Little Theories and Big Problems: Chicago Sociology and Ethnic Conflicts*

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like “theory” and “theorist,” both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a “grounded theory” ( Glaser and Strauss 1967 ). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing ( Rose 1962 ). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: “Exactly what is symbolic interaction”” He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, “It is what they do at Chicago.”     

A Girl Is a Girl,Is a Girl,Is a Girl

ABSTRACT

Before I did not know I was the other in my country, before I did not know it was not safe to be the other in this, before I did not know my existence was a series of ellipses, owing to mispronunciations and a smothering absence of words, before I did not know that the past will, unfailingly, be subsumed by its past and fantasies of a future will become present torments, before I did not know all of that, I did not know I was to be a woman. … Thirty-odd years in, having married a man and birthed children, I was made to look at myself and pronounce the most foreign of words. The sound was deafening. The sound left me speechless. These writings are an attempt at puncturing the silence enveloping the most dangerous of (my) words.     

Selling your soul to the devil: an autoethnography of pain, pleasure and the quest for a child

In this article I present an autoethnography in the form of a quest narrative linked as a self‐reflexive text to my continuing research of children and adults with spina bifida. My story centers on the themes of chronic illness, pain and sexuality, highlighting gaps in the literature related to these topics. I narrate my story as a manifesto for women with physical impairments to break their silence and talk about their sexuality. I recommend autoethnography as a method of understanding disability as embodied.

Faustus:?Now tell me, what says Lucifer thy lord?     

Home Is Where She Is

ABSTRACT

I have written this paper with the intention of reading it out loud to you. As I was writing this paper, I imagined your skin, that soft outer membrane of your body. I imagined my tongue moving to shape my words, all the while carefully shifting my teeth out of the way. I imagined having these words thump under your skin and tremble your presence to the beat of our hearts. Because this paper was supposed to have you feel me and my people. And by “my people,” I truly mean everyone around me, including you. So, this paper is essentially about us, you and me. You know, I just had a feeling that you might know us, but you do not feel us. I just had a feeling that you have got to feel how we are. … Do you hear me? Because, only then, can we finally, start.     

Buffalo's old first ward: A photographic study

This paper explores my journey into documentary photography and visual sociology. I will explain some of the events which led me to documentary photography, and eventually to the Old First Ward, a neighborhood in Buffalo I studied and photographed in depth. I wish to emphasize both the difficulty of finding my own “eye” as a photographer as well as the personal relationships which have made this process of self discovery and photographic practice fruitful.     

My Father,His Psychiatrists,and Me

My father is at an age when the body breaks down beyond repair. This essay describes my attempts to sustain what little sense of autonomy is left to him within the constraints of his physical limitations and to contain the anger generated by them. As I negotiate with a host of medical authorities, the most vexing of whom is the all-important psychopharmacologist, I am reminded of earlier interactions between my father's psychiatrists and me. These memories allow me to tell the story of our fraught, if loving, relationship. For a gay man, this telling is marked by the homophobic attitudes that funded many of my ostensibly therapeutic interactions with psychiatrists, as well as by a celebration of the queer genealogies through which I feel at home in the world.     

Queer like me: black girlhood sexuality on the playground, under the covers, and in the halls of academia

Using Laura Alexandra Harris' conception of a queer Black feminism, I evaluate stories from my girlhood to learn what lessons can be learned about young female sexuality when the researcher works from a position of pleasure. I contend that my secret quests to satisfy my same-sex sexual desires led me to begin the process of cultivating self-awareness, or subjectivity, and personal agency at an early age.     

Mesede and the Limits of Reciprocity in Fieldwork at Kamusi,Western Province,Papua New Guinea

This paper outlines some of the ways I and my research were defined by Bamu speakers living at Kamusi, the headquarters of the Wawoi Guavi logging concession in the Western Province of PNG. These definitions often involved stories about Mesede and other great Bamu ancestors. The stories about Mesede outlined Bamu experiences of colonial and post-colonial development and suggested that Mesede had the power to transform the Bamu's current poverty and marginalisation. The possibility that Mesede could institute a new epoch of development was linked to the Bamu's ability to maintain inalienable ties with Mesede despite his removal overseas. Mesede's story also required me to acknowledge, and productively respond to, past appropriations by Australians, and others, of Mesede. His history placed me in a project of im/possible reciprocity that should have involved me in returning Mesede to his rightful place.     

Sexual Abuse,Spiritual Formation,and Psychoanalysis

Sexual abuse, from being an event in fearful silence, is now seen as a civil wrong or crime. Participants are stereotyped as perpetrators, victims, and enablers. These are the simplifications of an adversarial legal and insurance system. I suggest a more complex view. I was abused as a boy by the senior acolyte who was training me. The abuse taught me to lie and lose trust in adults and myself. For survival, I learned to invent provisional selves without understanding that these would become profound confusions of identity, sexuality, and purpose, lifelong sources of anxiety and depression. Through a recovery of my abandoned spiritual life and an intense psychoanalysis that together amounted to a metanoia, “a change of heart,” I was able to move past mere forgiveness to a reconciliation with myself and my history, and with my elderly father, who I saw as having failed to protect me years before.     

Academic Outings

This essay is an exploration of my personal experiences with poverty and identity negotiation, specifically framed within and through my educational experiences. It is the beginnings of an answer to Denzin's (2003:259) call for a “performative politics that leads the way to radical social change.” Scholars often ignore class subjectivities and lived experiences of class. I have chosen to employ critical autoethnographic inquiry in the form of a layered account to understand my lived experiences and my positionality, simultaneously inviting the reader to enter into the discourse.     

Contradictions of state socialism: the case of Poland*

This article originates from an invitation to give a paper at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw m the Autumn of 1980. As then drafted, the paper consisted mainly of a discussion of the writings of selected Polish and British sociologists on the structure and workings of contemporary state-socialist societies, and it was my intention to revise it for submission to the Sociological Review as a sequel to, and commentary on, the article by Christopher G.A. Bryant published in the issue of February, 1980.¹ On return from Warsaw, I decided against doing so for two reasons: first, it seemed to me that the writings which I had taken as my starting-point were too remote from the actual course of events in Poland; second, I did not see how I could use the many informative conversations about those events which I had had with Polish sociologists and others in an academic journal article. On further reflection, however, I do not believe that either of these reasons should prevent my attempting to set out and justify my view of the implications for sociological theory of the Polish case, even though it is based in part on non-documentary sources and (more seriously) I lack the knowledge of the language which would give me direct access to the documentary ones. In what follows, accordingly, I first outline the framework within which the forms and distribution of power in state-socialist societies in general and Poland in particular can, in my view, best be analysed; I then set out in slightly more detail what I see as the reasons why events in Poland between 1956 and 1981 followed the course they did; and I conclude with a brief discussion of what I believe to be the principal weakness in the recent British sociological literature on state socialism insofar as it relates to the Polish case.     

The effects of cross-cultural competence on my teaching and studying in the UK context

In this paper, I reflect on my experiences as a Chinese educator, attempting to take my previous experiences into a new situation: teaching in the UK. These reflections take me down a path that shows how my Chinese cultural background and experiences created both challenges and opportunities for my teaching. I attempt to show how important it is to gain cross-cultural competence if one is to take one’s teaching into new cultural environments.     

All Things Thrown and Wonderful,All Memories Great and Small

And the Lord God made them all. I went to Sunday school and like lots of other kids (though far from all) came to an age at which I simply stopped going. Nothing conscious about it, I don't think, it's just those sets of spaces stopped becoming; stopped like nothing physical can stop, like a car crashing into a wall and instead of rebounding being merely consumed in whole. I (re)member, in my naive teens (when is this? I do not know. Perhaps the time of the Iraq war, but maybe this was a different car journey) I once came out with the statement (which was not particularly naive especially) “I think God exists, how did we all get here otherwise”. Me, my sister that is two years older than me, my mum and dad, were on the road from Auchmuir Bridge towards Stirling around Loch Leven, the loch in Fife, Scotland, on which Mary Queen of Scots was held on an island. I have an image of a memory of going there as well. It is thus, however, that I (re)member the initiation into a different vision of the universe and everything. Yet it is a state clearly pleated bewilderingly. As an event it exists in what Deleuze and Guattari term a “rhizome, a burrow”, with “flights of escape” which have no beginnings or ends, mere initialities and finalities. 3 3 They talk of this in many places. See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix , Anti‐Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , ( London and New York : Continuum, 2004 ); Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix , Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature , Dana Polan trans., ( Minneapolis and London : University of Minnesota Press, 1986 ). For Deleuze alone also see Deleuze, Gilles , The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque , Tom Conley trans. ( London : The Athlone Press, 1993 ).
This is strange. It is not a polemic, nor does it have an explicit argument, except perhaps to ask the question that always dances on a pinhead – as Bohumil Hrabal once put it, “Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp” 4 4 Hrabal, Bohumil , Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp .
– is there any escape? I think I sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” at my Gran's funeral, but it might have been something else. We stopped in the house of the priest and watched England lose the Cricket World Cup in 1999; they played in blue. That's how I (re)member the year of my Gran's funeral. The church I used to go to burned down. Arson, I think.     

Mutuality in Relationships with Health Care Providers

Abstract

I have had a mobility impairment for many years and have experienced repeated trauma at the hands of medical personnel. They have withheld anesthesia and postoperative pain medication, insisting that I had no pain. Physicians have also refused to believe that I have been physically active, and have minimized the degree of impairment that I described. They hold the same biases about people with disabilities as do most people: that we are lazy and weak, and that we do not try hard enough. Despite my ongoing attempts at self advocacy, my orthopedist has made unilateral decisions about my treatment goals and the management of my diseased joints. These have caused me to wear out other joints, until I am significantly impaired and can work only a few hours a week. He then began to treat me differently, since his preconceptions prevented him from seeing me as an individual with unique abilities facing attitudinal and physical barriers. Our relationship was the only tool available to me to attempt to break down his prejudices to stop the harm he was causing me. I will describe a series of oppressive medical provider relationships. I will then demonstrate my attempts to assert myself as an essential mutual partner in decisions about my goals, and show the limitations of this approach in the presence of a great power differential.     

Samson Now,an Introduction

In this introduction to the group of essays that follows by Sam Gerson, Jean-Max Gaudillière, Miri Rozmarin, and Udi Aloni, I trace the inspiration for this project, a collective contemplation of the figure of the biblical Samson using as its springboard David Grossman's book about Samson, Lion's Honey (2005 Grossman , D. ( 2005 ). Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson . New York , NY : Canongate . [Google Scholar]). I write about how the project emerged out of my work with a patient who recommended Grossman's book to me and my effort to grapple with the dilemmas of familial and collective loyalties that transpired as a core aspect our joint endeavor. How does one let go of one's child, in life or in transference? And what kind of letting go should, on the other hand, be resisted? How can we think about this conundrum of freedom and responsibility? This is the crucial clinical and ethical concern underlying the collection of essays published here.     

Searching for Yellowstone1

This experimental, layered, mixed‐genre narrative folds my biographical experiences into a critical reading of Wallace Stegner's autobiographical account of his childhood. This reading allows me to discuss three versions of the midcentury white male middle‐class American dream. I compare Stegner's father to my father and my grandfather, as I discuss a trip I almost made to Yellowstone Park with my grandfather before he died.     

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.