Saturday, February 12, 2005

take my discipline. please.

A few years ago, the American Sociological Association had the idea of starting a magazine to help bring sociological wisdom to the masses. The resulting quarterly, Contexts, has repeatedly expressed its aspirations to be the sort of thing anybody interested in sociologicalish issues can pick up and read, although it has been unclear how many readers Contexts has been able to attract who are not practicing sociologists, former sociologists, or relatives of sociologists.

With the latest issue, Contexts has added a humor column ("The Fool") for its back page. The author is Harry Green, whom I've never heard of before and who is described as "once a promising sociologist." He has apparently moved from that to being now on the Contexts masthead as its in-house "humorist." I don't know how one scores that gig, but presumably it's through some kind of personal connection to The Guys In Charge. But does cronyism have to imply cornyism? The Guys In Charge surely do know some clever jokesters, right?

Apparently not, or at least not any who were willing to step up to the plate for Contexts Comedy. Green's humor column is bad--and not bad in the so-bad-it's-good way, but bad in the so-bad-that-it's-really-horribly-claw-out-your-eyes-and-burn-your-ASA-membership-card bad way. Seriously, I think I've shed most of my illusions about the capacity for Mainstream Sociology to embarrass itself, and yet I found this embarrassing.

The premise of the column is that there are reports of terrorists lurking in American sociology, and Green has been commissioned to investigate. Armed with the chief ordnance of lazy humor writing--bullet points--he reports evidence of various suspicious characters in the discipline. One example of the kind of Harry-hilarity that ensues:
Harvard University. You never see any of its sociologists at ASA meetings. What do they spend their time doing? And where did this place get so much money if not from Saudi oil? And what is Harvard President Larry Summers if not a lackey of the New World Order?
Worse, despite the idea that Contexts is at least supposed to have a pretense of being accessible to the person on the street, most of the attempts at humor are based on in-jokes that not only do you have to be in the sociology fold in order to get, but are obscure enough that they won't even be accessible to the average sociologist. An example:
Douglas Mitchell, University of Chicago Press. "You're only as holy as your beard is long." God-fearing, born-again Christians don't have beards that long--except of course for my Uncle Ebenezer, of Hogfarts, West Virginia.
Or, hey, if convulsions of laughter have not yet compromised your ability to read, try this one:
Central Florida University. That's right. We had never heard of it either. Jeb Bush is up to something down there. Eminent environmental sociologist Riley E. Dunlap disappeared from Washington University at Pullman three years ago, said to be "abroad." Now, suddenly he is teaching at Central Florida. Operatives are not usually in training camps for this long, so he must have been studying something especially diabolical--like eigenvalues.
The editors of Contexts, in their comments at the beginning of the issue, note that they plan to work on having accessible articles even though "you have probably never seen the terms sociology and good writing in the same sentence." Of course, around the academy, you would probably also not often hear sociology in the same sentence as "technically sophisticated" or "intellectually rigorous." And sociologists themselves are selling cartoon mugs that poke fun at the discipline's irrelevance to society. But if we are going to have bad reputations in so many ways, can't sociologists at least allow the world to think that, at the end of the day, we might at least be clever and funny? Or do we have to use our discipline's magazine to dispel whatever delusions anyone might have about that?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh dear.

Laurie Talyor's chronicles of Professor Lapping's life and times at Poppleton University, on the back page of the Times Higher Ed Supplement, is the model here. (Small example.) As for Harry. Ack.

- kieran

Anonymous said...

Two sociologists walking down the street happen upon an elderly woman who has been robbed, beaten, and left lying in the gutter. One sociologist says to the other: "the people who did this need our help."

While silly, I think this joke captures some of the spirit of popular understandings of (and contempt for?) sociology.

jeremy said...

Well, to whatever extent sociologists try to call attention to broader causes of particular-but-recurrent tragedies, I think this is to the honor of the discipline rather than its detriment, whatever popular sentiment might be.

I'm trying to think of what would be punchlines of your joke that would do more to capture various laments I would have about contemporary sociology. I suppose one would be:

Two sociologists walking down the street happen upon an elderly woman who has been robbed, beaten, and left lying in the gutter. One sociologist says to the other: "As sociologists, what should we do?"

Or maybe:

Two sociologists walking down the street happen upon an elderly woman who has been robbed, beaten, and left lying in the gutter. One sociologist says to the other: "I hate George W. Bush."

jeremy said...

Or maybe, albeit more in-joky and less lamentfully:

Two sociologists walking down the street happen upon an elderly woman who has been robbed, beaten, and left lying in the gutter. One sociologist says to the other: "We should not think of these things as additive. Instead, what we need to understand is the intersectionality of 'robbed', 'beaten', and 'left lying in the gutter.'"

Anonymous said...

Two college Administrators walking down the street come upon the same elderly woman in the gutter and say to her, " We are willing to pay you $10.00 an hour, but no more than that, with limited benefits, to teach a Social Problems class." oh HA HA I am just too clever for my shoes this afternoon.

jeremy said...

Sure, Anon, we can go there if you insist. How about:

Two sociology professors walking down the street happen upon an elderly woman who has been robbed, beaten, and left lying in the gutter. One sociologist says to the other: "I don't know why our graduate students are always complaining. They have it so good compared to some people." And the other sociologist replies: "Yeah. We may rob them of their twenties and psychologically beat them down, but we never leave them in a gutter. Plus, free printing while it lasts!"

Anonymous said...

T'was once a lady named Pam
who would'st email nothing but spam
whil'st gorging on eggs and ham
most days she give'th not a damn
her pet project be'th a sham-
LDM

Drek said...

Plus, free printing while it lasts!Shit, y'all get free printing?! Goddamnit.

Anonymous said...

Yes, we get free printing. We hardly get paid enough to make rent, but we get free printing.