10 posts tagged “sociology”

I took the cual sociologo clasico eres? on facebook and somehow I was assigned Marx!!n But I said cuando estoy triste me siento como un mono- when I feel sad I feel like a monkey. when did marx ever feel like a monkey? Must be because when it asked for my opina de la probeza (the poor), I answered - debe ser abolida... igualdad para todos!!! - class should be abolished and equality for all!

As I was reading the NY TImes articles on researchers who study Facebook to learn about how people form social relationships, I thought of several things. 
This article highlights incredibly stupid research - and the only smart thing they highlight is Eszter Hargittai's comment on the racial territories of myspace and facebook - where latino kids are more likely to use myspace over facebook.  

1.) many of theses users of Facebook don't know they are being studied!  It's because they haven't checked off some privacy setting in their accounts!  This is horrible - it reminds me of like old-school racist anthropology where you sneak up upon a "tribe", and introduce yourself and live with the "people" to study their ways.  This is academic blasphemy!  How can you research people's profiles without them being aware of it? At the least they need to sign something that allows them to be studied - like in surveys and etc?  PEOPLE - set your profile so that only friends can see it!  otherwise you will have some Harvard researcher studying your vampire kisses and relationship status - and concluding that you must be ugly and have no social capital because no one has bitten you or given you any kisses lately. 

2.) PUHHLEASE NEVER NEVER NEVER let me do research just so I can proclaim something that any person could already tell you ok!  I hate academic research that makes these big proclomations - like, "people are less social when then are upset, and this is reflective of some theory..."    Or like when a researcher studies a  rural village to say, look - these people are agentic - they have minds and they survive by relying on each other!  these people are oppressed by their structures and yet they have agency! WOW!  thanks researcher for telling us!it's like DUHHH!  anyone can tell you that! 
In the article, a professor wrote a paper called In The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends, that says their analysis proves that "colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being."  well geez - talk to any college undergrad and they could all tell you that.  And they would do a better job of telling you that than some professor who spent months mulling over facebook data so that they could get their article published.

3.) watch out when the American Sociological Review (ASR) says anything is cool - in this article they say "“For studying young adults,” said Vincent Roscigno, an editor of The American Sociological Review, “Facebook is the key site of the moment.”"  EWWWWWWW .  Ok I love sociology, as that is what I study - but the ASR and American  sociology are not really known for any ground breaking research on "young adults."  SO careful when ASR says anything is the "IT" thing

4.) I hate when researchers study something they truly don't understand.  When they announce their results, they think they made a discovery that the people didn't know about!  Most of these researchers make stupid conclusions about Facebook - they must think that teenagers are obsessed with this and all their social ties and social relationships are mediated through Facebook.  They are studying people's relationship status box and it's scary when researchers are studying how "users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another — [to help] explore fundamental social science questions."  
researchers - let me tell you this now - YOU CAN't TAKE TOO SERIOUSLY WHAT GOES ON IN FACEBOOK!!!!  How many vampires I bite or how many pokes I give/receive/gnore is not reflective of my social life or how I form social relationships.    You can't trust what people put in their relationship box.  You have to be careful of how you interpret what people do on facebook.   One way to solve this problem, is to have actual facebookers - like youth or undergrads - on your research team.  They should be treated as equals to other researchers with their phds. 

So friends friends friends - please please shake the shit out of me if my research isn't exciting and relevant to the living world, but more importantly 1.) if it treats people as idiots, and 2.) isn't something that the people I would be researching already know.   I guess by writing this I have ruined any potential opportunities to be invited as a co-PI on any Facebook research- but that's ok. haha - I would rather have my research be connected to the real world than to study it as if I were above it.

Generic Asian Man:  I have more money than you!
Crazy Monster: Oh Yeah?  I have more cultural capital than you!
Generic Asian Man:  I create your cultural capital!!
Crazy Monster:  You little misrecognized structured bitch.

I drew this cartoon during a seminar discussion on Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction.  Bourdieu is HEAVY - everytime I read him I become so depressed because I feel like no matter what, the working class, or the marginalized are always fucked.   So to counterbalance this - I drew a cartoon, a la Bourdieu - but with a silly side.   Would he find it funny?  I don't know - but to understand this cartoon if you haven't read his work yet, here's a quick primer.  

Bourdieu  tried to show that there are more ways than just using money to dominate people - and that people use "culture" to also reproduce their superiority.  So he conceptualized this as "cultural capital."
For example, he said public education is a way social hierarchy is reproduced.  When the school sends their students on an art museu fieldtrip -   this is form of trying to enforce the dominant class's taste of what is considered to be "artistic" and valuable for education.  Bourdieu was trying to point out that the contradiction with public education is that it's supposed to INCREASE equality, but instead it PERPETUATES inequality.  When teachers and textbooks force into black kids that they need to know about European art and memorize European history, this is one way of reproducing the hierarchy of whites on top, and blacks on bottom.   Of course textbooks give Blacks one month for their anti-slavery  heros, and a chapter on third world Africa,  - and of course we say the West colonized Africa, but one month of heros or 1 chapter of lesson plans is not enough.  Even though we are past the plantation days,  school classrooms and curriculum ensure that racial superiority stays alive in more subversive ways.  It's all one big structure of structured domination! AHHHHH!

Read and Laugh at Crazy Monster #1-4

Generic Asian Man: Help Fire!!! We need more help!!!
Crazy Monster:  Sorry I'm busy thinking.  But I will help you socially deconstruct the situation from a culturally materialistic Point-of-View ex post facto.

today is the second day of the San Diego wildfires.  Raquel, Kevin, Brian and I are sitting here working on our research while the rest of San Diego is burning down - of course we are online and keeping up with the news at the same time.  Raquel at one point said how much she now realizes firefighters are symbolic social heros.  She said although it's their jobs  - they are out there fighting the fires while we are working on our research proposals.  and then I said - well it's not like a bunch of sociologists would EVER agree to help a fire - we would only volunteer to help socially deconstruct the situation after the fires were done burning.  So with that story - I bring you Crazy Monster #4:  Sure I will Help!

FYI - the firefighters aren't actually fighting any fires yet - they can't until the fires die down - they are busy performing emergency evacuations on idiots who wouldn't listen to the mandatory evacuation.

Read al the other Crazy Monster Cartoons here.

this is dedicated to my dear friend Leah. We are in the 2nd year of our 7year endeavor for world power. Leah has decided her dissertation will be about friendship networks. however, when she told some professors about this - their first question was - why are friends important? the professors werent' fishing for a theoretical answer - they literally just wanted to know what was the sociological significance of studying friendship.

and this is coming from the mouths of sociologists who supposedly really understand society....hmmm and we wonder why sociologists don't exist outside of the confines of the university walls.

Catch up on past Crazy Monster Cartoons.

Levi-Strauss, the author of "the Savage Mind," preferred that the English translation be titled “Pansies for Thought” - I think that would’ve been a much more fun title – but noooo – social science is a serious discipline right? No time for pansies here.

What I love about Levi-Strauss is that he explicitly says that “civilized” societies are not better or more developed than “primitive” societies.  So what we consider to be the “the savage mind” is really equal to “the civilized mind.”

Here are some quotes and notes from my favorite chapter in book, Chapter 9 - History and Dialectic

On Language
“language does not consist in the analytical reason of the old-style grammarians nor in the dialectical constituted by structural linguistics not in the constitutive dialectic of individual praxis facing the practice-inert, since all three presuppose it.  Linguistics thus presents with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will.  Language, an unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons of which man know nothing.” pg 252

On Meaning
“..this meaning is never the right one: superstructures are faulty acts, which have ‘made it’ socially.  Hence, it is vain to go to historical consciousness for the truest meaning.  What Sartre calls dialectical reason is only a reconstruction, by what he calls analytical reason, of hypothetical moves about which it is impossible to know—unless one should perform them without thinking them—whether they bear any relation at all to what he tells us about them, and which, if so, would be definable in terms of analytical reason alone.  And so we end up in the paradox of a system which invokes the criterion of historical consciousness to distinguish the ‘primitive’ from the ‘civilized’ but—contrary to its claim, is itself ahistorical.  It offers not a concrete image of history but an abstract schema of men making history of such a kind that it can manifest itself in the trend of their lives as a synchronic totality.  Its position in relations to history is therefore the same as that of primitives ot the central past: in Sartre’s system, history plays exactly the part of a myth.” pf 254

On history
“...Historical facts are no more given than any other” pg 257
“...history is therefore never history, but history-for. It is partial in the sense of being biased even when it claims not to be, for it inevitably remains partial –that is incomplete—and this is a form of partiality.” pg 258
“it is thus not only fallacious but contradictory to conceive of the historical process as a continuous development...”
“history is a discontinuous set composed of domains of history, each of which is defined by a characteristic frequency and by a differential coding of before and after. 

On privileging civilized over primitive:
“the idea that the universe of primitives (or supposedly such) consists of principally in message is nothing new.  But until recently a negative value was attributed to what was wrongly taken to be a distinctive characteristic, as though this difference between the universe of the primitives and our own contained the explanation of their mental and technological inferiority.” pg 267
“the false antimony between logical and prelogical mentality was surmounted at the same time. the savage mind is logical in the same sense and the same fashion as ours, thought as our own is only when it is applied to knowledge of a universe in which it recognizes physical and semantic properties simultaneously.”

Quotes on Dialectical Reason:
Argues that dialectical reason is in addition to analytical (Sartre call this transcendental materialist and aesthete), dialectical reason is “the necessary condition for it to venture to undertake the resolution of the human into the non-human.” pg 246

Argues the role of dialectical reason “is to put human sciences in possession of a reality with which it alone can furnish them, but the properly scientific work consists in decomposing and then recomposing on a different plane."
 
"It is imperative to account for dialectical reason by discovering the dialectic subject’s analytical reason. BUT dialectical reason alone cannot account for itself nor for analytical reason!" Pg 253

Quotes on How Bad Sartre:
“Sartre, who claims to found an anthropology, separates his own society from others.” pg 250

“by making analytical reason an anti-comprehension, Sartre often comes to refuse it any reality as an integral part of the object of comprehension.  This paralogism is already apparent in his manner of invoking history, for one is hard to put to it to see whether it is meant to be the history of men make unconsciously, history of men consciously made by historians, the philosopher’s interpretation of the history of men or his interpretation of the history of historians, The difficulty becomes even greater, however, when Sartre endeavors to explain the life an thought of the present or past members not of his own society, but of exotic societies.” pf 251

“he concludes wrongly, that the relationship between native thought and his knowledge of it, is that of a constitutive to a constituted dialectic, and thus, but an unforeseen detour, he repeats all the illusions of theorists of primitive mentality on his own account” pg 251

So I am reading Althy - who is a Marixst Philosopher - some would say Structural Marxist. I am reading his most well known work, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus – which I think is very relevant still – especially for those work in academia or education in general.  He argues that in a developed capitalist system, education is the arm of ideological inoculation of living in society – b.c it teaches students how to be efficient workers and this is according to the ruling class – who of course are also the dominant economic class.

What he wrote has triggered some thoughts I have had for a while about the “claimed” purposes of a univeristy of high school.  I’ve been working in public education for a while, and even now as a TA (teaching assistant to professors)  at a public university – the one line I have heard, regardless of what level of schooling, is that we are supposed to teach students “how to be global citizens.”  I’ve always wondered what exactly that means.  In light of what Althy has written, does that mean producing great worker bees?  Does it mean global citizens who will be active in their community, have compassion for others, and be conscious of world issues OR does it mean global citizens who know how to sell themselves to the most high-paying corporation, selfishly climb up the managerial scale, automatically obey authority and rationalize all decisions?  I wonder if those who say we are making “global citizen” have thought out what exactly this means. 

I know so many educators who complain about their rebellious students – but you know those are the ones I love – (also probably because I was also one of those) – but it’s the rebellious students who understand that they are being inoculated into obedience and autonomization.  They know what the teachers are up to even if they can’t articulate it in this way – they articulate it in their music, their clothing, their fuck you's – they rebel by not showing up to class, and they rebel by refusing to obey.  This notion of rebelllion is particularly important in light of the recent rhetoric of panic in the education world, that American is falling behind in producing educated students and China and India are going to take over.  Of course this is tied into producing good worker bees for the American economy and not into actually producing "truly educated" students.  And there is nothing wrong with being aware that we need to reform the way we educate students in the US and there's nothing wrong with realizing that we need to have a competitive edge in the global economy, but what's not ok is how this rhetoric is carried out in the schools.  Wired magazine this month has a great article connecting Einstein to how we teach youth - and that we need to stop forcing students into obedience and rote memorization - but start nuturing rebelliousness.  I totally agree - that's why I love little rebels.    

Well I’ve always carefully thought about what I mean when I say I want my students to become “global citizens” - part of it is that I want them to discover their passion, their happiness, and discover that they have what it takes – and that you can also make money doing what you love and should think about how you can make a lot of it without exploiting others or the environment- yes money matters :)  The road may not always be the most popular – but I want my students to always keep thinking – and I want them to even challenge what I tell them.   Well – I think Althy would agree..maybe :) according to him we’re all subjected to the ideological state apparatus to begin with – and the one thing we can do is to become conscious of it - and oh yes he's another genius gone bad - he strangled his wife when he was 62 years old as he was giving her a "massage" - then he was left in a psychiatric hospital til he dies of a heart attack 10 years later-
KEELAN says he ran through the streets after he strangled his wife saying "I KILLED MY WIFE" and the punishment was a very "posh" mental hosipital where he could come and go.  psycho academics!

So here are some quotes from Althy that I particularly like:

"the reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of it skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide forth domination of the ruling class "in words". pg 132
 
"to my knowledge, no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatus." pg 146
 
"The Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle." pg 147
 
 
"the ideological state Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations is a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus." pg 152
 
In fact, the Church has been replaced today in its role as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus by the School." pg 157
 
"the mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the school as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is...lay), where teachers respectful of the "conscience" and 'freedom' of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their 'parents' (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their 'liberating virtues'." pg 157
 
"Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, describing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief" pg 170

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"sociology  which was conceived in the attempt to come to terms with the spread of industrial capitalsism in the 19th century, is ironically being left behind in the quest to come to terms with globalization in the 21st.  In place of a sociology grounded in Durkheim's theory of practice, which would solidly connect with studies of global practices in business, science, economics and communication, the discipline has turned to Pragmatism and other more conventional positions that place beliefs and motivations at the center of social life.  As a consequence, actual worksite practices, which are essential to the understanding of science and industry, are rendered invisible to the researcher."  pg 316

"when insitutional orders fail to meet the changing needs of practice societies fail." pg 318

"How can individual perceptions of natural reality give rise to valid knowledge of that reality?  Durkhei argues that because individual ideas are not the origin of human reason, this way of posing the question makes it appear to be insolvable.  Accordin to Durkheim, replacing the individualist approach of traditional philosophy, with an approach solidly embedded in enacted social practice, was the only possible  solution to the epitemological dilema.  A sociological approach to epistemology is necessary, for Durkheim, because knowledge begins with relations between persons, not with the individual.  The individual human perceiver does not exist outside of, or, before, society.  Therefore, to begin with the individual is to begin with the result of a social process reifying the individual by treating it as if it had an independent existence.  The epistemological question remains unsolvable because the process through which human individuals are made rational and human in the first place remains unexamined." pg 11

From Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

"Money is the most abstract and "impersonal" element that exists in human life. the more the world of the modern capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness.  the more rational, and thus impersonal, capitalism becomes, the more this is the case. in the past it was [possible to regulate ethically the personal relationships between master and slave precisely because they were personal relations. but it snot possible to regulate --at least not in the same sense or with the same success--the relations-between the shifting holders of mortgages and the shifting debtors of the banks that issue these mortgages: for in the case, no personal bonds of any sort exist." 
economy and society, Max Weber

"Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy.  In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests this very clearly.  The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure, induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective position of the leaders and the led...With the advance of organization, democracy tends to decline.  Democratic evolution has a parabolic course.  At the present time, at any rate as far as party life is concerned, democracy is in the descending phase. It may be enunciated as a general rule that the increase in the power of the leaders is directly proportional with the extension of the organization."

"The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves.  They break ever on the same shoal. They are never renewed.  This enduring spectacle is simultaneously encouraging and depressing. When democracies have gained a certain state of development, they undergo a gradual transformation, adopting the aristocratic spirit, and in many cases also the aristocratic forms, against which at the outset they struggles do fiercely.  Now new accusers arise to denounce the traitors; after an era of glorious combats and inglorious power, they end by fusing with the dominant class; whereupon once more they are in their turn attacked by fresh opponents who appeal to the name of democracy.  It is probably that this cruel game will continue without end."  From <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Political-Parties-Sociological-Oligarchical-Tendencies/dp/0765804697/sr=1-1/qid=1169343822/ref=sr_1_1/102-4913444-1098564?ie=UTF8&s=books"/>Robert Michels