Ask a sociologist anything

I'll also give you book recommendations, just to keep this on topic.

Other urls found in this thread:

amazon.com/Twilight-American-Culture-Morris-Berman/dp/039332169X
amazon.com/Dark-Ages-America-Final-Empire/dp/0393329771
amazon.com/Why-America-Failed-Imperial-Decline/dp/149233393X
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

How can Turks be stopped, you German fuck?

The ones here or in Turkey?

By putting an end to capitalism.

Books on nationalism, ethnocentrism or a combination of both. More inspired books on race relations than what we get fed at uni. As well as books on societal collapse.

When will your field become respectable? (it honestly has a lot of potential)

How do I keep hobos away from waste containers next to my house?

The behavioural sciences are fine in principle. Their attractiveness to ultra liberal lesbian feminazis is the problem and why so much of it is reduced to 'hocus you're raping me if you pocus'.

I can really reccomend Anderson and Hobsbawn, even if you're not agreeing with them. I think you should always read oft-cited books, regardless if they cater to your views, simply to know what you're up against.

Assuming that you're European, read the olf nationalist literature from the 19th century to get a grasp of what nationalism was struggling against and why it was as liberal as you could get back then. For collapse of civilization, readt the German stuff from ~1914.

Does it really bother you that much? Just get containers with a lock.

t.b.h. I don't really care how respectable my field is; I don't have a lot of respect for it myself. But I guess that's what most people say about their discipline.

why is malcolm gladwell so shitty

PopSci is always trash.

What do you think about Ralph Miliband? I'm a huge Hobsbawm fan and I've heard they influenced each other

Have you read Berger/Luckmann ? I heard they're/were important in the field. Also, thoughts on philosophy and its relationship with your field since supposedly sociology owes its existence to Marx?

Haven't read him, sorry. What does Hobsbawn have to say about him?

They were part of the introductory syllabus at my uni. A colleague who used to go to the same church as him told me that Berger is a diehard conservative Lutheran who feel that the world has gone nuts, including a large part of sociology.

Philosophy is a somewhat delicate topic. In the last 80 years or so, Philosophers have confined themselves to not acknowledging any empirical argument whatsoever while sociologists set out to create yet another discipline completely devoid of philosophy. You can imagine how that turned out. If sociologists ever took up philosophy in any way, it was constructivist, thereby depriving the world outside of any importance (at least in sociological theory). There's been some return to ontology recently, but that's usually just lip service. Aside from that.

I wouldn't say Marx founded sociology. The field could just as well have remained a part of political/national economy until Durkheim. And maybe that would have been for the better.

Don't know if this is sociology related, but here goes.

How seriously is Freud's Civilization and it's Discontents taken nowadays? In my mind it is the capstone of his work and what people should really be focusing on and not the memes to do with childhood and motherfucking. I have a soft spot for intellectuals who try and show how western civilization / capitalism is directly related to base biological urges (death, sex, etc). Is any of that shit still taken seriously thou?

Why is racism defined by a math equation?

racism = power + privilege

If a group of black people discriminate against a single white person based on race, then how is that not racism? Isn't changing the definition from "discrimination based on race" to "power + privilege" intellectually dishonest and only done to further political agendas?

It's the main reason that sociology(or at least the way it's taught) is trash.

How is the refusal to be ranked working out for German sociology departments? I think its based as fuck but I don't know the practical consequences.

To wish views it caters matters little to me. I write a small paper on it. I have my opinion on it, but any good material is welcome.

Thanks for the input, will check it out.

Working out just fine. Ranking is bullshit in any case, you cannot possibly compare departments across sub-fields.

The problem is rather that all the positions are filled through networks, people are hardly publishing anything here unless they're professors, and that you pretty much only ever get tenure (or an open-ended contract, for that matter) as a distinguished professor.

No one reads Freud in psychology anymore, and here in sociology he seems to be the exclusive domain of the long extinct freudo-marxists.Some critical theorists take him as a source of inspiration, but that's pretty much it.

All that urge stuff is pretty much discredited (unless you're Steven Pinker), and I think anyone who cites biology in their support without being able to properly read biology papers deserves to be fired.

So the charge definitely can't be used against the perpetual false-underdogs - just in case the accused thought they could tip the butcher back.

Read National Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town by Brubaker et al. 2006. Also: "What is Racial Domination" by Desmond & Emirbayer (2009). Everyone should have been taught at least the latter article. The fact that no one even knows what the fuck race is and that the only way to find out is studying social sciences/philosophy etc. is fucked up. Primary and secondary schools are failures.

What is your opinion on the theory of face-work? I find the premise of the theory pretty easy to accept. However, I don't know about any criticism of it that has arisen. Could you shed a light on that and possibly other authors who have built on Goffman's work?

I study English myself with education science as a minor and I can't consider myself very well-versed in sociology. I bought a book that gives introductions to most of the main thinkers of the French sociological tradition. So far it has been intriguing. It's interesting how well sociology of interaction connects with the pragmatics of language use. Language education could take notes from the work of those fields.

>Haven't read him, sorry. What does Hobsbawn have to say about him?

don't know, but I've read they worked together or something like that

Thanks a lot

what is your take on anthropology? and on psychology?

>spook bait

what's your take on macintyre's criticisms of the predictive power of sociological generalizations?

Not that I've read much into it, but a common criticism of Goffmann is directed towards his theater metaphors, and thinking of the "face" as a mere mask is one of those. It effectively means not to take people seriously to the very end, but to hide yourself behind the irony of an observer who can see through all the masquerades. Apart from that, I'm actually a big fan of many of Goffman's concepts, and had he embraced the political implications of his work, I think he would be one of the great figures of sociology today.

What kind of anthropology? The physical or the cultural one? I've had classes in both, and I tend to like the former more, but only because I think it's more down to earth - as long as it doesn't make up bullshit about historical societies based on the length of hairs in a grave. Cultural anthropology has been an incredible source for great concepts over the last decades (see the quoted post above), unfortunately cultural anthropologists have never made much of it and sociologists considered cultural anthropology to be below them.

Our psychology department is just across the street from my office, and it's a h0rrible place. I find most of what they teach there incredibly dull, especially when it comes to experimental psychology. But maybe that's just here. Sociologists in general stay away as far as possible from psychology to mark their claims.

Why did the Frankfurt School have to kill Marxism?

How much discrimination against conservative researchers have you personally witnessed?

pic related macintyre? only came across him during my political science BA. from a quick google search I get that he denies that social sciences have any predictive power? if so, than this is one of the cases where, once again, social scientists have once again misunderstood what constitutes predictive power in the natural sciences and how it is achieved.

the conclusion that social sciences lack the ability to predict is contradicted by the immense precision of polls and market mechanisms (albbeit both weren't enough to predict brexit). both an electoral system and a stock market have to be engineered in a specific way, however, to allow for predictions. if the structures necessary for that are lacking, you cannot make predictions.

Because it's meant to point at the self-reinforcing dynamics between power and privilege, I guess. Although I do think that you got that equation wron, it should be power + predjudice

Dunno, ask Habermas.

none so far, because these people stick to economics and political science, where they in turn harass anyone who even dares to consider poststructuralism and marxism valid approaches.

jokes aside, most people choose their disciplines themselves, hence you will find very few conservatives in sociology or university in general. there are some positions you better not articulate too explicitly, though, at least not if you're not able to defend them against hegemonic social constructivism.

yeah, that macintyre. 'after virtue' has a discussion of the social sciences. i should clarify that he still thinks that the social sciences are very important and have valuable things to teach us. he just thinks that they rest on a mistaken picture of both human nature and the fact/value distinction which results in mistaken beliefs about the kind of precision they can achieve in predicting things

>most people choose their disciplines themselves, hence you will find very few conservatives in sociology or university in general.

This doesn't explain the disappearance of conservative sociologists in the last decades. There used to be far more of them in the past, and people chose their disciplines themselves back then, too.

What sociologists do you mean? Maybe leftist positions from the past just seem conservative to you from today's perspective.

Things have changed a lot since the 90s. And this chart is across all disciplines, the ratio in sociology is something like 20:1.

Is this for the US? And based on what, self-identification? I'd consider a drop in 5 ppt for conservatives moderate, so it wouldn't suprprise me if it's not conceivable across disciplines - but a rise in far left, lumped together with liberal? Radical leftists have been kicked out of social science departments everywhere here in Germany; be it economics, sociology or even philosophy.

What is sociology

With the new equation the same argument line applies, why cant black people have prejudices again? They obviously can. If a group of black people make fun of a white person, are the black people powerless? If a black person holds a gun to a white persons head, are they powerless? This idea that black people cant be racist because racism = prejudice + power seems to be a basic misunderstanding of power. Not to mention the abhorrent moralizing in a semireligous value style, but thats another topic entirely. I dont take sociology very seriously because of such basic misunderstandings.

I posit, sociology = misunderstandings + trash

Everybody can be racist. It isn't defined by a maths equation.
Speaking with someone on a Nepalese cartoon posting website shouldn't be enough for you to dismiss an entire field of study, which you obviously don't know about.

So you're throwing around something you found on some SJW twitter - probably misquoted - just to rant here about it? Who ever claimed that you can't be racist just because you have dark skin?

You shouldn't worry about things like that on principle. They would obviously need mathematical formulas for power, and for prejudice. Those formulas in turn would need formulas to define (more like justify) the terms in that formula, and so on. It will just be infinite squabbling over terms and what constitutes what. actually what will happen is that eventually the group with the biggest following of people plugging their ears and saying "lalalaIcan'thearyou" wins by just being louder at any given time

I agree, my equation is as legitimate as the previous ones supposedly defining racism. However,
>Everybody can be racist
You say this as if it is taken as fact in Sociology itself. Have you never heard the theory that institutional racism is the only true racism, and all other forms are justified by the relation to the dominant insitution? If one is racist and if that racism agrees with the historical insitutional version then it is unjustified, if it is "racism against the historical racism" then it is justified. This is Sociology. Obviously

Who claimed it? Sociology teachers. Are you playing dumb? It isn't tied to dark skin, it is "historically marginalized groups". Black vs white is just the easiest example. You could say Sadaam vs Kurds if you want

That kind of surprises me, I've got a different feeling from my country situation (France) : I feel sociologists wished they could look down to anthropologists. Even in the highest institutions of sociology, the "leaders" are very often anthropologists. Then, difference between cultural anthropology and sociology tends to be more and more attenuated here.

I agree with you that constructivism was very much embraced by a large portion of sociology, though the accusation of "depriving the outside world of any importance" seems outdated to me nowadays. I've got the feeling it was quite much more a theoretic concern than a pragmatic one, because sincerely, as a heuristic, we don't give a damn about ontology as soon as it allows to search something (and on the contrary I don't have the feeling that constructivism basis smashed research at all. And the most recent uses seemed to me as a way of keeping an independence to the social realm study besides other approaches, such as cognitive and behavioural ones).
Then to specifically talk about the accusation of constructivism' "lack of substance", I find Latour to be convincing (even if he somehow claim distancing from constructivism and relativism) with the epistemological justifications of the Actor Network Theory. (And once again, it is quite in the background an heuristic justification)

About philosophy independence, I can talk only about where I live, but sociology and political philosophy mixed approaches really explodes here.

>I've got the feeling it was quite much more a theoretic concern than a pragmatic one, because sincerely, as a heuristic, we don't give a damn about ontology as soon as it allows to search something
In practice, it probably wasn't so much. Good studies are good because they point to the most interesting things, not because they use the right methodology or theory. But then again, my colleagues here seem to have a silent agreement not to tackle anything of substance. Imagine bringing up genes in a gender studies seminar here! They'd probably think I'm some kind of Hitler/Dawkins lovechild.

Well, I don't know too much what to think of it. There's indeed a silence around this, but is it an agreement? It seems rather not-thought to me, common base frame, as much as it exists in other study fields... As you say, as long as studies are interesting, you don't try to "fix something that works". It doesn't really bugs me, once again coming from a very heuristic-keen point of view.

As long as everybody shares a common base of discussion... Not that I don't like interdisciplinarity (the so-called and trendy interdisciplinarity), but it has its own limitations. Concepts are only transposable in a certain measure, from which it's easy to not talk about the same thing at all. In other words, you don't fuse two reductionisms together to make an unified field, because these reductionisms also engage in a dialectic between each-other...
You talk about the example of bringing genes to gender studies, I of course doubt it would be a safe idea, but to be quite honest I also doubt it would be relevant ! There is a whole world separating conceptions of the subject, and I pretty much think they can't go hand-in-hand without collapsing one of the two for the moment (and given the nowadays power of the biological approach, it would be the social approach that would be dying). Though, I don't think it's due to a lack of epistemology self-conscience from gender studies here, it's very much the contrary (giving a look to the emergence of the field, the struggle was and is still tough to give it an independence besides biological matter, to show the relevance and legitimacy of another point of view regarding the subject).

Is visual sociology worth studying?

If you're looking for books on societal collapse, here's a series of books that argues that the United States is like Rome:

amazon.com/Twilight-American-Culture-Morris-Berman/dp/039332169X

amazon.com/Dark-Ages-America-Final-Empire/dp/0393329771

amazon.com/Why-America-Failed-Imperial-Decline/dp/149233393X

Why dont you do good science?