of the more general schema “a sociology of [X]”) is symptomatic of a deeply entrenched form of “Primitive Classification” (which I will refer to as the “Comtean schema”) that governs the way in which sociologists conceive of their place in, and engage with other denizens of, the social science landscape. I will also argue that while this style of disciplinary engagement might have worked in the past when it came to dealing with the standard (nineteenth‐century) social science disciplines and even some late‐twentieth‐century upstarts, it will not work as a way to engage the now‐sprawling postdisciplinary field that I will refer to as “Cognitive Social Science” (CSS). The takeaway point is that if sociologists want to be part of CSS (and it is in their interest to be part of it because this constitutes the future of the behavioral sciences), then they will have to give up the Comtean‐schematic thought style.     

Animal Unconscious: Three Questions

“Animal Unconscious” begins with Freud’s claim, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1965), that psychoanalysis proposes “nothing animal is alien to us.” By drawing on recent scholarship in feminist, queer, new materialist, and posthumanist theory, the essay posits that the unconscious is something “animal,” not something uniquely human in order to inquire what this postulate would mean for thinking about 3 problems: the place of animality in institutions of analysis and (higher) learning, the animality of language, and the invention of new modes of kinship. Throughout, the essay speculates on what it means to recast “human” psychoanalysis as an animal practice while simultaneously opening it toward including nonhuman animals in its purview.     

Pragmatics for the Production of Subjectivity: Time for Probe‐Heads

This article attends to the collaborative project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and specifically to their concept of “probe‐head” as mapped out in A Thousand Plateaus. Probe‐head names the rupturing of, and production of alternative modes of organisation to, the mixed semiotic of faciality that determines much of our lived life, in fact that constitutes us as “human”. In exploring this alternative “production of subjectivity” the essay attends also to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “several regimes of signs”, and to the idea of an experimental “pragmatics” of living. The essay goes on to map out what might be called two operating terrains of probe‐heads, in fact two different “times” of the contemporary – the past and the future – and looks at how these might be deployed against the impasses of the present. As far as the latter goes the essay looks at case studies of myth/modern paganism and contemporary art production.     

Preface: Foresight in 2020: Race and Gender in the Upcoming Election

This essay introduces contributions to a special issue of Sociological Forum titled “Foresight in 2020: Race and Gender in the Upcoming Election.” All articles in the issue can be accessed at the journal’s website, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15737861 . They will first appear under the “Early View” tab, and later in volume 35, supplement I.     

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.     

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.     

Sociological Knowledge of the Other: Wolff’s “Surrender and Catch” Methodology

From a sociological perspective the “surrender and catch” expression derives, of course, from the experiential and existential basis of Wolff’s epistemology and hermeneutics.“Surrender” is connected with phenomenology, and Husserl’s (as well as Schütz’s) writings, besides Scheler’s idea of a “relatively natural world view”.“Surrender and catch” is also a “sociology of understanding” a definition which recuperates the German verstehende Soziologie though it makes a distinction between “surrender” and “surrender to”. It is not just a theory, it is a methodology too, in order to understand the otherness.Wolff was a multi-facetted scholar and this affected his conceptualizations. Furthermore, his surrender is something one experiences existentially in a number of fields, from the nature of empirical research to the art of theoretical reflection, from politics to poetry, from philosophy to history to sociology.It must also be pointed out that surrender and catch are a form of protest against the status quo.     

Typology of Slovenian Drama in the Period Between the Two World Wars

From the 1970s, the term metafiction has been mostly confined to studies of American and Western European literatures; I propose using metafiction as a means of approaching Sergei Dovlatov’s Zona [The Zone], a novel which blurs the line between fiction and memoir. In one sense a prison text, in that it concerns the lives of guards and prisoners in a camp, it is, however, divorced from survivor narratives in that the camp does not contain political prisoners, so the “heroes” are the thieves and criminals so universally reviled in other memoirs of the Soviet gulag. It is also a record of its author’s developing need to write as it tracks the transformation of the guard Boris Alikhanov, Dovlatov’s alter-ego. Dovlatov’s authorial persona serves not to elucidate the text, but to construct a hybrid prison memoir which supports his views on the prison experience; views which are in opposition to the pre-existing tradition, and this leads me to describe The Zone as a metatextual camp narrative, containing many of the attributes of the metafictional novel, though originating from the memoiristic impulse and still straddling the line between fiction and nonfiction in a way that true metafictions do not.