Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Series Editor: Norman K. Denzin Recent Volumes: Volumes 1–30: Studies in Symbolic Inter...

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STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Series Editor: Norman K. Denzin Recent Volumes: Volumes 1–30:

Studies in Symbolic Interaction

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION VOLUME 31

STUDIES IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTION EDITED BY

NORMAN K. DENZIN Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA CO-MANAGING EDITOR

JAMES SALVO Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA CO-MANAGING EDITOR

MYRA WASHINGTON Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

JAI Press is an imprint of Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2008 Copyright r 2008 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84855-124-4 ISSN: 0163-2396 (Series)

Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Lonnie Athens

Department of Criminal Justice, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA

Rebecca Savage Bilbro

Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Marshall B. Clinard

Department of Sociology – Emeritus, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, WI, USA

David D. Franks

Sociology Program, L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

Colleen R. Hall-Patton

Department of Sociology, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Antony Puddephatt

Department of Sociology, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ont., Canada

Natalia Ruiz Junco

Department of Sociology, American University, Washington, DC, USA

Grant W. Shoffstall

Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

M. Spohn

Liberal Studies, University College, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

Christopher Darius Stonebanks

Department of Education, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Que., Canada vii

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Giuseppe Toscano

Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Norbert Wiley

Department of Sociology – Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

THE INAUGURATION OF THE ‘‘BLUE-RIBBON PAPERS’’ SERIES Lonnie Athens In this issue of Studies in Symbolic Interaction, I am pleased to announce the publication of the ﬁrst set of papers in our newly created ‘‘blue-ribbon paper’’ series. The series is dedicated to publishing cutting-edge papers done from a broadly deﬁned interactionist’s perspective. We particularly want to publish the works of new and seasoned scholars that display not only a creative, but also a humanistic bent. We want our series to provide scholars who think ‘‘outside the box’’ about the human condition with a chance to ‘‘push the envelope’’ in their special areas of expertise and interest without fear of having their work rejected for being too avante grade. Thus, our main objective is to help beginning and veteran interactionists whose work ‘‘breaks the mold’’ carve out or expand their niche in the research literature. In the immortal words of Robert Park, the journalist turned sociologist and early interactionist, we want to help scholars who fall into this category ﬁnd their ‘‘spot in the sun.’’ In addition to creativity, priority will be given to papers presented at sessions organized by interactionism section of interactional Association of Qualitative Inquiry at its annual meetings. Prospective authors should note whether their papers were presented at one of these sessions. Of course, the highest priority will be placed on publishing well-crafted papers in which the authors address well-deﬁned problems that are properly situated in the literature, draw conclusions that go beyond what was already stated in the body of the paper, and write in the ﬁrst person where needed and always in

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 3–6 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31001-1

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the active voice and with simple and direct prose and minimal sociological jargon. In my opinion, the initial set of six papers to be published in this series all meet the publication criteria just described. In our ﬁrst essay, ‘‘A Pragmatic Theory of the Self,’’ Norbert Wiley, a veteran scholar and world authority on the development of American sociological theory, outlines the essential, generic features of the self that he distilled from his study of the philosophical thought of the early American pragmatists – John Dewey, William James, George H. Mead, and Charles Peirce. I think that Wiley’s brilliant essay, in which he expands on his remarks delivered during his distinguished lecture at the Couch-Stone Symposium in 2007, will become required reading for anyone interested in the self. In our second essay, ‘‘George Herbert Mead’s Social Theory of Scientiﬁc Growth,’’ Antony Puddephatt, a rising star in the sociology of science, explicates clearly Mead’s rather opaque account of scientiﬁc advancement. By juxtaposing Mead’s account of scientiﬁc growth against those of his main rivals’ explanations, Puddephatt not only pinpoints the unique aspects of Mead’s explanation, but also its relative strength and weaknesses. In my opinion, Puddephatt gives the most lucid statement and comprehensive evaluation of Mead’s explanation of the growth of scientiﬁc knowledge in the entire body of Mead scholarship. Anyone who claims or wants to be an expert in Mead’s philosophy or sociology of science needs to give Puddephatt’s essay careful study. David Franks, a seasoned scholar, is the author of our third essay, ‘‘The Controversy of Mind over Matter: Mead’s Solution and Application from Neuroscience.’’ Franks provides an eye-opening discussion of how Mead viewed the relationship of the human brain to the mind. Of course, the standard line on Mead’s position on this problem is that he viewed the brain as necessary, but, by itself, insufﬁcient for our development of the mind. Instead, he contended that for humans to develop a mind they must not only have a normal functioning brain, but also acquire competence in the use of signiﬁcant symbols from their interaction with other human beings. Franks goes beyond these commonplace observations about how Mead views the relation of the mind to the brain. He reviews a body of neuroscience research with which few sociologists are familiar that shows that a brain is not only insufﬁcient for the development of a mind, but, that once developed, the mind can literally rewire the neural circuits in the brain. The implications of these ﬁndings for Mead’s conception of the mind’s relation to the brain are immense. If the mind and brain exist in a reciprocal relationship to one another, then his notion of the mind takes on even much

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more importance than ever previously believed. We all owe a great debt to David Franks for bringing these potentially revolutionary ﬁndings from neuroscience to our attention. Natalia Ruiz-Junco, a young and up and coming expert in sociological theory, is the author of our fourth blue-ribbon essay, ‘‘The Passages of Theory: A Critical Analysis of the Ortega-Mead Connection.’’ Although comparing Mead’s ideas against those of other thinkers now is nothing new, Ruiz-Junco’s comparison far outshines most of those done earlier. Among the many reasons for this is her decision to compare Mead’s to the ideas of Ortega, a Spanish philosopher. Ortega represents an ideal choice for this comparison not only because few American sociologists are familiar with his ideas, but also because he apparently examined many of the same or very similar problems as Mead examined in his work. A second reason that RuizJunco’s comparison outshines most past ones is that she very clearly articulates their respective positions on the same or similar problems despite their writing in different languages and using of divergent terminologies. The ﬁnal and most important reason that her comparison stands out from most earlier ones is that Ortega’s and Mead’s positions are so starkly different from one another on the issues examined that you ﬁnd yourself forced to choose between their respective ideas. I know that reading her essay not only strengthens further my reservations about Mead’s failure to pay greater attention to the operation of unconscious factors in human group life, but also his main contention that human society operates on the basis of his principle of ‘‘sociality.’’ Although Ruiz-Junco’s comparison demonstrates ultimately that most of Mead’s ideas are superior to those of Ortega, at least as far as the common problems that they examined are concerned, she also makes it clear that some of Mead’s ideas, which many present-day interactionists’ view as beyond criticism, are, in fact, in desperate need of revision. In our ﬁfth blue-ribbon essay, ‘‘Considering Violentization on the Societal Scale,’’ Megan Spohn, a new and savvy scholar, evaluates the possible value of violentization theory for understanding problems of intercommunal conﬂict now dealt with in the ﬁeld of international relations. In the process, she not only succinctly summarizes the theory and carefully examines the methodology used in its construction, but also weighs very thoughtfully the positive and negative reactions of others to the theory. The end result of this arduous effort on her part is the most exhaustive and enlightening discussion of this theory in the literature. As the author of violentization theory, I know that I gained some important new insights into my explanation of violence from reading her ﬁery essay. Paradoxically, Spohn’s training in the ﬁeld of international relations worked to her advantage

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rather than disadvantage. Coming from a discipline other than criminology, she had no prior allegiance to any criminological school of thought. Displaying a rare appreciation for and understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, she had no preinstilled preference for one over the other. Thus, she was in a perfect position to provide an evaluation of the theory that was relatively free of bias, especially by present-day academic standards. I have saved for last, the essay which for me, at least, was the most fun to read. In ‘‘How I Became a Criminologist,’’ Marshall B. Clinard, one of the world’s most renown criminologists, explains how he got into the criminology racket. According to him, two factors most inﬂuenced his decision to become a criminologists. One of these factors was simply historical circumstances. Because Clinard came of age during the Great Depression, he wanted to do something that he felt would help improve society. The second factor that inﬂuenced his career choice was being labeled, according to him, somewhat prematurely, as a ‘‘criminologists’’ while working on his master’s degree in sociology at Stanford University. As a great fan of the ‘‘Chicago School,’’ my favorite part of Clinard’s life story was when he later enrolled in the department of sociology at the University of Chicago to do his doctoral work under the direction of Edwin Sutherland, who was at that time the Dean of American criminology. While a doctoral student at Chicago, Clinard became well acquainted with most of the department’s faculty members, who in addition to Sutherland, included Herbert Blumer, Ernest W. Burgess, Louis Wirth, Evert Hughes, Ellsworth Faris, and William F. Ogburn. Clinard’s off-hand observations about some of these faculty give a nice glimpse of the atmosphere that prevailed in Chicago’s department of sociology during the twilight of its glory years. I can also say that his life story closely mirrors the ﬁgure that he cut as a professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin at Madison while I was a graduate student there. In conclusion, the creation of a new article series, such as this one, requires the efforts of more than one person. I thank Norman K. Denzin, the founding editor of Studies in Symbolic Interaction, which has been published for over 30 years under his sole direction, for his help and encouragement in this endeavor. As far as I know, no one has done more than him over their careers to develop and maintain outlets for the publication of interactionist’s work. For this, we are all indebted to him. Last, I express my appreciation for James Salvo, our managing editor, for helping me learn the ropes in my new job as Chief Deputy Editor of the journal.

THE 2007 COUCH-STONE DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: THE PRAGMATISTS’ THEORY OF THE SELF$ Norbert Wiley ABSTRACT This will be an attempt to construct a pragmatist theory of the self, drawing on the four major classical pragmatists. From John Dewey, I will take the self as actor or agent; from George Herbert Mead the social self; from Charles Sanders Peirce the semiotic or signiﬁcative self; and from William James the emotion of self feeling. The four ﬁt together reasonably well, and the result is a highly egalitarian, democratic and humanistic idea of what it means to be a human being.

INTRODUCTION In this paper, I will review the pragmatists’ theory of the self. My review will be limited to four major pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce, $

This paper represents an expanded version of the distinguished lecture that I delivered at the Couch-Stone Symposium held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign on May 5, 2007.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 7–29 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31002-3

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William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Although other pragmatist thinkers could have also been included, I prefer here to concentrate my attention on these four major ﬁgures. Despite the general lack of work on this topic, some important analyses that touch on it can be found in the writings of Hoopes (1989), Eugene Halton (Rochberg-Halton, 1986), Colapietro (1989, 1999), Rosenthal (1986), Joas (1993), Perinbanayagam (2000), and Archer (2003) among others. It needs to be made clear at the very outset that the pragmatists did not create fully developed theories of the self. Instead, they worked with rough-cut approximations, which were often lying in their writings as bits and pieces. Many of Peirce’s best ideas on this topic are in his unpublished notes (Colapietro, 1989). Mead’s materials are largely student notes from his unpublished lectures. Dewey, who wrote a great deal, wrote little on the express topic of the self, although his paper on the reﬂex arc was quite important (Dewey, 1896). James, despite his systematic and lengthy chapter on the self (James, 1890, pp. 291–401) left us with a distinctly ‘‘divided’’ self, in both the theoretical and moral senses (Gale, 1999). Nevertheless, I will select ideas from each one of these pragmatists and try to ﬁt them together as best as I can. From Dewey I will take the self as actor or agent, from Mead the social self, from Peirce the semiotic or signiﬁcative self, and from James the emotion of self-feeling. I will proceed by going from Dewey to Mead to Peirce to James, adding concepts as I go along. This is not a chronological order but one that was chosen for the presentation of ideas. There should be an increasing cognitive momentum as the portrait gets ﬁlled in. After going through the four pragmatists, I will list the overall characteristics of the theory. And then I will have a concluding section. All together, my paper will have six sections: Part 1 on Dewey, Part 2 on Mead, Part 3 on Peirce, Part 4 on James, Part 5 on Properties of the Overall Theory, and Part 6 on the Conclusion. Finally, a disclaimer needs to be inserted here. The way that I constructed a general pragmatic theory of the self is deﬁnitely not the only way that this could have been done. On the contrary, there are probably over a dozen different ways that this synthesis could have been performed. Thus, I am aware that other scholars familiar with these same ﬁgures’ work could have well emphasized different ideas and organized them much differently than I did in performing this task.

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JOHN DEWEY Dewey was distinct from the other pragmatists in having a populist, common man style, emphasizing ordinary life, practicality, everyday problems, common sense, and the improvement of life for the average person. He was suspicious of theory and analysis, preferring practice and synthesis. In relation to the self, Dewey emphasized the process of solving problems. This means the aspect of the self that he paid most attention to was practical action or agency. All the pragmatists emphasized practice, and the term ‘‘pragmatism’’ tips the discourse in that direction. So it makes sense to use Dewey’s agency as the overall framework for the theory of self. Dewey’s idea of agency, however, also had room for pure cognitions or theory, for he recognized that thought could sometimes be relatively distant from goal seeking or practice, even though he himself was disinclined from this type of thinking. Within the overall agentic loop there could be one or more purely cognitive subloops. Still he saw agency as the overall framework within which all thought, no matter how abstract, operated. For Dewey, action or agency has two stages: rehearsal and enactment. He distinguished them as follows: ‘‘An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, it’s consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not ﬁnal or fatal. It is retrievable.’’ (Dewey, 1930, p. 190). This distinction again opens up the agentic process to a number of early, preparatory stages. People have been known to think for indeﬁnite periods of time before engaging in such actions as getting married or divorced, picking or changing an occupation, going into or out of psychotherapy, actually writing their Ph.D. dissertation, killing themselves, curing themselves, etc. In rehearsal then we are deﬁning and modeling the act, not executing it. And we are also trying out the choice to see how it feels. As Dewey says, rehearsing is less committing than action itself, for you can back out of it. You are not morally and legally attached as you are to overt action. In contrast, action is unchangeable. Once we do it, not in our minds but in the external world, it is there forever. Dewey was especially insightful in examining the ﬁrst or rehearsal stage. This was a kind of mental experiment where we could try out, imaginatively, the various options and see which one seemed to work best. As he put it, ‘‘Deliberation is an experiment in ﬁnding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon. But the trial is in imagination, not in overt fact’’ (Dewey, 1930, p. 190).

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A good example of Dewey’s distinction between rehearsal and execution can be seen in the boyhood of Herbert Peirce, the younger brother of Charles Sanders Peirce. Charles tells of the incident as follows: I well remember when I was a boy, and my brother Herbert, now our minister at Christiania, was scarce more than a child, one day, as the whole family were at table, some spirit from a ‘‘blazer’’ or ‘‘chaﬁng-dish’’ dropped on the muslin dress of one of the ladies (i.e. their mother) and was kindled; and how instantaneously he jumped up, and did the right thing, and how skillfully each motion was adapted to the purpose. I asked him afterward about it; and he told me that since Mrs. Longfellow’s death, it was that he had often run over in imagination all the details of what ought to be done in such an emergency. It was a striking example of a real habit produced by exercises in the imagination. (1934, pp. 487, note #1 and 538, note #1)

Fannie Longfellow had died in a dress ﬁre in 1861, when Herbert Peirce was about twelve. Fannie was pouring candle wax to seal an envelope, and her gauze dress caught on ﬁre. When she screamed her husband, napping in the next room, immediately got up, grabbed a rug, and began to put out the ﬁre. But the rug was too small, and in her panic, Fannie pulled away and ran across the room. Then, after losing precious seconds, she ran back to her husband and he extinguished the ﬁre. But by then Fannie’s body had been blackened and she lived only a few more hours (Wagenknecht, 1956, p. 242; McFarland, 2004, pp. 243–244). This story was repeated throughout Cambridge, and, I think we can assume, everyone was concerned with having the right size rug at hand. Herbert, who evidently never wrote about his action, must have been mentally practicing how to seize the right rug, encircle some woman’s enﬂamed body, and put out the ﬁre. Of course young boys are always engaging in self-heroic fantasies, but in this case the fantasy came true. It also gives a crisp and dramatic example of Dewey’s distinction between deliberation and execution. This deliberation process is also, in large part, a matter of inner speech or internal conversation. All of the pragmatists recognized this process at the core of the self (Wiley, 2006b). Thought and planning are central to this activity. And it seems as though freedom of choice itself, to the extent that we have it, is also partly a matter of inner speech. We ﬁrst exercise choice in inner speech – we say to ourselves that we are going to do it. But only later do we externalize it in action, and at that we sometimes back out. Making a prechoice in our inner speech is, in a way, a stage between deliberation and overt action. Another one of Dewey’s major concepts was habit. In his revised version of Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey, 1930, p. viii), Dewey explained that between the 1922 and 1930 versions of the book the discipline of psychology

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had changed from an emphasis on instincts, which were thought to be biologically innate forces that determined people’s personalities, to habit, which was a largely symbolic concept. For Dewey habit was the unit of culture. Peirce and Mead also used the term habit, and for them it was a semiotic response that was repeated and patterned. For Peirce the meaning of a sign was the habit it produces. James used the term both for a physical response and a signiﬁcative one. So, all four of the pragmatists used this term in approximately the same way. And for each it was associated with the emergent (i.e. nonbiological), self, and with the system of culture. Dewey used habit in multiple, highly nuanced ways, and it is his tool for exploring the complexities of the self. Dewey was always both personally and intellectually close to Mead. In 1931, after Mead’s death, he said he had great respect for and agreed with Mead’s theory of the self (Dewey, 1933). This was quite an admission, since Mead’s self theory was extremely complex and pretty much his own invention. Dewey’s use of habit showed his closeness to Mead’s signiﬁcant symbol. We can assume then that if Dewey were to ﬂesh out his agentic scheme he would ﬁll it largely with Mead’s ideas. When I turn to Mead now to present his own ideas, it should be understood that I am talking about Dewey as well.

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD According to Mead, the key feature of the self is in its being an object to itself (Mead, 1934, p. 136, 1964, p. 243). The self is a recursive or looping entity, which turns back on itself. This is what allows it to be aware of itself. The relation of self to itself which is self awareness entails a sort of split in the self between a reﬂecting and a reﬂected aspect. For Mead the reﬂecting aspect is the ‘‘I’’ and the reﬂected upon aspect is the ‘‘me.’’ What I have just described is ordinary or ﬁrst-order reﬂexivity. But sometimes the self jumps to a higher level and reﬂects on its entirety, i.e. on both the I and the me. In this case it is aware of itself, not in a partial manner, such as a thermostat or other feedback device. These self-regulating machines have two parts, the part being reﬂected upon and the part doing the reﬂecting. And the latter part can never reﬂect on itself. This makes mechanical reﬂexivity only partial. In contrast the self can reﬂect on the totality of itself. This is because the reﬂecting device is, so to speak, another self; one that is meta to the one being reﬂected upon. In this case the self

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does not really split into two parts like the self-regulating machines. It doubles up into a ﬁrst order and a second order or meta self. Thus the entire self is in the ‘‘reﬂected upon’’ position, and another version of the entire self is in the ‘‘reﬂecting’’ position. Sometimes people say that mechanical reﬂexivity devices are ‘‘selves,’’ because they share the property of reﬂexivity with selves. Machines can be engineered to do this. But they are reﬂexive in a more limited sense than selves, and the attribution of selfhood to these devices is fallacious. Mead also argues that this reﬂexivity is a transformation of the infant’s ﬁrst social relationship, the one formed between the baby and its caretaker. This is a complex but breathtaking insight and it will take several pages to explain it. The reﬂected, as opposed to the reﬂecting, self is a generalized form of the caretaker, now incorporated into the self as an internalized other. Mead sometimes refers to the me as a ‘‘generalized other’’ (Mead, 1964, p. 246). In other words the self, being an internalized and condensed social relation, is modeled after an interpersonal relation. And this relation is usually that of infant and mother. In what appears to be a small minority of cases, the close caretaker is a male, normally the father. And sometimes there is more than one close caretaker. But the most common case is one in which the close caretaker is the biological mother. Baby begins with a strong identiﬁcation with the mother, but gradually separates into a semi- and then more or less completely autonomous self. Just how close the original identiﬁcation is, how long the separation process takes, what stages it goes through, and so on, are matters of discussion in the child development literature. The relation between child and caretaker becomes internalized so that it exists inside of the infant, even in the absence of the mother. The internalized mother, then, gradually becomes more plasticized and generalized so that anyone can occupy the space that was initially occupied by the mother or close caretaker. Finally the internal dyad, though based on the child–mother bond, is transformed into two aspects of the baby’s self. This is what Mead referred to as the dialogical self and what he called the ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘me.’’ The internal society, baby, and caretaker, becomes the form of the self. The self is a two-sided relationship which can house, not only the caretaker, but also anyone else. Baby’s ﬁrst relationship to the caretaker becomes the template for relationships with other people. First these others are family members and close intimates. But gradually this dyadic form can accommodate anyone else as the partner to the infant. This partner or other gradually becomes an aspect of the self. For Mead the self–caretaker

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relationship broadens into a self–other relationship and this becomes a self– self or ‘‘I–me’’ relationship. So as the relationship internalizes it passes from I–mother to I–other to I–me. Mead’s self is the internalization of the social relationship. The pragmatist version of the self then, including both male and female selves, is usually modeled after the mother. In other words even though the self has sometimes been given what could be interpreted as a highly separated, masculine tilt, e.g. by Descartes; for the pragmatists it is usually the product of a mother’s love and therefore might be said to have a feminine ontogeny or tilt. This bit of pragmatist child development theory ﬁts the psychoanalytic view of Nancy Chodorow, although it concerns an earlier stage in the infant’s life (Chodorow, 1978). She compared the outcomes of the oedipal and electra complexes as they occur in females and males. She concluded that in the female case the child remains somewhat under-separated from the mother. This explained, according to Chodorow, why women are usually more skilled with emotions than men and also why they tend to be better ‘‘motherers,’’ i.e. close caretakers. Men, she concluded, experience the opposite effect of being overseparated from their mothers and thereby from all women. This makes them usually less skilled with emotions and child-rearing. From a pragmatist point of view, the reason why women tend to be under-separated and men over-separated from their mothers is because both genders are outgrowths of their mothers in the ﬁrst place. Women’s electra complexes are continuous with this feminine origin, and it is understandable that women would remain close to (or ‘‘under-separated’’ from) their mothers. In contrast men, who are told to identify with a gender other than that of their mother, would initially have the same tendency as women, i.e. to stay close to their mother. But since males are not allowed to indulge this natural tendency they have to try extra hard to ﬁnd their gender. In fact they have to be over-separated, not only from their mothers, but from their selves. The solution to this problem would seem to be to allow men to be less ‘‘masculine’’ and more like women. This may in fact have been the case before male work became separated from the farm and home with the industrial revolution (Laqueur, 1990, pp. 149–192). The Meadean theory of the self, then, explains the fundamental similarity between men and women and the reason why men in industrial society are often uncomfortable in their gender. The reﬂexivity of the self, which is the key to thought and language for Mead, is a product of the internalized social relation. The condensed

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relation to the mother permits the self to relate to itself, which is what is meant by reﬂexivity. This reﬂexivity permits the self to role-take, which is Mead’s term for being able to understand and communicate with another. The major functions of the self are closely interconnected for Mead. The social origins of the self, in the condensed relation to the caretaker, lead to the thinking, linguistic, communicative self. These capacities in turn lead back to the mother. There is a loop in the infant then, from mother-ascaretaker to the internalized social relation to the linguistic-communicative capacity and then back to mother (and anyone else) as an autonomous, thinking and talking human being. One can understand why Dewey was impressed by Mead’s theory of self, for it is both original and ingenious. I have the impression that, given Mead’s loss of early religious faith, he decided, rather obsessively, to replace religion with reason. In particular he wanted to explain everything traditionally attributed to the soul in naturalistic terms. He wanted to explain all the mysteries with a purely secular theory of the self. I do not think he completely succeeded, for he never could explain the phylogenetic origins of the self in the primates, which in religious terms would be the creation of the soul. But he may have come closer than anyone else. In any case he has the most developed theory of the self of all the pragmatists. Mead’s reﬂexivity has another quality that should be mentioned. The nature of a reﬂexive relation will depend on which aspect of the self is being known and looped through. Mead’s reﬂexivity is between the I, the subject and center of the self so to speak, and the me, which is an object and is in the past. Peirce’s (5.421) notion of reﬂexivity, to anticipate this point, was between the self and the ‘‘you,’’ which Peirce deﬁned as ‘‘that other self that is just coming into life in the ﬂow of time.’’1 Peirce’s you is the self of the immediate future. The temporal passage of the self is from you to I to me, or in other words from future to present to past. These temporal positions can be thought of and experienced as either physical or psychological i.e. as knife-edge or ‘‘felt.’’ It also seems that we experience these positions in both respects at the same time, and the combination of the two modes of experiencing the ﬂow of time can be quite complex. Given these two modes of reﬂexivity, Mead’s reﬂexivity is a looping between subject and object or present and past. In contrast Peirce’s reﬂexivity is a looping between two subjects, that of the present and that of the immediately incoming future. If we accept both Mead and Peirce, it seems that the self has (at least) two modes of reﬂexivity, Mead’s to a pastobject and Peirce’s to a future-subject. Another way of saying this is that inner speech has two major voices – to the past and to the future. These two

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voices have different moral qualities. As Dewey said ‘‘authorship and liability look in two different ways, one to the past, and the other to the future’’ (Dewey, 1958, p. 233). In other words the past is, to a great extent, morally settled; the future is morally open. The two voices also have different communicative and signifying qualities. The voice to the past deals in rather stable states and certainties. The voice to the future deals in unstable conﬁgurations and uncertainties.2 These two reﬂexivities seem to be able to talk to each other and they constitute a distinct layer of the dialogical self. In addition these two help explain how complex the life of imagination is. There can be many voices and they might well be sometimes speaking in harsh dissonance. The distinction between Mead’s me and Peirce’s you also suggests a way that pragmatism can explain self-deceit or what Sartre called bad faith (Sartre, 1957b, pp. 47–70). Your past is more or less settled and done with, allowing that it is always subject to reinterpretation. The future is open and indeterminate. Your choices are primarily for the future, not the past. But people sometimes falter when they face a tough decision, pretending that one particular option, usually the safer one, is the only one they have. For example, you keep quiet when an evil act is being committed, afraid to take the risk of speaking out. You could have tried to stop the evil, but you pretended that there was no avenue but to close your eyes. You kidded yourself to avoid the pain of facing your cowardice. When you do this you are pretending that the open future is like the ﬁxed past, determined and closed. You are facing your you, which is the self that is soon to come to be, and you are seeing it as a me, the self that has already been and is sedimentated into your past. Sartre referred to this as taking being for itself as being in itself, i.e. taking the conscious and free to be without consciousness and inert. But I think the pragmatist formulation of mistaking the you for the me is a simpler and more compelling explanation. At this point I must make a short digression. I am aware that when using the terms ‘‘me,’’ ‘‘I,’’ and ‘‘you,’’ it may sound like I think there are little people or humunculi inside people’s heads. I may seem to be hypostasizing or reifying these ideas. But this usage is merely a literary device for facilitating communication. It must be decoded. These phases of the self, the you, I, and me, are actually part of a rolling process. Our personal time is breezing along inside of James’s stream of consciousness. It is continuous and ﬂuid. It does not have stops, let along little islands that have names. But we can still distinguish the future from the past. And we can identify the present, both the theoretical or knife-edge present and the felt or

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saddle block present. This latter point in time can be referred to as I or even as ‘‘the’’ I. The future can be called you and the past can be called me. These words are a convenience for conveying a particular idea about the ﬂow of time. And they are also built into ordinary language. Time itself actually ﬂows continuously, but we can divide it, analytically into past, present, and future (or the self-in-time as me, I, and you). So when I refer what may sound like little people inside our heads, I am actually talking about the process of temporal passage and how we, somewhat artiﬁcially, slice it up. It is also important to remember that these self pronouns have reﬂexive meanings. ‘‘I’’ does not refer to some ﬁxed person. It refers to whomever is saying ‘‘I.’’ The same is true of you and me. And ‘‘you’’ has the additional ambiguity of referring, a la Peirce, either to the future of whichever ‘‘I’’ is at center stage or to whomever we might be talking to. It can be the other me, approaching the present from the future, or it can be our interpersonal or conversational partner. Beyond this, these three pronouns, at least as I am using them, are relative to the ﬂow of time. ‘‘I’’ refers to time at the precise moment when we utter the word, I. You and me are also relative to the temporal ﬂow. So the pronouns are twice relative: to the person doing the talking and to the stream of time. I am using the terms I, me, and you quite casually, for analysis calls for this usage. But when we unfold these terms and apprehend their precise meanings, we ﬁnd the complex pair of relativities I just described. Nevertheless, if we spoke with all the precision and nuance that these ideas carry, the discourse would be opaque with congestion. Therefore I say ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘you,’’ and ‘‘me’’ with the understanding that I am referring, for ease of utterance, to something far more wordy and conceptually complicated. Now that I have concluded my digression, let me return to two earlier points. Bad faith or self-deceit in pragmatist terms, to conclude my original comment, is the mistaking of the future for the past, the you for the me, or freedom for determinism. It is a particular form of sin or moral ﬂaw, namely the violation of our best possibilities or dignity. And returning to my larger point, both Mead’s and Peirce’s reﬂexivity ﬁt into Dewey’s agentic self. In the kind of action that the agentic self is engaging in we are facing the future and dialoging it to ﬁnd the right path to take. And we are also dialoging the past to ﬁnd out which actions have proved to be unsuitable. When Herbert Peirce was thinking about Fannie Longfellow’s death he was dialoging the past. When he was thinking about how he would act if he were ever faced with such a challenge, he was dialoging the future.

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CHARLES PEIRCE Turning to Peirce, his deﬁnition of the self was in terms of meaning or signiﬁcance. As he said, humans are ‘‘signs’’ (Pierce, 1934; 5.314). And, as such, they are composed of iconic, indexical and symbolic signs, i.e. the whole range of signs (Perinbanayagam, 1991, p. 11). Peirce’s theory of signs was derived from his argument against Descartes and intuition. An intuition, in the specialized sense in which Peirce used the term, was an idea or proposition that is self-validating. It needs no previous propositions from which it is derived. And it needs no future evidence or experimentation. It is clearly true as it stands. Peirce’s position was that there were no intuitions. Ideas, he held, were signs, and as such they had to be interpreted. They were never clear and distinct in themselves. They had to unfold gradually, and they had to do so by way of an interpretive process engaged in by individuals and communities. Peirce’s favorite example of an invalid intuition was Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. Descartes thought this statement was self-evident, that to think this proposition was to be convinced of it. But Peirce argued that there is no direct cogito. We encounter the self indirectly and never intuitively. Peirce’s notion of the nature of the self has important consequences. Since human cultures as well as selves are based on signs and symbols, these cultures reﬂect the features of signs. In particular, cultures are highly variable. They differ a great deal across time and space. Cultures reﬂect the plasticity of signs, and these signs in turn reﬂect the plasticity of human selves. This leads to the idea that all selves, being plastic and of indeﬁnite possibilities, are therefore fundamentally the same. Peirce’s self seems to be an empty template for a sign, i.e. for any sign and for any number of signs. All empty templates are alike. Peirce’s self-sign resembles Locke’s ‘‘tabula rasa,’’ in being undetermined and open to any meaning. But Locke’s mind has a tabular rasa whereas Peirce’s self is a tabula rasa (or generic sign). Peirce’s semiotic self also resembles Sartre’s idea that the self is, in some respects, a ‘‘nothingness,’’ remembering that Sartre’s nothingness has the technical meaning of an absence or privation (Sartre, 1957a). Accordingly Sartre’s nothingness, like Peirce’s semiotic self, can become an indeﬁnite variety of ‘‘somethingnesses.’’ In other words Peirce’s self has unlimited potential; as a sign it can become a sign of anything. Peirce formed this notion of the self for logical reasons. His denial of intuitions led him, via the notion of semiotic, to an indeﬁnitely variable self. Peirce was not thinking of the political implications of this self, and his own political views seem to have been quite conservative, for the most part. His private, nonphilosopher

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self was probably quite racist, patriarchical etc., making him a man of his times. But sometimes ideas have ‘‘their own ideas,’’ i.e. they have implications that were unforeseen by their originators. This is a property that Robert Merton called ‘‘unanticipated consequences’’ and Max Weber called ‘‘elective afﬁnity.’’ In this case the ontological or structural similarities of all semiotic selves strongly suggests that biologically determinist and racist theories of the self are erroneous and that selves are formed by purely symbolic processes. When Peirce was writing, in the late l800s and early l900s, the most widespread view of the self was that it was largely determined by instincts and genes. This belief was not only held concerning people of color, such as Asians and blacks, but of all the other ethnic groups as well. In particular Central and Eastern Europeans were thought to be psychologically and morally inferior to Western Europeans and their psychological and moral inferiority was seen as physiologically determined. The Peircean idea of the self always had the potential of suggesting that all selves were the same, i.e. that they were all psychologically and morally similar kinds of entities. In other words, the Peircean self could easily transform into the egalitarian self of the American Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg address. The early Twentieth century introduced a controversy between the racist ‘‘Americanization’’ movement and the more liberal ideas of the pragmatists, the social sciences. and in particular anthropology and sociology (Higham, 1988). This controversy extended over several years, and in the process the egalitarian theory of the self was gradually worked out and honed. In other words, the biologism and racism of the Americanization movement pushed pragmatism’s theory of the self even more in the opposite, i.e. the cultural, direction. All four of the major pragmatists as well as the many secondary pragmatists contributed to this controversy. Dewey (1929, p. viii) describes, in restrained language, the victory of the liberal side, as follows: When this volume was ﬁrst produced, there was a tendency, especially among psychologists, to insist upon native human nature untouched by social inﬂuences and to explain social phenomena by reference to traits of original nature called ‘‘instincts.’’ Since that date (1922), the pendulum has undoubtedly swung in the opposite direction. The importance of culture as a formative medium is more generally recognized.

The moral and legal equality of all humans was slowly recognized, if not always acted upon, in the 1920s and later. In practice this idea implied the equality of all subcultural groups, including race, gender, age, ethnicity,

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sexual orientation, and so on, although it took decades for these democratic implications to work themselves out. Another way of seeing the egalitarianism of Peirce’s deﬁnition of humans was in its closeness to the anthropological concept of culture. This concept of culture has been the great equalizer in the social sciences. In particular cultural relativity – the principle that cultures have to be understood in terms that are relative to that culture – suggests that all cultures, subcultures, and individuals are fundamentally equal. And that all individuals therefore have the same rights. The unit of culture is signs and symbols, and Peirce’s notion of signs can, with minor transformation, be translated into the notion of culture (discussed in great detail in Wiley, 2006a). Peirce was also responsible for the revival of the dialogical self, an idea found in Plato and in the Middle Ages but ignored since the time of Descartes (Wiley, 2006a, 2006b). This idea too has egalitarian implications, for if humans are self-steered by a dialogical process, this is clearly a nonbiological, cultural force. Peirce’s notion of the semiotic self and the dialogical process both had radically egalitarian implications, perhaps still to this day in the process of being worked out. Peirce then is a striking example of unintended consequences, for his purely analytical ideas gradually ﬂowed through an interpretive, elective afﬁnity process and became foundational for America political liberalism.

WILLIAM JAMES Like the other pragmatists, James had a reﬂexive view of the self. In fact, drawing on the German idealists, he originated the I–me distinction. As he put it: We may sum up by saying that personality implies the incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective thought and recognized as continuing in time. Hereafter let us use the words ME and I for the empirical person and the judging thought. (James, 1950, p. 371, emphasis added)

So the idea I am attributing to Mead was earlier present in simpler form in James. I do not think James would have disagreed with the way Mead developed his insight into the internal conversation, but James himself did not stay with the I–me distinction and make it more precise.

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James had another deﬁning feature of the self however and this was what he referred to as ‘‘self feeling.’’ Two quotes give an initial idea of what he had in mind. In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and words, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. (James, 1950, p. 291)

And in another place: ‘‘the words me, then, and self, as far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are objective designations, meaning all the things which have the power to produce in the stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort’’ (James, 1950, p. 319). This way of coming at the self is quite different from the I–me distinction, for it is not cognitive but emotional. The I–me approach divides the self into parts that differ in self-communicative function. The self-feeling approach divides the self into parts that differ in how we feel about ourselves. It might have been better if James had stayed with the I–me distinction and simply added the self-feeling perspective, for they are both valid and powerful views of the self and both seem true to experience. But he did not. James begins his analysis of self-feeling with a property metaphor, as though the things to which we give self-feeling or ‘‘ownership’’ become extensions of the self. But self-feeling is somewhat undeﬁned in James and it has perhaps several slightly differing meanings. I would like to take hold of the expression ‘‘excitement of a certain peculiar sort’’ and give this an interpretation. The word ‘‘excitement’’ suggests that James has something extraordinary and unusual in mind. But since James does not give any precise deﬁnition to self-feeling, the concept seems quite open to the reader’s interpretation. Perhaps it is not stretching things too far to suggest that James is here getting at the particular charisma that is characteristic of the human self, particularly in modern times. This seems to be what underlies the excitement of the self. The self is sacred, according to Durkheim, and this mana or sacredness can extend to the things that one loves or is closest too. Mana is contagious; it jumps from person to person and from center to periphery. Durkheim’s sacred is similar to Weber’s charisma, particularly as it is exercised by a charismatic leader. The charismatic person too has a somewhat contagious charisma, as people who are close to the leader feel energized by contact with the charisma.

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In contemporary times the self is the most sacred of entities. For many people and certainly for most legal systems, it is more sacred than a religious entity. The sacred self, then, resembles the charismatic leader in having a glow of value or holiness. James himself did not give much theoretical development to the notion of self-feeling, but I am engaging in what I think is a reasonable interpretation. Cooley also used self-feeling, in a slightly different way than James. He looked at feelings the self has about itself, and he drew the important insight of the ‘‘looking glass self,’’ (Cooley, 1922, pp. 183–184; Scheff, 2005) later richly developed in Erving Goffman’s works. Nevertheless I want to take James’s concept in a different direction than Cooley did. More generally I decided to make this paper tilt in a cognitive, i.e. not an emotional, direction. Let me explain. The pragmatists all had comments on emotions, but putting these comments together and integrating them with the cognitive side is the task for another paper. And it is pretty clear that most emotions will ﬁt into Dewey’s agency scheme largely as sources of energy, pro and con, for action. Also I think the cognitive aspect of the self is what makes humans most obviously distinct from the other animals. Human emotionality is also probably distinct, but the distinctness seems less striking. An additional reason for leaning cognitive is that this issue is what the American ‘‘politics of the self ’’ was fought over. My view is that in the early Twentieth century the United States was drifting in a nondemocratic, authoritarian political direction, the Americanization movement being central to this drift. The inﬂuence of the pragmatists, largely concerning the cognitive and cultural nature of the self, helped swerve this country back toward the democratic center. Another way of saying this is that the pragmatists ﬁnished off the still inconclusive Civil War, at least in its underlying ideological ﬁght. This war was in large part over the morality of slavery. It took a while, but when the pragmatist theory of the self gradually developed its fully egalitarian implications, the United States could ﬁnally see what the ﬁght was about. They could see that it was a violation of human nature to have slaves, and they could also see in what deeper sense African Americans were equal to and the same as all other people. It took a clariﬁed theory of the self to explain this issue. Returning to James’s notion of self-feeling, this idea appears to be ripe for development. One obvious way to do this is to connect it to the sacred self of Durkheim and Weber, as I have hinted. I will not pursue this connection extensively at this time, but it suggests how the value of the self ﬁts into the pragmatists’ theory. I would say then, that although James had a reﬂexivity theory of the self, he also had a quasi-religious one, in which the self is

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permeated with a sacred feeling or emotion. This emotion is similar to Durkheim’s religious awe. This quality of the self was not explicated by Peirce, Dewey, or Mead, but it is compatible with their views of the self. Another quality of James’s self-feeling concept is that it gives a clearer role for the body than is the case with the other pragmatists. In particular Mead and Peirce concentrated on explaining what is unique about humans in the animal kingdom. For Peirce the differentia is the sign and for Mead it is the closely related idea of reﬂexivity (and its product, the signiﬁcant symbol). In other words, both Peirce and Mead deﬁned humans without mentioning their bodies. This is understandable since they are trying to capture the unique quality of humans. Implicitly they are both saying that humans are bodies that have the property of signiﬁcation and symbolism. But this remains implicit and it does give some indetermination to the role or the body in pragmatist self-theory. James does not have this problem. Since he actually deﬁnes the self in terms of self-feeling, the body, which is high on his list of self-feeling items, is central to his characterization of the self. And given that reﬂexivity and self-feeling are quite compatible, the self can be deﬁned as having both reﬂexivity and self-feeling. The body is not only the carrier of the property of reﬂexivity and signiﬁcation, but it also is at the actual center of self-feeling. So James adds a clariﬁcation to the role of the body. I would add that the body seems to have more self-feeling for women than for men – it is closer to the ‘‘self ’’ for women. But I am basing this on ordinary experience and on my conversations with family and friends, not on formal evidence of any kind. The pragmatists also attributed other features to the self, but these four – agency, sociality, symbolicity, and self-feeling – go a long way to constructing a theory of the self. The self has ends and it can exercise meaningful self-awareness in pursuit of these ends. This self-awareness also creates value, for the self evokes an awe and reverence in other people, i.e. in the community. This proﬁle of the self can be seen in the example of Herbert Peirce saving his mother’s life. I have already pointed out how agency, in both its deliberative and active stages, is strikingly visible in this example. Herbert was rehearsing with the signs and symbols of Fannie Longfellow’s death and also of the undetermined person whose life he was preparing to save. His thoughts would also be characterized by Mead’s reﬂexivity and sociality, for this is arguably the nature of all thought. And Herbert’s self-feeling would be intensely engaged as he anticipated the dress ﬁre and the life saving of someone he loved. These concepts work together rather well to describe the actual practices of selves, and it seems clear that they constitute a coherent and powerful theory.

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I am not suggesting here that the pragmatist’s conception of the self is by any means ﬁnished. But no school of philosophers – Greeks, Medievals, British Empiricists, German idealists, contemporary poststructuralists or postmodernists – has a ﬁnished theory of the self. Their theories would probably all have as many weaknesses of the one I am working with. But as Peirce said, the point is for the community of thinkers to keep on thinking. My motive in writing this paper is to induce others to write better ones on the same topic.

THE GENERAL PROPERTIES OF PRAGMATIST’S SELF This theory can also be described in a brief list of its characteristics. Up to now I have been talking about four discrete theorists. Now I am talking about the four of them taken collectively, i.e. as a shared theory. This will be a loose list, and I mean it to be an umbrella over the theory.

Irreducible The self cannot be reduced to some other kind of thing, either upwards or downwards. Upwardly the self could be reduced or dissolved into language or culture, which would render it a form of nothingness. Downwardly the self could be absorbed into physical, chemical, or biological processes, ceasing to be a suprabiological entity and therefore becoming another form of nothingness. But the pragmatist self is a sui generis entity, incapable of reduction in either direction. This irreducibility has implications for the dignity of the self. If there is no self, i.e. if it is subject to reduction, then the whole human drama is a sham. Rights, consciousness, self worth, conscience, and love, to mention some features of the self, would all be a delusion. All the human values, in my opinion, assume an irreducible self, and the pragmatist’s self is of that nature.

Dialogical The core process of the self is dialogical. The self functions by exercising a dialog with itself as well as with others. This is how we think, how we plan, and how we steer ourselves through the world. When people are emotionally

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disturbed inner speech becomes damaged and loses some of its function. Internal dialog is at the core of the healthy self. There are also unconscious processes, both emotional and cognitive, and these are distinct from the conscious dialog. But the conscious process is probably the most important part of the self. And in any case the unconscious processes may themselves be dialogical.

Decentered The self of the pragmatists lacks a strong center, for it is divided into discrete and semiautonomous parts. Mead’s I and me are certainly a decentered self. If you add Peirce’s you there is more decentering. And James’s network of possessions that share in self-feeling also add to the decentering. Descartes ‘‘I’’ was the powerful center of the self. Nothing else in his self had this centrality or rootedness. The ‘‘I’’ of the pragmatists is more like an equal partner with several other important players. This I is a kind of administrative center but not necessarily at the center of meaning or feeling.

Relational If the self is not a Cartesian substance and is not reduced to physicalist or postmodern nothingness, the only serious category left is that of relation. Relations are pairs that are connected in some way. In the case of the self they are pairs connected by reﬂexivity, i.e. by a looping back onto itself. All aspects of the self are aspects of the reﬂexive relation. This relativity is basic to the self ’s decenteredness. It also underlies the internal dialog, for one part of the relation addresses the other part. I see the self as a triad, embracing the I, Mead’s me, and Peirce’s you. This triad is the combination of two relationships: Mead’s I–me and Peirce’s I–you. The self then is composed of many relationships but the basic kind of entity is the relation.

Egalitarian There are several important egalitarian strains within the pragmatist theory of self. Peirce’s self is the most strongly egalitarian of the four. His self-as-asign is a kind of rubber band or silly putty which can be stretched in an

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indeﬁnite number of ways. Equality is rooted in this ﬂexibility. Dewey’s self was a distinctly ordinary man, contradictory to all versions of inequality. Mead’s self is antipatriarchical, initially a female and then branching out into the two genders. His self also has Peirce’s plasticity. And the charisma of James’s self is one of equal and inviolable value. The sacred self, in contemporary times, is the source of Weber’s substantive rationality. This was his category of the good-in-itself. All selves are sacred in the same way, and this make them all of equal value. Voluntarism The pragmatist self is goal seeking and self-determined. The agency framework implies voluntarism, and the term ‘‘pragmatism’’ suggests the self-steering of practice. Similarly inner speech seems to be the place where choices are initially made and tried out. The social institutions in all societies, including the regulatory or legal system and the family, assume that people make choices and are responsible for these choices. It is difﬁcult to see how these institutions would have evolved and remained in place if the actions of human beings were completely determined. Therefore the pragmatist position on self-determination seems to ﬁt the practical realities of life. Cultural Pragmatism’s self is culturally driven, although bodies obviously have a huge inﬂuence on the self. Nevertheless the distinctive features of the self are cultural or symbolic (Wiley, 2007). The particular way culture animates and steers the self explains how human lives develop. Symbols steer them, not genes or other biological traits. Culture is composed of signs and symbols. So semiotics – which is the study of signs – underlies culture. The pragmatists had a semiotic view of the self, meaning the self is primarily composed of signs and symbols. To say that the self is semiotic and to say that it is cultural is to say the same thing. These concepts also lead to the egalitarian self, for all selves are made of the same plastic, highly malleable ‘‘stuff.’’ Social Sciences The pragmatist theory of the self is closely related to the social sciences, especially as they developed in the United States. I have already mentioned

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that the pragmatist notion of the self runs parallel to the anthropological concept of culture. The social sciences have also used some form of Mead’s social self for a long time. In addition the pragmatist theme of the dialogical self has a counterpart in social psychology. And the pragmatist theory of meaning, given a semiotic or cultural interpretation, underlies all of the social sciences.

CONCLUSION My discussion of the pragmatists’ conception of the self has profound implications for several broader issues which I will now brieﬂy touch on.

Form versus Content A formal property of the self can be deﬁned as a feature that is claimed to be part of all selves at all times and places. For example, Peirce’s idea that selves are symbolic, or Mead’s idea that they are reﬂexive (i.e. self-aware). My discussion has been primarily at the formal level. A substantive feature of the self would be a matter of content as opposed to form. A particular identity, for example, or a self-concept of some kind would be at the level of content. The boundary between form and content is not always clear, and sometimes only time can tell which is which. For example, saying the self ‘‘maximizes’’ seems formal, but it may come and go with modern capitalism. Even if traits were around for centuries, such as male hegemony, Christianity or what Weber called modern capitalism, they would still be matters of content – having the quality of (long-term) transiency. Content can come and go, but the formal qualities remain. When Foucault (1973) deﬁned humans in terms of epistemes he was giving them a time bound, content-based deﬁnition. And if an episteme fades over time, one might say, along with Foucault, that man is now erased, eliminated or dead. But the form would persist and simply adopt a new content, becoming in fact the (re)birth of man.

Family Resemblance The unity of the pragmatists seems to be one, not of essence but of a Wittgensteinian family resemblance. Wittgenstein used this term in two

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senses: structural and stylistic (suggested to me by Perinbanayagam, 2006, pp. 63–67). Wittgenstein’s list of family resemblances includes ‘‘build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc.’’ (Wittgenstein, 1958; par 66 and 67). The ﬁrst four items are structural features of the body. But the last one, temperament, is more a matter of emotional style. Certain ways of smiling, laughing, frowning, etc. sometimes run in families. These are the emotional expression or style of the bodily structure. If we follow the now common practice of applying Wittgenstein’s family resemblance analogically to other kinds of groupings, such as clusters of scholars, we might look for the two kinds of similarities: structural and stylistic. Among thinkers, structural similarities would be ideas that they, more or less, hold in common. Similarities of style would seem to be matters of presentation and logic, including informal logic and logic-in-use. The pragmatist theory of the self, for example, entails these structural features: agency, symbolicity, goal directedness, internal plurality, dialogicality, and interpenetration with society. The pragmatists placed different nuances and emphases on these ideas but they had enough in common to say they had a family resemblance in the structural sense. The pragmatists also shared such stylistic features as an emphasis on consequents rather than antecedents, a concern for the tangibility or observability of concepts, a suspicion of dualisms, an acceptance of the ﬁrst person perspective, and a relational view of the self. The unity, then, of the pragmatist theory of the self is not one of uniformity or essence but one of family resemblance, in both the structural and stylistic senses of the word.

Humanism What I have said so far implies a distinct humanism for this philosophy, but this point needs to be made more explicit. At the risk of stating the obvious I would like to make it explicit. Pragmatism is one of the few remaining humanist philosophies. This philosophy insists that humans actually exist and that their existence cannot be explained away by dissolving them into some other reality, such as language or computers. The pragmatist position is that humans are pretty much as we experience them. We think we see and hear, and we actually do see and hear. We seem to choose, and we do choose. We seem to have some kind of agency or center of action, and we do have this center. We seem to think our way through life, and we do think our way through life.

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In addition pragmatism sees humans as having intrinsic value and inviolability. We have rights, and these rights come from the nature of our selves, not from governments. And the rights are equal, not only in the United States but throughout the world, at all times and places. Men and women also have the same rights, all racial, ethnic, and subcultural groups have the same rights, and the Declaration of Independence with its radical egalitarianism pretty much describes pragmatism’s ethics. Finally, pragmatism is humanistic in being comfortably suitable for democracy. This philosophy and American democracy have had a back-and-forth, causal dialog for many decades. Democracy, with its system of voting, civil liberties, and equal rights assumes a particular kind of human nature or ‘‘self.’’ And this ‘‘self ’’ seems quite close to the one I have described in this paper.

NOTES 1. In this referencing system the ﬁrst digit refers to the volume of Peirce’s Collected Papers, and the subsequent digits refer to the paragraph. 2. Kierkegaard is often claimed to have said ‘‘we live life forward and understand it backwards.’’ Actually he said, ‘‘It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived – forwards’’ (Kierkegaard, 1971, pt. 5, sct. 4, no. 136). Still, true as this may be, we ‘‘think’’ our way through life both forwards (Peirce) and backwards (Mead). We use the power of inner speech in both directions. In particular we talk our way through actions and into the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author thanks Eric Bredo, Lonnie Athens, Eugene Halton, Gerald Handel, Vincent Colapietro, and Thomas Scheff for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Any mistakes, of course, are all his.

REFERENCES Archer, M. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Colapietro, V. (1989). Peirce’s approach to the self. Albany: Suny Press.

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Colapietro, V. (1999). Subject positions and positional subjectivity: A pragmatic approach. Semiotische Berichte, 1–4, 13–28. Cooley, C. H. (1992(1922c)). Human nature and the social order. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Dewey, J. (1930). Human nature and conduct (Revised ed.). New York: The Modern Library. Dewey, J. (1933). George Herbert Mead as I knew him. In: The later works (Vol. 6, pp. 22–28), 1931–1932. Dewey, J. (1958(c1929)). Experience and nature. New York: Dover Publications Inc. Dewey, J. (1972(c1896)). The research arc concept in psychology. In: John Dewey, the early works, 1882–1898 (pp. 96–109). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Foucault, M. (1973). The order of things. New York: Vintage Books. Gale, R. M. (1999). The divided self of William James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Higham, J. (1988). Strangers in the land: Patterns of American Nativism: 1860–1925 (2nd ed.). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hoopes, J. (1989). Consciousness in New England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. James, W. (1950(c1890)) The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Dover Publications Inc. Joas, H. (1993). Pragmatism and social theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1971(c1960)). The diary of Soren Kierkegaard. New York: Wisdom Library (distributed by Citadel Press). Laqueur, T. (1990). Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McFarland, P. (2004). Hawthorne in Concord. New York: Grove Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1964). In: A. Reck (Ed.), G.H. Mead selected writings. Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press. Peirce, C. S. (1934). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Pragmatism and pragmaticism (Vol. 5). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Perinbanayagam, R. (2000). The presence of self. Lanham: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, Inc. Perinbanayagam, R. (2006). Games and sport in everyday life. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1991). Discursive acts. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Rochberg-Halton, E. (1986). Meaning and modernity: Social theory in the pragmatic attitude. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenthal, S. (1986). Speculative pragmatism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Sartre, J. P. (1957a(c1937)). The transcendence of the ego. New York: The Noonday Press. Sartre, J. P. (1957b). Being and nothingness. London: Methuen & Co Ltd. Scheff, T. (2005). Looking-glass self: Goffman as a symbolic interactionist. Symbolic Interaction, 28, 147–166. Wagenknecht, E. (Ed.) (1956). Mrs. Longfellow. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. Wiley, N. (2006a). Peirce and the founding of American Sociology. Journal of Classical Sociology, 6, 23–50. Wiley, N. (2006b). Pragmatism and the dialogical self. International Journal for Dialogical Science, 1, 5–21. Wiley, N. (2007). Znaniecki’s key insight: The merger of pragmatism and neo-Kantianism. Polish Sociological Review, 2(158), 133–143. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. London: Blackwell.

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD: AN EARLY SOCIOLOGIST OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE Antony Puddephatt ABSTRACT George Herbert Mead is an exemplary ﬁgure in sociology, and is central to sociological conceptions of the self and social action. However, other important aspects of Mead’s thought have been largely neglected, including his remarkably sophisticated and sociological theory of scientiﬁc knowledge. Traditional accounts of the sociology of science identify Thomas Kuhn, and his predecessor, Ludwig Fleck, as pioneers in the social analysis of scientiﬁc knowledge, allowing the modern constructionist school of science studies to emerge. This article challenges this history by showing Mead’s awareness of the sociological aspects of scientiﬁc knowledge in papers that predate both Kuhn and Fleck. Finally, Mead’s position attempts to avoid sociological relativism, and offers instead a pragmatist foundation to approach the study of science.

INTRODUCTION The traditional history of the sociology of scientiﬁc knowledge is presented as a standard account for students, and considers Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 31–60 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31003-5

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The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions as the key philosophical and historical critique of a traditional, cumulative account of the progress of scientiﬁc knowledge. As a result of its popularity, this book is admittedly the single most important work that led the way for social studies of science to emerge (Fuller, 2000). Arguing most stridently against the logical positivists of the Vienna circle such as Ernst Mach and Rudolph Carnap, and then with his contemporary, Karl Popper, Kuhn argued that scientiﬁc inquiry was itself a deeply sociological process. As a result of this, neutral observation is a myth of philosophical textbooks, since what a scientist sees can only make sense in relation to an overarching paradigm that guides inquiry and provides a context to make meaning of what is seen. Unlike Popper’s (1963) assumption that science is in a constant process of scrutinizing assumptions, Kuhn argued that science proceeds forward dogmatically, and that it is this dogmatic feature of science that makes it so productive, and ironically, leads to the most innovations. Scientists engage in ‘‘puzzle-solving’’ exercises in an effort to ﬁt the empirical world into the existing theoretical framework, rather than vice versa. This relentless process eventually leads the paradigm into crisis, as a result of built up contradictions that can no longer be explained adequately by the core theory. At this point, a revolution occurs, where a new paradigm is taken up by a younger group of scientists not yet socialized into the beliefs of the older view. The new paradigm then becomes the new dogma, and new scientiﬁc knowledge is produced at a lightning pace as a result of the convergence around a new set of shared meanings, methods, assumptions, and standards of evidence. Up until Kuhn’s revolutions thesis, the traditional story tells us, there was never room for a social analysis of the content of scientiﬁc knowledge. Classical theorists like Weber, Durkheim, and Marx always considered science, as a result of the rigorous nature of its method, as being relatively free of the social forces they would otherwise consider centrally (Puddephatt & McLaughlin (2006)). Karl Mannheim (1936), often recognized as the founder of the formal sociology of knowledge, also infamously regarded science as an exception to the social and historical character of knowledge. It was Kuhn’s work that inspired sociologists such as Barry Barnes (1977, 1982) and David Bloor (1991) to pioneer social studies of scientiﬁc knowledge itself as a legitimate realm of inquiry, forming an alliance with other prominent sociologists such as Bruno Latour (1987) and Harry Collins (1985). Indeed, Kuhn’s emphasis on the cultural basis of scientiﬁc inquiry, and the problem of incommensurability between opposing scientiﬁc factions provided exactly the ammunition that was necessary for

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thorough analyses of scientiﬁc knowledge, and all the conﬂicts, interests, and cultural factors tied into this. This history became somewhat muddied as people realized that Kuhn (1962) both cited and paid a large intellectual debt to the work of the German microbiologist and philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck (1935), especially his book The Genesis and Development of a Scientiﬁc Fact. Evidence of this is clear as Kuhn himself wrote the foreword to the 1979 publication of the book in English. Fleck worked out his ideas on the social constitution of scientiﬁc knowledge, apparently, 30 years prior, and similarly argued against positivistic accounts of science that would try to reduce all knowledge to evidence and logic alone. He would often complain about the esteem that sociologists would grant scientiﬁc knowledge uncritically, stating ‘‘All these thinkers trained in sociology and classics, however, no matter how productive their ideas, commit a characteristic error. They exhibit an excessive respect, bordering on pious reverence, for scientiﬁc facts’’ (p. 47). For Fleck, facts are not primary starting points on which theories are built, but rather, can only be deﬁned from the standpoint of a particular ‘‘thought style’’ established by a community of acting scientists. No facts are free from the enculturation of beliefs within a particular scientiﬁc community. Focusing primarily on the historical development of syphilis, Fleck showed how early accounts of the disease were connected to astrological beliefs about the stars, and that these early mystical beliefs could be seen in later developments of knowledge and study of the disease. The science of syphilis simply could not be disconnected from the larger cultural context and widespread beliefs from which it emerged. The particular details of Fleck’s (1935) social and historical analysis of the scientiﬁc conception of syphilis are not important, yet the general implications he drew from the case are. Fleck used this case to staunchly argue against the positivist assumption of ‘‘value-neutral’’ facts, and took the place of culture and belief seriously in the genesis of scientiﬁc knowledge of any kind. Further, Fleck drew lines of process between the work of those within the ‘‘esoteric circle’’ of scientiﬁc specialists to the ‘‘exoteric circle’’ of the lay public, arguing that the feedback and accommodation provided between these divergent groups helped generate the broad ‘‘thought style’’ that communities of scientists would inevitably operate within. It is the culture of thought styles that provides the opportunities and constraints within which so-called ‘‘facts’’ would ﬁnd their genesis as cultural constructs. Thus, with the important inclusion of Fleck’s early studies of microbiology, the contemporary historiography has it that the classical

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sociologists had the mistaken impression that scientiﬁc knowledge was an ‘‘exception’’ to all other knowledge claims, and thus did not seek to look at the cultural foundations of its products. Max Weber (2004), like Robert Merton (1973) following him, would consider the occupational and institutional aspects of science as a particular type of vocation. Marx considered the role of science as a servant of industry, such that scientists create knowledge under the direction of bourgeois owners to increase efﬁciency, productivity, and the accumulation of capital (Aronowitz, 1988). Still, unlike religious and political ideology, Marx never placed the products of science under the same scrutiny, and considered the instrument of science as the best way forward in social scientiﬁc research. Durkheim was interested in the social construction of ‘‘primitive’’ categories such as causality and time (see Durkheim, 1915; Durkheim and Mauss, 1963), but considered modern science a higher evolved form of knowledge that could be fully rationalized through its rigorous methodology. Before Ludwik Fleck, or so the story goes, no classical theorists were interested in considering scientiﬁc knowledge itself as a social creation. Science was exempt from the sociology of knowledge, and ideological deconstruction. This article aims to challenge this popular account of the history of the sociology of science, by arguing that George Herbert Mead engaged in an in-depth consideration of the progress and development of scientiﬁc knowledge as a deeply social enterprise. Mead considered the importance of socialization and enculturation of scientists, external beliefs in the construction of theory, the noncumulative evolution of scientiﬁc knowledge through history, and the contingent nature of scientiﬁc practice. It is curious that Mead’s social analysis of scientiﬁc knowledge has been so neglected, since many of his followers in the symbolic interactionist tradition have made important contributions to the sociology of science. Following the conceptual framework laid out by Herbert Blumer (1969) and Anselm Strauss (1993), the interactionists have made useful contributions to the sociology of science, using primarily ethnographic (Miall and Miall, 2002; Clarke and Fujimura, 1992) and historical (Star, 1989) methods to study scientiﬁc knowledge production. All of these approaches pay tribute to, in almost ritualistic fashion, Mead’s (1934) contributions to social psychology, as well as his emergent theory of meaning, yet have had very little to say about Mead’s ideas speciﬁcally as they relate to science. The probable reason for this is that most interactionists, like the rest of the sociological community at large, have generally focused most on Mead’s (1934) Mind, Self and Society, which contains no explication of his thoughts on science. As has been well documented (Cook, 1993; Joas, 1985, 1996), there has been

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a signiﬁcant neglect by sociologists of his other collections of work, such as Philosophy of the Act, Movements of Thought in the 19th Century, and Philosophy of the Present. And, it is primarily in these works, as well as other scattered and unpublished papers, where Mead’s social-pragmatist conception of science is to be found. Mead’s theoretical contributions to science have not been ignored completely. Those who edited various volumes of his collected works in the 1930s discussed Mead’s theories of science in summary fashion, and consider these statements in relation to broader philosophical concerns (see Murphy, 1932; Moore, 1936; Morris, 1938). Others would write secondary analyses of Mead’s philosophy of science (see McKinney, 1955; Morris, 1965), yet these statements were quite short and unsystematic (6–7 pages long), perhaps in part due to the academic standards of journal articles at the time. Also, as a result of their chronology, these scholars were not able to examine Mead’s ideas in light of present-day perspectives. There have been more modern statements about Mead’s conception of science vis-a`-vis contemporary theoretical analyses of his work (e.g., Miller, 1973; Lewis, 1981; Joas, 1985; Goff, 1980; Cook, 1993; Aboulaﬁa, 2001).1 However, these are not systematic treatments, and Mead’s philosophy of science is not adequately assessed in relation to the contemporary ﬁeld. These authors certainly cannot be faulted for this; science is simply not where their theoretical interests lie. As such, discussions of Mead’s theory of science are ﬂeeting, or are addressed only in relation to broader concerns with Mead’s thoughts on pragmatism, ethics, and so on. Still, the work of these scholars has been helpful in considering and trying to formulate Mead’s theory of science in broad terms. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate Mead’s sociological analysis of scientiﬁc knowledge, and show that he had a rich account of the social roots of all scientiﬁc knowledge. For Mead, unlike Mannheim, but like Kuhn and Fleck, natural science was not immune from sociological analysis. As such, Mead strived to understand how the products of scientiﬁc knowledge become formulated in microsituational, historical, and contextual terms. In order to appreciate Mead’s philosophy of science, I draw on his lesser read (Mead, 1932, 1936, 1938) and newly published (Mead, 1999, 2001) collections, as well as much of his scattered and still unpublished work (Mead, 1909, 1917, 1923, 1929, 1930), now available in archival form. This article will present Mead’s sociological theory of scientiﬁc knowledge and growth through the following conceptual sections: (1) Mead’s consideration of the ‘‘scientiﬁc self,’’ and how this challenges positivist/ empiricist versions of scientiﬁc practice; (2) Mead’s ‘‘organic’’ theory of

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scientiﬁc institutions, which demonstrates an externalist vision of scientiﬁc growth; (3) Mead’s historical theory of scientiﬁc progress, and his realization of the relativity of different epochs of scientiﬁc belief; (4) Mead’s pragmatist position on knowledge generally, and his belief in relativity over a full sociological relativist account science; and ﬁnally, (5) a consideration of emergence and innovation in the growth of scientiﬁc knowledge.

THE SCIENTIFIC SELF George Herbert Mead studied at the turn of the 20th Century, and was inﬂuenced by a number of different philosophical currents, including postKantian German Idealism (Cook, 1993; Puddephatt, 2006). Probably through the teachings of Josiah Royce at Harvard, he came to place a major emphasis on the interplay of the community and the individual in the progress and advancement of social life (see Royce, 1920; Mead, 1936). As a result, Mead was similarly inspired by the philosophy of Hegel (Mead, 1936), viewing the self as a developmental, emergent phenomenon that arises from the community. It was this belief in the dialectical relationship of the individual and society as one mutually conditioning process that led him into an extended dialogue and friendship with his contemporary and neoHegelian turned pragmatist John Dewey. Partnering with Dewey, Mead attempted to fuse the insights of German idealism with the materialist emphasis of Darwin and the physiological psychology of Wilhelm Wundt as well as William James, to arrive at a more practical and developmental conception of the individual, in contrast to atomistic conceptions provided in most economic theories and individual-centered philosophies of the time. Following from this larger critique of a static conception of individuals, Mead was highly critical of the naı¨ ve view of the scientiﬁc inquirer given by the positivists and empiricists who dominated the philosophy of science up until that time. For Mead, the scientist was anything but an individual cogito acting alone in an environment of pure or neutral sense perception. Scientists are not wholly autonomous individuals who enter into scientiﬁc observation and experiment as blank slates, building their theories from the passive perception of neutral facts. Scientists, like all individuals, have selves, and selves are fundamentally community products, infused with meanings from the community in ways that affect thought and action at a fundamental level. Mead (1934, pp. 135–138) writes that ‘‘The self is something which has a development; it is not there initially at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activityy The individual

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experiences himselfyfrom the particular standpoint of other individual membersyor from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole.’’ In this way, Mead describes intelligent conduct as an inner conversation involving universal meanings that are derived from the community in the form of language. So-called individual thought at the level of reﬂective awareness is really the psychic playing out of a conversation involving the imagined role of others, or the generalized community. As stated earlier, scientists, and scientiﬁc thought processes, are no exception to this rule, and are derived and internalized from the community within which he or she is socialized. Mead (1938, p. 52) writes: It may be that the scientist, in a self-centered moment, might think away all else but its self and its thinkingyits having any thoughts at all would depend entirely upon its preserving its previous habits of conversing with others and so with himselfy The dividend I wish to see declared on this social nature of mind and the self is the equal immediacy that may attach to the assimilation of others’ experience with that of our own.

While scientists (and many philosophers of science at that time) believe they are engaging in their own ‘‘private’’ individual thoughts, for Mead the process of thought in terms of signiﬁcant symbols always requires the community from which these symbols arise. Thus, while the role of the individual in scientiﬁc practice is central, Mead rejects the conception of the so-called individual in a monological, Cartesian sense. The individual is always to be understood as a microcosm of the broader community, representing socially acquired attitudes and expectations that serve to guide conduct. Symbolic thought is a community process over and above an individual process. This notion of the social nature of reﬂective thought is echoed in a paper titled ‘‘The Social Factor in Perception,’’ where Mead (1938, pp. 140–153) argues that the common perspective shared by individuals in a social group directs and inﬂuences the perceptive activity of individuals. Further, perception is deﬁned not as a passive experience, but as a directed action on the part of the (socialized) individual. As such, the outcome of a perceptual act is inﬂuenced in large part by the attitude with which objects are approached; and this attitude is a product of the social collective of which the individual is a part. Kuhn (1962, pp. 118–119) would later make similar arguments in discussing the primacy of paradigms before the act of observation in experiment, arguing that scientists operating from different scientiﬁc paradigms could be looking at exactly the same physical phenomena yet would literally witness ‘‘different worlds,’’ as a result of

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the theoretical context framing the observation. This is reminiscent of Herbert Blumer’s (1969) insistence that people in similar physical environments armed with different matrices of meanings obtained from various social contexts might as well be living in different worlds, which is an idea taken directly from the teachings of Mead (Blumer, 2004). Socialization is taken to be a large inﬂuence on this ‘‘attitude’’ or set of taken for granted assumptions by which the individual approaches everyday perceptual acts, as well as more disciplined empirical investigations. It was this argument which led many of the later pragmatists to be at odds with the positivist assumption of neutral observation. Dewey’s (1896) paper titled the ‘‘reﬂex arc in social psychology’’ was testimony that humans did not simply respond automatically to stimulus in the way of some lower animals, but rather, processed and interpreted said stimuli in order to meaningfully formulate a response. Further, Dewey argued that human organisms were able to intelligently select out and direct their sensory actions within environments, such that they had a hand in the very perceptions they would generate. Mead was deeply inﬂuenced by this paper (see Mead, 1930), and, probably as a result of his training in physiological psychology from Wilhelm Wundt while in Germany, considered the psychology of perception a very important consideration in questions of knowledge, and certainly, scientiﬁc conduct. Perhaps more importantly than this, Mead rejected the idea of neutral sense data since all observation can only make sense in relation to a preestablished attitude. As such, Descartes’ assumption of placing the world into doubt momentarily as a way to rationally construct a foundation for knowledge, or Locke’s imaginary of the tabula rasa, is, for Mead (1930), as with Dewey, a fantasy at best. One always approaches the world with an established and habitually derived attitude, which ebbs and ﬂows within the conduct of action (see also Joas, 1996). There can be no such thing as a fresh start. Observation is never accomplished apart from an ongoing process with a preceding attitude or expectation that guides conduct. This attitude is derived from practical action and linguistic socialization, which always refers to patterned, coordinated conduct learned within an organized society. Kuhn (1962, p. 63) would later present modern evidence for this by presenting the classic ‘‘card experiment’’ of Bruner and Postman, where cards were ﬂashed in quick succession to subjects who would identify each card to the tester as they were ﬂipped over. When an anomalous card (for example, a black four of hearts) was ﬂashed, it was immediately ﬁtted by respondents into preestablished categories that they were expecting, so they would report a four of spades. Entering the experiment with a preestablished

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‘‘attitude’’ and habit of thought and expectation, they were unable to identify the erroneous cards. Mead (1938, p. 49) argues that it is this fact, that all sensation is relative to some meaningful theory or attitude with which the scientist approaches observation, that provides a fundamental difﬁculty for positivist accounts of science: ‘‘ythe scientist, when he times the microscopic oil drops as they move toward or away from charged plates, or when he measures the distances of photographed stars from one another before and during an eclipse, has not at all the attitude of a man perched insecurely upon obscure and adventitious data. The world that is there has taken up into itself all the order, deﬁnition, and necessity of earlier scientiﬁc advance.’’ Thus, very much in the tradition of pragmatism, there can be no such thing as pure observation. Mead (1917, p. 206) distanced himself from the position of logical positivism, or any correspondence theories of truth, as ‘‘no scientist ever analyzed his objects into such sense data. They exist only in philosophical textbooksy Research deﬁnes its problem by isolating certain facts which appear for the time being not as the sense data of a solipsistic mind, but as experiences of an individual in a highly organized society.’’ Mead sees perception as an active process that is directed by the speciﬁc attitude and problems identiﬁed by the socialized scientist. The product of this process is determined in large part by the intention and activity of the disciplined and problem-oriented perceptive act of the scientist, and cannot be reduced merely to the so-called ﬁeld of bare sense data. Mead (1938, p. 62) writes: ‘‘the experimental scientistyis not a positivist. He has no inclination to build up a world out of such scientiﬁc datay Nothing would more completely squeeze the interest out of his world than the resolution of it into the data of observation.’’ Another similarity to Kuhn can be seen as Mead emphasizes the importance of education, largely achieved through the formulaic lessons of scientiﬁc textbooks. Mead (1938, 2001) recognizes that the assumptions and problems a scientist accrues are decided in large part by science education imparted early on (e.g., Campbell, 2003). If the attitude of a scientist is largely generative of what is acted upon and observed in scientiﬁc practice, then clearly the shaping of this attitude is a major consideration in understanding how scientiﬁc collectives are constituted. Consider the following quotation from Mead that describes the unique character of science education: [W]e enter the world of the scientist by the process of learning. In schools and institutions of higher learning we are taught the doctrines of modern science. Most of us

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ANTONY PUDDEPHATT take no part in the work of discovering what is there found out, but we acquire it through a process of learning, in which we retrace some of the steps which research has followed, while in the main we accept it largely on faith in the men and their methods, especially faith in the checking up of the results of certain individuals by all others in the ﬁeld. (Mead, 1938, p. 50)

What Mead is pointing at here is what Kuhn (1962, pp. 136–143) would later argue leads to the ‘‘invisibility of revolutions’’ in science. Scientiﬁc textbooks paper over conﬂict and disputes, as well as revolutionary periods, and present a Whig history of how the knowledge came to be accepted in the ﬁrst place, if it is to be discussed at all. (Fuller, 1988). Scientiﬁc histories are presented as though they were achieved through a slow, cumulative, and rational method, always stepping forward and never back. Mead (2001, pp. 137–159) was also quite critical of the truncated nature of science education in high school and university. He argued that the a-historical nature of education both biases students toward contemporary schools of thought, and strips them of any possible access to the actual process of scientiﬁc investigation as it is actually undertaken.2 Mead (2001, p. 152) argues that the sciences are presented to students with a truncated history, separate from the concrete problems out of which they emerged, such that they are ‘‘not interconnected in the minds of the students, that they exist in water-tight compartments. There is no common ﬁeld out of which they all spring.’’ This style of presentation leads to a glossed over, tidied up conception of science, and as such, serves to solidify belief in the scientiﬁc theories of the present, thus enhancing the selective attitudes with which scientists approach their work.

THE ORGANIC NATURE OF THE SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTION An accusation that is often thrown at Thomas Kuhn by modern sociologists of science is that he placed most of his emphasis on the socialization that occurs within the ivory tower of the university, ignoring broader social forces such as class and gender (Aronowitz, 1988; Harding, 1986).3 There is now considerable consensus that any sociology of knowledge that purports to study the content of scientiﬁc theory would do well to look beyond the halls of academia for both the generation of research projects and the subsequent scrutiny and interpretation of results (e.g., Barnes, 1977; Shapin, 1992). It is this corrective to Kuhn that directed much of the contemporary

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research in the study of scientiﬁc knowledge (see Pinch, 2006). While it would seem that Mead may be guilty of the same oversight (focusing only within the halls of academe for sociological processes that might affect knowledge production), a closer look shows that Mead’s consideration of science actually does include sources of inﬂuence that are external to the academy. In many places, Mead (1936) emphasized the ‘‘organic’’ connections of science, as a social institution, to the particular needs and social currents of the broader community out of which it grows. As such, Mead’s consideration of science as an embedded institution allows for the analysis of information and ideas as they ﬂow through and beyond the bounds of academic borders. To understand Mead’s perspective on institutions in general, it is important to recognize that he was largely inﬂuenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin, and the resulting evolutionary trends followed by many social theorists in America at that time (Fine, 1979; Mead, 1909). Mead argues that society does not evolve toward any Hegelian envisioned ultimate goal, but rather expands in directions that are decided contingently, by solving particular problems of the human group as they are introduced through organized means, thus allowing for previously blocked collective action to go on unabated (Athens, 2005). It is through the problematic situations presented that Mead saw the evolution of human culture as a collective response to material problems of survival. For Mead, intelligent human responses to problems of food supply, water, digestion, and energy form the basis of our modern institutions. Manning (2005) has suggested that Mead’s dedication to evolutionist thought also led him to be inﬂuenced by the American social Darwinist William Sumner. Mead (1936) directly credits Auguste Comte, but more deﬁnitively Herbert Spencer, as coming up with the organic conception of society as the evolution of a set of ‘‘social habits’’ (p. 373). Mead saw institutions as forming emergently in response to the particular needs of people who then come together to solve problems in the physical and social environment through collective action. It is through the repetition of these collective problem-solving acts that social habits and institutional structures form and sediment. Science, for Mead, is no exception. Like all other institutions in society, science has arisen as a particular organized form of community conduct that allows for the solutions of problems faced by human groups in their struggle for survival: [T]he scientiﬁc method, as such, is, after all, only the evolutionary process grown conscious. We look back over the history of plant and animal life on the face of the globe

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ANTONY PUDDEPHATT and see how forms have developed slowly by the trial and error methody Societies develop, just as animal forms develop, by adjusting themselves to the problems that they ﬁnd before them. (Mead, 1936a, pp. 365–366)

Sciences, like all social habits and societal institutions, arise as a form of adaptation, adjusting to and solving problems in the environment that are identiﬁed and posed by the emerging needs of society. Mead (1936a) explicitly argues that science must not be understood as a fully autonomous institution, but rather as a formalized adaptation to the surrounding conditions, needs, and interests of human groups. Following this logic, in his lecture ‘‘Industry as a Boon to Science,’’ Mead states (1936, p. 243) that ‘‘the so-called Industrial Revolution has been the source out of which some of the most important of our scientiﬁc conceptions and hypotheses have arisen.’’ Mead (1936, pp. 244–245) posits that many scientiﬁc hypotheses and trends of thought stem quite closely to the particular economic needs of the society from which they originate: The economist turns to the scientist and wants a theory for his new servant, the steam engine. He says ‘I want to know how much work it can do.’y Work or energy, then, is a bookkeeping conception taken over from the economic doctriney It is very interesting to see the sources from which importantly constructive ideas have arisen, to see what an organic thing society is; how ideas that you ﬁnd in one phase of it appear in some different form in another phase, but come back to common sources.

Mead argues that the theory of the conservation of energy arose out of an economic need for a common method of equating the amount of work done across widely different contexts, and measuring this with common units of energy. Huge intellectual resources became devoted to studying problems of energy conservation for the obvious economic and industrial beneﬁts that would come from it (Dear, 2006, p. 125). Probably because of its strong connections to the needs of the economy, this became a major watershed in science, and began to inﬂuence a host of what would normally be disconnected streams of thought in other specialized disciplines. Mead (1936, pp. 246–248) demonstrates this with a fascinating example of the work of a German chemist by the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald. Mead shows how Ostwald’s theoretical developments in chemistry were inﬂuenced by the scientiﬁc fashion of the time to focus on the conservation of energy. In effect, Ostwald attempted to reduce the periodic table of the elements into quantiﬁable amounts of energy, eliminating the need for qualitative designations of atomic properties. This attempt by Ostwald to apply the broad movement of thought known as energetics to atomic chemistry shows the importance of how

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broad movements of thought can inﬂuence widely divergent and disparate realms of scientiﬁc practice. Mead (1936, p. 246) writes: Ostwaldytried to get rid of the conception of atomic particles. With this in mind he wrote an elementary chemistry in which he did do away with atoms entirelyy He simply stated the amounts in terms of quantitiesy What this German chemist was trying to do was to set up a certain metaphysical entity of energy and say this is the ultimate substance in the universe. That in itself broke down; but the history of it, which I have brieﬂy given, shows a very interesting development of such a scientiﬁc concept and the interrelationship of such a conception with the social structure and social theory of the period.

Ostwald’s chemistry is an excellent example of the power of broad theoretical trends and currents of thought that can serve to inﬂuence what would seem to be disconnected ﬁelds of research.4 By drawing on this example in his lectures, Mead was able to make a strong case for external societal beliefs on the internal conduct and practice of science. This shows not only that Mead was cognizant of the social nature of the content of scientiﬁc theories, but also that this could be connected convincingly to external currents located in the broader cultural milieu.

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) paradigm/revolution theory of science has been widely discussed and criticized over the years (e.g., Laudan, 1977; Fuller, 2000, 2003), yet the supposed originality of Kuhn’s model has never been raised as a point of contention, except for the obvious inﬂuence of Ludwik Fleck. I will show that Mead used many of the same empirical examples from the history of science some 40 years prior to Kuhn, to make arguments that, while not identical, largely preﬁgure many of the central points made in regard to the history of science. It is clear that Mead had a broad knowledge of the history of science, using many historical examples of science in his writing, and offered several courses on the topic during his tenure at the University of Chicago (Lewis and Smith, 1980). As I will demonstrate, Mead’s vision of scientiﬁc progress is strongly posed against positivist notions of a purely rationally derived, cumulative science, and he identiﬁes the seemingly disjunctive progression of scientiﬁc theory over time. Mead is cognizant that radical departures in science are an empirical fact, and explains these disjunctures by the fact that scientiﬁc knowledge is something culturally contingent, and therefore historically variable. As we will see, Mead demonstrates his awareness of the stark changes in the scientiﬁc landscape of knowledge claims over long historical periods.

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While the quotation provided below is dated 1938, the paper is written long before this, as the book Philosophy of the Act represents a collection of papers written throughout Mead’s life as a scholar, so they are very difﬁcult to date accurately (see Cook, 1993). However, one indication of dating is that Mead’s paper ‘‘Scientiﬁc Method and the Individual Thinker’’ is dated 1917, which considers many of these problems associated with individual investigations in tension with community belief in science. Not only does this predate Kuhn’s argument by almost 50 years, it also predates Fleck’s book originally printed in German from 1935. As shown below, Mead (1938, p. 60) observes that scientists operating in different epochs of knowledge will often exhibit radically different conceptions of the same physical phenomena under investigation: The world of Daltonian atomsyis a different world from that whose ultimate elements are particles of electricity. Such worlds are dated by the problems upon whose solutions they have appeared are social in the sense that they belong to the history of the human community, since reﬂective thought is a social undertaking, and since the individual in whose experience both the problem and its solution must arise presupposes the community out of which he springs.

Mead underlines the deeply social aspects of scientiﬁc inquiry, as it is through the social deﬁnition of particular problems that investigations are carried out. These social deﬁnitions can vary widely in their intellectual history, as they undergo interconnections with entirely different cultural contexts of belief through the wider society of the time. Mead is aware of the theory-driven nature of science, and that the theories with which one approaches scientiﬁc problems are social in character, and will thus be quite different depending on the social community from which it arises. Clearly, Mead is presenting a historical argument that science, like other forms of knowledge, is culturally relative. If he was writing in the period of 1900–1930, prior to Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn, the question becomes clear. How did Mead get these ideas about the cultural variability of science through history? Considering the argument is culturally oriented and historical, it makes sense to presume he found inspiration for it from his doctoral supervisor in Germany, Wilhelm Dilthey. Unfortunately, Mead’s intellectual debts to Dilthey are largely assumed and cannot be documented accurately (Joas, 1985; Bakker, 1999; Prus, 1996). However, Dilthey is famous for his arguments about the historical relativity of cultural knowledge, customs, and values (Ermarth, 1978; Platinga, 1980). Like Dilthey, Mead believed in a general doctrine of cultural relativity, and through a separate interest in the history of science

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(Lewis and Smith, 1980), probably came to realize that scientiﬁc knowledge is no exception to this rule. As a result of this perspective, Mead insists that progress in science is not accomplished as a slow and steady process of cumulative logical deductions from the evidence gathered. Rather, Mead recognized there are times when a fundamental shift of basic assumptions are needed to shuttle science forward. After such a radical departure, Mead believed that older theories can be subsumed from the frame of reference provided by the newer view through a posthoc translation. Consider Mead’s (1936a, p. 356) discussion of the advance from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy, an example often drawn on much later by Kuhn: Up to some time in the 18th century you could have covered the whole ﬁeld of astronomy by the Ptolemaic account of the world. But, by working out that doctrine with all its implications, you could not have deduced from it the Copernican, the heliocentric, theory. By the most complete set of deductions possible you could not have reached the latter theory as a necessary result of the formery When one has accepted that the sun is the center, then you can show why the conclusions that you drew from the Ptolemaic theory were accuratey That is, you can deduce the results of the Ptolemaic theory from the results of the Copernican theory. But you could not move in the opposite direction.

Mead acknowledges that drastic shifts in frames of conceptual organization are necessary for genuine progress in science, yet does not think this is a sign that science cannot genuinely progress forward. ‘‘We would think any science barren which did not in one generation give a different view than the generation before. And, if that difference is a fundamental one, we think science just that much more productive’’ (Mead, 1936a, p. 266). The previous cited passage also demonstrates that Mead considered the dilemma of translation from a prior symbolic system to the next.5 The movement from a prior frame to a new frame can ﬁnd no basis in logical deduction and evidence, and Mead recognized that such a paradigm shift requires a leap of faith at ﬁrst. However, after a shift to a new theoretical framework has become institutionalized, Mead believed that ‘‘later hypotheses which you present and accept must be able to take up into themselves all the facts gathered before’’ (Mead, 1936a, p. 356). According to Mead, a posthoc translation of the facts and ﬁndings of old theories is a requirement for the acceptance and institution of a new theoretical model. Certainly, this claim is something that Kuhn would violently disagree with, as, for Kuhn (1962), the ordering of paradigms does not imply that the latter theory is any better, or more true, than what was held previously. Further, Kuhn’s thesis of incommensurability argues that there cannot be, by deﬁnition, any

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meaningful posthoc translation between paradigms. Since the fundamental assumptions on which they rest are different, they cannot be brought into full agreement. Thus, while it seems that Newtonian theories of motion can be calculated using the newer Einsteinian relativity theory, really the theories cannot be reconciled since they rest on different fundamental assumptions in regard to mass and energy. Beyond this, contemporary philosophers such as Lakatos (1981) and Laudan (1977) would argue that paradigms are chosen not by a litmus test of reverse translation (i.e. can the new paradigm explain the empirical record of the past paradigm), but rather, they are chosen by their ability to answer questions at a higher rate than they ask new ones, or simply hold a higher rate of solving practical problems, respectively. And, these theories of paradigm choice say nothing of the contemporary sociology of science, which would argue that new paradigms are chosen and supported largely out of interests, material supports of ‘‘big science,’’ and interconnections with other powerful institutions in society (Fuller, 2000). Despite these shortcomings, it is plain that Mead was very much of aware of the cultural basis of scientiﬁc knowledge, and linked this to the radical departures that can be observed to have taken place through the history of science. Comparisons to Kuhn (1962) are natural at this point, and it seems that Mead (1936, 1938) did not go as far as Kuhn in refuting the traditional conception of scientiﬁc progress vis-a`-vis the argument of incommensurability. Mead believed that posthoc translation was possible from a new epoch of thought to an older one, such that all the facts presented by the prior theory could be explained by the new one. In addition, Mead believed that this was a necessary condition for the survival of the newer theoretical order to become institutionalized. Moreover, Mead’s belief in scientiﬁc progress largely matched his overall beliefs in political progress through social reform (see Shalin 1991), and was certainly modernist in his assumptions that scientiﬁc progress, while socially conditioned and not wholly cumulative, is genuine and not simply arbitrary as Kuhn would have it. Still, Mead deﬁnitely pushed the point that scientiﬁc knowledge was no exception to other forms of knowledge (see especially Mead 1923), and as such, science is also prone to social, cultural, and historical conditioning.

WAS MEAD A RELATIVIST? Considering the arguments presented by Mead up until this point, it seems that many may charge him with epistemological relativism, which is a debate that has been raging for years now in the contemporary ‘‘science

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wars’’ (see Barnes and Bloor, 1981; Pickering, 1992; Pinch, 2008). Opponents of a relativist position basically argue that if all knowledge cannot be judged separately from the standpoint of a particular social position, then there are no grounds for truth, and as such, there is no foundation for knowledge claims beyond social interests. This leads to the position that no-one has a privileged position with which to argue for universal knowledge, and thus, all arguments can be deconstructed, and the modernist pursuit of truth loses its force entirely, such that methods of evidence and rationality cannot be privileged except in relation to the community in question (for a summary, see Hacking 1999). Where does Mead fall in this debate, and what was the context of debates surrounding these issues at the time he was writing? We have seen that Mead argues all scientiﬁc knowledge is contingent on the attitude of the investigating scientist(s), gained via socialization from the scientiﬁc community from which they are taught. The cultures and symbolic beliefs of this community, transmitted through textbook accounts of scientiﬁc facts to be taken on faith, cannot be understood separately from the wider societal institutions with which they interrelate. Thus, as society changes its central values, beliefs, and institutional structures over history, so should scientiﬁc knowledge change accordingly. This is evidenced for Mead by the radical changes in natural belief through different epochs of scientiﬁc thought over time. Is Mead guilty of reducing knowledge claims to the cultural period from which they arose? Can an epoch of thought only be validated internally, by its own cultural standards, as Thomas Kuhn would argue in later years? Was Mead skeptical to the point of complete epistemological relativism? There are a number of reasons why Mead found grounds to reject a strong position of epistemological relativism. First, it is clear that Mead was steadfastly against the position of idealism, and, following the pragmatists generally, railed against any sort of dualist system of philosophy that would consider thought and nature to be in separate plains of existence. Consciousness and meaning, was for Mead, a natural product, and mind and consciousness could never be considered separately from the physical environment from which it is generated. Human perspectives, while important for the construction of meaning, are themselves naturalistic products, as outlined in Mead’s paper ‘‘The Objective Reality of Perspectives’’ (Mead, 1932). Perspectives and subjectivities are as natural as physical objects, and arise through real-world relations of organism and environment. This is somewhat similar to his teacher Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion that ‘‘there is no perspective without an objective order’’ (cited in

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Ermarth, 1978, p. 335). This is much of the reason that Mead was critical of Josiah Royce’s writings and lectures – pragmatism was a philosophy committed to ﬁnding practical solutions in real-world settings, linking thought and nature through the process of action between organism and environment. This is the same reason that Mead was critical of Hegel, and preferred Darwin’s materialist emphasis, and later, Bergson’s insistence on the creative advance of nature as a root of innovation. Further, Mead deﬁned the social much more broadly than just human groups, and actually envisioned role-taking processes as part and parcel of perceptive practice with material objects (Joas, 1985; Puddephatt, 2005). Thus, to consider social interactions separately from perception does not make sense – as perception was, for Mead, a deeply social act as well. It was Mead’s conception of ‘‘sociality’’ that tried to link a pragmatist emphasis on action and perception with a social–psychological understanding of knowledge, under a common theoretical umbrella. Thus, if knowledge construction cannot be reduced to either subject or object, but always involves the relationship between both together through the act, then a reduction to an analysis of the inquirer alone in explaining the construction of meaning would be incomplete and untenable. Beyond the pragmatic rejection of idealism, there is a clear preference in Mead, like his teacher, Dilthey, for a position of relativity over relativism, a tension that seems evident in both of their writings. Dilthey was often charged by his critics with historicist relativism, but would defend his position by distinguishing historical relativism from his preferred analysis of historical relativity (Ermarth, 1978; Platinga, 1980). A relativist position assumes that knowledge generated within a cultural period can only be understood and accurately evaluated from within the hermeneutic conﬁnes of that period. The only criterion of truth and validity would then be possible with regards to the culturally speciﬁc standards of truth and evidence of that time. There is no independent criterion for truth, no outside Archimedian point from where knowledge can be adjudicated. This is the sort of idealist skepticism that Dilthey argued virulently against. Instead, Dilthey preferred the method of historical relativity, which merely assumes that knowledge can only be generated from a socio-historical position; and that cultural factors will always affect the type of knowledge that is created. This does not mean that said knowledge is necessarily false, or that it cannot be evaluated by objective standards of validity. Simply because something is to be understood as a cultural construct does not mean it is necessarily false, or immune from objective testing. Further, Dilthey believed all knowledge through history has a modicum of truth to it, and should be judged

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according to its ﬁt with the going values, norms, and beliefs of the current period (Platinga, 1980). This position is very much in line with the pragmatist movement – that true knowledge can be found in almost any period, in that it was used to accomplish practical actions in meaningful ways within the social community. Dilthey argued that knowledge cannot only be understood and evaluated from inside the cultural/historical epoch from which it is created, but that people can recognize the limitations of particular periods, and hence develop ‘‘incentives to a movement beyond’’ (Ermarth, 1978, p. 335). This might help to explain Mead’s belief in a genuine progress forward in science, in that he was inﬂuenced and inspired by Dilthey’s position on the relation between different historical periods – while they are differentiated and contingent, they are not completely insulated from one another, and there are grounds of commonality that allow for comparison. We will see this emphasis arise as we compare this intellectual backdrop to Mead’s stance on the position of scientiﬁc change speciﬁcally. It is striking that, like Dilthey before him, Mead was in defense of such a relativist accusation in his own writings. Mead (1938, p. 258) writes that while his social-pragmatist theory of science implies relativity due to the important role of socialization on a scientist’s approach to problems, ‘‘this relativity is in no sense solipsistic. It represents a certain relation between the ﬁeld and individuals. In so far as this relationship is identical, objects may be identical.’’ Thus, the key to experimental research practice is to fashion the design in such a way as to have multiple individuals engage in the same perceptive practice, by universalizing, to the best degree possible, a set of individual perceptive acts. Since the physiological qualities of sense perception can be made to converge by setting up the same sets of relations between observer and environment, there is a grounding from which incommensurable worldviews can be bridged through the act of communication and the aligning of sensory actions in commonly constituted environments. Mead (1938, p. 254) explains this well in the following passage: We cannot say we have discovered entities that are independent of experience – in other words, independent of the situations of percipient individuals – but we can assert that like percipient individuals would have, in an enormous range, experiences which, in these Newtonian characters, would be measurably identical with those which we have or which we can present to ourselves.

Since knowledge can only be generated through relations (not objects or subjects alone), knowledge only ever actually refers to relationships. By

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discussing the color of iodine, the scientist is actually referring to the color of iodine in relation to the human eye in the context of particular environments of action. However, once it is recognized that all knowledge refers to relations, similar relations between scientists and common environments and theoretical contexts can be aligned; this allows for a universality that is relational and contextual in character. Further, in his consideration of the seeming disjunctures in scientiﬁc knowledge, Mead always left room for some commonality of relational experience that would allow for a bridging between different epochs of thought. This is very much like Dilthey’s earlier emphasis. Mead believed that scientiﬁc knowledge can be shared meaningfully across epochs as a result of the common perceptual relations that they refer to. The following lengthy quotation is particularly indicative of this: The Mesopotamian soothsayer who had hit upon the succession of the eclipses and enshrined it in the Great Saros, and the Greek astronomer who by a scientiﬁc explanation of the eclipses had worked out the same succession, and the modern Copernican astronomer who substitutes the motion of the earth in its orbit for that of the sun about the earth and dates these eclipses still more accurately, were all observing the same phenomenon. For each there was a different world that was there, but in these worlds there were actual or identical observations of individuals which connect these worlds with one another and enable the later thinker to take up into his own the worlds that have preceded his. (1938, p. 61)

While scientists may be distanced from one another as a result of their respective theoretical indoctrinations, it is possible for an adaptation and accommodation to other scientiﬁc worldviews. Thus, as I have argued previously, Mead believed in scientiﬁc progress in a more genuine sense of the word. The common space–time relations constructed between observers and observed are enough for the followers of different scientiﬁc camps to compare notes. As a result of this common connection, later scientiﬁc epochs are capable of pulling in previous systems of belief and making sense of them from a contemporary perspective. With this admonition, Mead has a strong, and possibly naı¨ ve, view of scientiﬁc progress that is somewhat in line with his overall belief in social reform. Later systems of thought (which must eventually move forward through a leap of faith) are still capable of communicating and sharing with earlier systems, as a result of their shared observations built on a commonality of relations between scientists and their objects of study. As a result, there are grounds for comparison, whereby the empirical ﬁndings of earlier worldviews can be satisfactorily accommodated, and the limitations

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of these earlier views can be surpassed. Thus, although scientiﬁc knowledge does not progress in an entirely logical, consistent, or cumulative way, Mead had a genuine belief in progress through his belief in the mutual alignment of theoretical and observational protocols that would allow for a meaningful comparison. For Kuhn, there is no Archimedian point outside of worldviews for which to compare or evaluate theories in relation to each other. For Mead, that point can be found, but only in the relations that exist between observers and observed, between and across the situational contexts of practicing scientists.

EMERGENCE AND INNOVATION IN SCIENTIFIC GROWTH This attempt to escape the trappings of relativism resembles the more optimistic belief in scientiﬁc progress that would later be presented by Karl Popper (1959, 1963), and his student, Imre Lakatos (1981). Popper’s argument that scientiﬁc theories are not to be treated as dogmatic laws, but rather as tentative conjectures prone to be refuted by the scrutiny of Baconian ‘‘crucial experiments’’ plays up the importance of the spirit of mutual criticism and dialogue across boundaries that may be seen through history, but also in the contemporary landscape of science (Popper, 1963, p. 112). No doubt, Popper’s neglected (and largely dismissed) model is one of hope, and one that envisions science as a path to challenge ideology and dogma rather than reinforce it (Fuller, 2000, 2003).6 Mead was probably less optimistic than Popper about the dangers of dogma in science, yet still held out hope for genuine progress, by the possibility of comparing similar relational experiences between groups or periods. However, for Mead, there will never be a grand ﬁnal perspective with which to analyze and subsume all previous modes of thought: all scientiﬁc theories are bound to be proven inadequate eventually when tested under the emergent and unpredictable character of nature. As such, Mead rejects the possibility of establishing a ﬁnal veriﬁcation for scientiﬁc theories, emphasizing, much like Popper would in later years, the tentative status of all scientiﬁc belief: The scientist accepts this theory for the time being, but only as a postulate. He does not accept it as something to be taken in dogmatic fashion. He is perfectly ready to ﬁnd problems in all phases of his theory. In fact, the research scientist is looking for problems, and he feels happiest when he ﬁnds new ones. He does not cherish laws and

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ANTONY PUDDEPHATT the form of which they are given as something that must be maintained, something that must not be touched. On the contrary, he is anxious to ﬁnd some exception to the statement of laws which have been given. (Mead, 1936, p. 265)

This parallel to Popper’s view is telling of how much inspiration Popper probably got, if not from Mead directly, certainly from the general views held by the pragmatists in their reaction to logical positivism (see Hutcheon, 1995). However, to paint Popper as a pragmatist is not accurate, since he believed that the instrumentality of action was not adequate grounds for establishing truth. For Popper (1963), truth can only be tentatively established for those conjectures that survive continuous efforts to refute them. This negative and pseudo-Darwinian standard of truth is probably stronger grounds than the mere instrumentality of an idea. Applying an idea successfully is a much easier criterion for truth than subjecting it to a battery of empirical experiments speciﬁcally designed to refute it.7 At any rate, Mead’s (1929) own view of the tentative nature of scientiﬁc postulates was largely an argument against philosophical rationalism and idealism. For Mead, the spirit of science as a dialectical enterprise necessitated the notion that hypotheses and symbolic universals would have to be re-adjusted in light of confounding evidence. This is another obvious difference between Mead’s thinking and that of Thomas Kuhn who would later argue that scientists will not consciously recognize anomalous evidence until they add up to a crisis, which sinks the entire paradigm at once. For Mead, on the other hand, the discovery of novel and emergent qualities was part and parcel of the process of intelligence that forms the foundation of human group life. Readers may be skeptical of this somewhat naı¨ ve claim that scientists are all too happy to encounter data that may refute their own theoretical presuppositions. Thus, according to Mead, it is not only possible for scientists to recognize and adjust to anomalous evidence, but it is a joy to, as it becomes a source for creative innovation. Indeed, many sociologists of scientiﬁc knowledge have since shown that this is rarely the case at all (Collins and Pinch, 1993), since scientists often have to satisfy granting agencies, and have a lot of personal and professional interest riding on their proposed theory being accepted. Making use of network and institutional analysis, Fuchs (1992, 1993) has since argued that the likelihood of scientists acting in ways to be more innovative or ‘‘against the grain,’’ and more accepting of anomalous evidence, depends on their place within the institutional ﬁeld of science. Thus, scientists who are in the applied areas are more likely to ‘‘puzzle-solve’’ in Kuhn’s terms, yet scientiﬁc elites in the

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center of the ‘‘research frontier’’ are more likely to pursue anomalous evidence in the search for more original and innovative theory. Mead not only considered anomalous evidence as noteworthy in the reconstruction or readjustment of existing theories, but considered anomalous evidence as formative in the generation and growth of new scientiﬁc theory: [T]he scientist is continually noting that which departs from the accepted view, the given laws. With him it is not a disappointment but an achievement, a new problem to work on. He approaches it with interest and excitement. It is a discovery of something that is an exception to the view that has been held; it is the getting of something novel. These facts then, arouse interest and observation. And they not only do that, but they lead to the formation of a technique of observation. (Mead, 1936, pp. 282–283)

By shifting the experimental design explicitly to interrogate an unknown anomalous entity, Mead argues that the creative expansion and readjustment of methodological designs hold promise for innovative ﬁndings and new knowledge. This is what Lonnie Athens (2007) has referred to as Mead’s method of ‘‘negative case analysis,’’ which he argues is an important component of inductive social science, especially as practiced throughout the interactionist tradition. Since the possibility of innovation exists in the discovery of anomalous evidence, it is in the interest of the scientist to pursue negative cases anew with excitement and vigor. If originality is to be valued, one should expect scientists to pursue, and set up batteries of subsequent experimental tests, to investigate discordant data and negative cases with interest, rather than shying away. Further, Mead (1917, 1932, 1936a, 1938) argues that anomalous evidence marks the very cornerstone of scientiﬁc productivity. Mead posits that it is the conﬂict introduced by contradictory evidence, not the dogmatic following of a Kuhnian envisioned tradition, which allows science to be most productive. Thus, ﬁnding inspiration from the creative philosophy of Henri Bergson, Mead’s emphasis on the creative advance of nature is a very important aspect to his views on the continual readjustments that are to be made within the practice of science. Mead (1932, p. 119) explains the centrality of emergence in the ﬁeld of scientiﬁc activity here, in that the unexpected is central to the progress of science: The scientist’s emergent appears in his observation of the repugnant fact. Unquestionably in his experience something novel has occurred, and his experience lies within the worldy In so far as it is novel – e.g., in so far as the radiation of the black body does not conform to the wave theory of radiation – the new fact exists only as his experimental ﬁnding, as his perceptual experience, and he must make sure that any other person under like circumstances will have the same perceptual experience. The reality of this experience

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ANTONY PUDDEPHATT of his, and of others carrying out the like experiment, in its opposition to current meanings, is the cornerstone of experimental science. (Mead, 1932, p. 119)

For Mead, anomalous evidence (conﬁrming and then investigating the negative case) is the very cornerstone that leads the process of scientiﬁc inquiry, and is the mark of reality that allows a better epistemological grounding than a consensus theory of truth. Further, this leads to a model of science that does not fall into the hopelessness of dogmatic hegemony, whereby human ideas are projected onto the world in any way they wish. Mead (1936a, pp. 292–325) follows Bergson in recognizing the impossibility of capturing the world of nature within perfect theoretical abstractions. Universals are always approximated distortions and simpliﬁcations of nature, guaranteeing the constant emergence of novel and unpredicted experiences in science much like in everyday life. As such, universals are unﬁnalizable by deﬁnition, and will constantly undergo continual readjustment, which is the deﬁnition of intelligence. Indeed, it is in the emergent quality of action within our more instinctual character (Mead, 1934, pp. 347–353) and the uncertainty and unpredictability of contingencies in nature that provides the very root of creative innovation (Joas, 1996; Puddephatt, 2005).

IN PERSPECTIVE It is clear that George Herbert Mead analyzed the sociological character of scientiﬁc knowledge, and its progression, in a number of useful ways. Mead was keenly aware that science was a social process, and that the construction of symbolic universals requires a shared community, and an educational system with which to transmit knowledge to future generations. Further, Mead understood the radical variations in belief that could be witnessed across different historical epochs, and that the different assumptions and problem deﬁnitions these epochs hold will have drastic effects on the type of observations and interpretations to emerge from their respective inquiries. Thus, Mead recognized socialization as the most important starting point to any scientiﬁc inquiry, in stark opposition to the naı¨ ve view of the autonomous, neutral observer. The constructed and symbolic aspects of science are largely social in character, represent creative human solutions, and form the basis from which science can operate. There can be no reduction into pure observational sense data in the actual world of scientiﬁc practice.

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Mead also understood how ideas ﬂow in and through the academy from a variety of sources, most obviously, but not exclusively, the economy. Mead considered in many places how broad movements of thought can inﬂuence local research initiatives. He also realized the organic connections of scientiﬁc research to other spheres of activity, considering its permeation into everyday life, as well as other academic spheres such as philosophy and social science. Thus, Mead was aware of the importance of external sources of ideas. The generation of scientiﬁc concepts does not happen, for Mead, inside of an internalist vacuum. Overall, Mead understood how these pregiven ideas can affect the ‘‘attitude’’ of the scientist, as well as how speciﬁc problems are identiﬁed, deﬁned, and approached. Scientiﬁc investigation is infused with sociological considerations at every stage, and spans both the microprocesses of practice as well as macro-sociological considerations of economic factors and broad sweeping historical ideas. Despite Mead’s recognition of the social features of scientiﬁc practice, his careful consideration of human action avoids the problem of a sociologically driven relativism. Observation does not happen in knife-edge presents with direct access to bare sense data, yet neither does it occur in a manner that is entirely relative to the socialization context of scientist in an esoteric community. Mead contends that meaning can only be generated relationally, in the conduct that goes on between organisms and their environments through particular temporal durations in the here and now. The essential relation between (socialized) organisms and environments cannot be reduced to one or the other, as both are necessary elements in the emergence of objects. This rejection of dualist thinking is the foundation of Mead’s thought, and is one of the key components of the American pragmatist movement in general. This creates a theoretical space for which scientists can recognize what Mead called the ‘‘brute facts’’ of science that conﬂict with prior scientiﬁc constructions, and allow for useful comparisons of common relations between scientiﬁc groups and historical periods. This breaks the assumption of different scientiﬁc paradigms as hermeneutically sealed and self-contained bubbles of internally consistent but self-referential packages of ideas, terms of logic, and standards of evidence. Mead allowed later scientiﬁc factions to take in and assimilate past ﬁndings through the shared relational experiences of perception between the groups. As such, future epochs of knowledge are able to recognize and understand the shortcomings of previous approaches, and move beyond them in genuinely progressive ways. This emphasis also allows for the recognition of anomalous evidence, which is not to be ignored, but is the source for innovative research and rapid

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scientiﬁc growth. As such, Mead recommends the isolation and investigation of negative cases, which holds promise for more innovative growth. Of course, many of these beliefs presented by Mead are somewhat dated, and have been challenged not only by Kuhnian philosophy of science, but also by myriad sociological studies of actual scientiﬁc practice. There are many sociological reasons based on social interests, institutional pressures, and arenas of power that scientists often do not have the privilege to utilize negative case analysis in a free way, especially since the rise of big science and the need to satisfy grants for applied research. Still, Mead’s optimistic vision of an open, critical, and deeply creative and innovative science is refreshing. This optimism may be helpful for carving out a brand of social research that is not entangled in pessimistic critique, but holds out hope for studying science in ways that offer more genuinely constructive criticism. At the very least, it should be recognized that Mead held a sophisticated sociological theory of scientiﬁc knowledge that warrants further study and reﬂection.

NOTES 1. Joas’ (1985, p. 201) observation that ‘‘a brief sketch of Mead’s arguments show that his view of science is astonishingly modern,’’ and portends Thomas Kuhn’s theory of science in many ways, largely inspired me to take on this project. 2. This is obviously in opposition to Merton’s (1973) ideal of ‘‘normative skepticism’’ that is to be ingrained into scientists during their early enculturation. 3. This widely held criticism is highly questionable however, when one considers Kuhn’s (1957) earlier work in The Copernican Revolution (especially pages 124–133), where he explicitly ties scientiﬁc theories to the larger cultural milieu of the period. Why Kuhn (1962) left this style of analysis behind in Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions is unclear, but he certainly considered the sway of larger cultural forces in his earlier work, even if he did not emphasize this later on in his career. 4. Another example of Mead’s (1930) macrosociological considerations of knowledge is his analysis of the distinctive American character of pragmatism. Mead shows how the practicality and antielitism of pragmatism would ﬁnd support in America as a result of its peculiar self-reliant culture of industry, as well as its uniquely individualistic democratic political context. Mead makes similar cultural observations about American culture and values to Alexis de Tocqueville (1863) and later Seymour Martin Lipset (1967). This example shows how Mead would often look for external factors (the American cultural and political context) to explain the content, reception, and legitimation of particular knowledge claims (pragmatism). Clearly, Mead had the intellectual roots in place for a thorough-going sociology of knowledge. However, these scattered but insightful contributions to an early sociology of knowledge have been as yet neglected within the sociological community.

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5. See Hacking (1999) for an excellent review of the problems of translation across paradigms in science and an overview of debates about social constructionism and realism in the philosophy and sociology of science. 6. This, Fuller (2000, 2003) argues, is much more in the spirit of antiauthoritarianism and emancipatory potential than the pessimistic and Platonic vision put forward by Kuhn. Fuller has made an important argument for the importance of democratic critique in science, for making science less insulated and elite, and for restoring a genuine faith in scientiﬁc progress. It is for all of these reasons that Fuller has given those in the humanities reason to give Popper a second read. 7. The extent to which this happens in scientiﬁc practice, is of course, another question, as Collins (1985), Shapin and Schaffer (1985), and Collins and Pinch (1993) have shown time and again in their studies of replication.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author thanks Peter Archibald, Lonnie Athens, Peter Dear, Benjamin Kelly, Neil McLaughlin, David Nock, Trevor Pinch, Robert Prus, Larry Reynolds, and Kyle Siler for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript.

REFERENCES Aboulaﬁa, M. (2001). The cosmopolitan self: George Herbert Mead and continental philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aronowitz, S. (1988). Science as power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Athens, L. (2005). Mead’s lost conception of society. Symbolic Interaction, 28(3), 305–325. Athens, L. (2007). Negative case analysis. In: G. Ritzer (Ed.), Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Bakker, H. (1999). Wilhelm Dilthey: Classical sociological theorist. Quarterly Journal of Ideology, 22(1–2), 43–82. Barnes, B. (1977). Interests and the growth of knowledge. London: Routledge. Barnes, B. (1982). T.S. Kuhn and social science. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Barnes, B., & Bloor, D. (1981). Relativism, rationalism, and the sociology of knowledge. In: M. Hollis & S. Lukes (Eds), Rationality and relativism (pp. 21–47). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloor, D. (1991). Knowledge and social imagery (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blumer, H. (2004). George Herbert Mead and human conduct. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Campbell, R. A. (2003). Preparing the next generation of scientists: The social process of managing students. Social Studies of Science, 33(6), 897–927.

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Clarke, A., & Fujimura, J. (Eds). (1992). The right tools for the job: At work in 20th century life sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, H. (1985). Changing order: Replication and induction in scientiﬁc practice. London, UK: Sage. Collins, H., & Pinch, T. (1993). The Golem: What you should know about science. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Cook, G. A. (1993). George Herbert Mead: The making of a social pragmatist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dear, P. (2006). The intelligibility of nature: How science makes sense of the world. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1896). The reﬂex-arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370. Durkheim, E. (1915). Elementary forms of the religious life. In: J. Ward (trans.), London: Allen and Unwin. Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1963). Primitive classiﬁcation. In: R. Needham (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ermarth, M. (1978). Wilhelm Dilthey: The critique of historical reason. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Fine, W. F. (1979). Progressive evolutionism and American sociology, 1890–1920. Umi Research Press. Fleck, L. (1935). Genesis and development of a scientiﬁc fact. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fuchs, S. (1992). The professional quest for truth: A social theory of science and knowledge. New York, NY: SUNY Press. Fuchs, S. (1993). A sociological theory of scientiﬁc change. Social Forces, 71(4), 933–953. Fuller, S. (1988). Social epistemology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fuller, S. (2000). Thomas Kuhn: A philosophical history for our times. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fuller, S. (2003). Kuhn vs. Popper: The struggle for the soul of science. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Goff, T. W. (1980). Marx and Mead: Contributions to a sociology of knowledge. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan-Paul. Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harding, S. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press. Hutcheon, P. D. (1995). Popper and Kuhn on the evolution of science. Brock Review, 4(1–2), 28–37. Joas, H. (1985). G.H. Mead: A contemporary re-examination of his thought. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. (1957). The Copernican revolution: Planetary astronomy in the development of western thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientiﬁc revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, I. (1981). History of science and its rational reconstructions. In: I. Hacking (Ed.), Scientiﬁc revolutions (pp. 107–127). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Laudan, L. (1977). Progress and its problems: Towards a theory of scientiﬁc growth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Lewis, J. D. (1981). G.H. Mead’s contact theory of reality: The manipulatory phase of the act in the constitution of mundane, scientiﬁc, aesthetic, and evaluative objects. Symbolic Interaction, 4(2), 129–141. Lewis, J. D., & Smith, R. L. (1980). American sociology and pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lipset, S. M. (1967). The ﬁrst new nation: The United States in historical and comparative perspective. New York, NY: Doubleday. Mannheim, K. (1936[1968]). Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan-Paul. Manning, P. (2005). Freud and American sociology. Malden, MA: Polity Press. McKinney, J. (1955). G.H. Mead and the philosophy of science. Philosophy of Science, 22, 264–271. Mead, G. H. (1909). On the inﬂuence of Darwin’s origin of species. Unpublished manuscript, 17 pages. Mead, G. H. (1917). Scientiﬁc method and individual thinker. In: J. Dewey, et al. (Eds), Creative intelligence: Essays in the pragmatic attitude. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. Mead, G. H. (1923). Scientiﬁc method and the moral sciences. International Journal of Ethics, 23, 229–247. Mead, G. H. (1929). A pragmatic theory of truth. Studies in the Nature of Truth: University of California Publications in Philosophy, 11, 65–88. Mead, G. H. (1930). The philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in their American setting. International Journal of Ethics, 40, 211–231. Mead, G. H. (1932). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1936). Movements of thought in the nineteenth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1938). The philosophy of the act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1999). In: M. J. Deegan (Ed.), Play, school and society. New York: Peter Lang. Mead, G. H. (2001). Essays in social psychology. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miall, C., & Miall, A. (2002). The Exxon factor: The roles of corporate and academic science in the emergence and legitimation of a new global model of sequence stratigraphy. The Sociological Quarterly, 43, 307–334. Miller, D. L. (1973). George Herbert Mead: Self, language, and the world. Austin: University of Texas Press. Moore, M. H. (1936). Introduction. In: G. H. Mead (Ed.), Movements of thought in the 19th century (pp. xi–xxxvii). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. W. (1938). Introduction. In: G. H. Mead (Ed.), Philosophy of the act (pp. vii–lxxiii). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. W. (1965). G.H. Mead: A pragmatist’s philosophy of science. In: B. B. Wolman & E. Nagel (Eds), Scientiﬁc psychology. New York, NY. Murphy, A. E. (1932). Introduction. In: G. H. Mead (Ed.), Philosophy of the present (pp. 11–29). Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing. Pickering, A. (Ed.) (1992). Science as practice and culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Pinch, T. (2006). The sociology of science and technology. In: C. D. Bryant & D. L. Peck (Eds), The handbook of 21st century sociology (Vol. 1). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Pinch, T. (2008). Relativism: Is it worth the candle? In: M. Mazzotti (Ed.), Knowledge as social order: Rethinking the sociology of Barry Barnes (pp. 35–48). Aldershot: UK. Platinga, T. (1980). Historical understanding in the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. Popper, K. (1959). The logic of scientiﬁc discovery. New York, NY: Basic Books. Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientiﬁc knowledge. New York, NY: Harper and Rowe. Prus, R. (1996). Symbolic interaction and ethnographic research. New York, NY: SUNY Press. Puddephatt, A. J. (2005). Mead has never been modern: Using meadian theory to extend the constructionist study of technology. Social Epistemology, 19(4), 357–380. Puddephatt, A. J. (2006). Rethinking George Herbert Mead: Implications for contemporary theories of knowledge, science, and technology. Doctoral Dissertation. McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Puddephatt, A., & McLaughlin, N. (2006). The sociology of knowledge. In: C. D. Bryant & D. L. Peck (Eds), The handbook of 21st century sociology (Vol. 2, pp. 239–248). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Royce, J. (1920). The world and the individual. London: MacMillan. Shalin, D. (1991). G.H. Mead, socialism, and the progressive agenda. In: M. Aboulaﬁa (Ed.), Philosophy, social theory, and the thought of George Herbert Mead (pp. 21–56). New York, NY: SUNY Press. Shapin, S. (1992). Discipline and bounding: The history and sociology of science as seen through the externalism–internalism debate. History of Science, 30, 333–369. Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the air pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Star, S. L. (1989). Regions of the mind: British brain research, 1870–1906. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Strauss, A. (1993). The continual permutations of action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Tocqueville, A. (1863). Democracy in America. Simon and Schuster, 1964. Weber, M. (2004). The vocation lectures: Science as a vocation, politics as a vocation. Hackett Publishing.

THE CONTROVERSY OF MIND OVER MATTER: MEAD’S SOLUTION AND APPLICATIONS FROM NEUROSCIENCE David D. Franks ABSTRACT In this essay, I relate G. H. Mead’s emergent theory of mind and reﬂexivity to neuroscience evidence that ‘‘minded’’ practices can be applied in restructuring the neural structures involved in obsessive-compulsive disorders, stroke patients, and depression. The demonstration that such efforts can become causal factors in changing material brain structures attests to the emergent reality of mind as conceived by Mead, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry, and others. This means that mind, arising from the material brain cannot be completely reduced to the biological properties that make it possible. Schwartz and Begley (2002) and Begley (2007) describe the six-step program in minded practices producing structural brain change in The Mind and the Brain. The authors argue for a voluntaristic framework transcending SR behaviorist approaches to behavior modiﬁcation, which ignore distinctively human capacities. fMRI evidence of the structural changes in brain systems involved in OCD after patients were trained in ‘‘minded’’ behaviors is described.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 61–80 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31004-7

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MIND OVER MATTER Despite George Herbert Mead’s efforts to produce a naturalistic and thoroughly social view of mind, scholars in many academic ﬁelds, including our own, still question the necessity for the term. This essay shows how advances from neuroscience have established the causal potency of mind over the cells from which it arose. In doing so, we can also witness how the very different frameworks of neuroscience and Meadian thought have demonstrated the vital importance of minded behavior in human life. Many symbolic interactionists see neuroscience as basically deterministic and reductionist. There is certainly much that is determined in the brain. We would hope so if we are to breathe, perceive, remember, and feel as well as a myriad of other things like walking straight and recognizing our spouses’ faces. But much of contemporary thinking in neuroscience goes well beyond the unproductive dualism between determinism and voluntarism (see Dennett, 2003). This is not solely due to the insights of neuroscience. Philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century were aware of the difﬁculties of complete determinism and the reductionism it implies. If one has a totally detailed understanding of all past causes, the ‘‘dependent variable’’ would have nothing left to it that had not already been explained. It would be really nothing but its past causes. To think otherwise is to posit some mystical thing that illegitimately inserts itself at the very end of the causal chain allowing the event to be more than its past. Since everything reduces to its prior history there can be nothing really new in nature. Everything just makes explicit what has already been done (Miller, 1973, p. 40). This issue was part of the philosophical discussion during the ﬁrst part of the last century at the University of Chicago. Mead resolved these problems through his conception of emergence. Since the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts (taken separately), room is ﬁnally made for true novelty.

G. H. Mead’s Concept of Emergence Rather than seeking explanations for the material and biological world in the deterministic past or the teleologically divined future, Mead rooted his thinking in the behavioral present. Reality was lodged in what he referred to as ‘‘immediacy’’ – the experienced present. Behaviorally, this present is always a matter of adjustments to unpredicted situations. Some of these ongoing adjustments produce truly novel events. For example, Miller,

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taking the point of view of impersonal nature, says that grass, once ingested in an accommodating digestive system becomes something entirely new called ‘‘food.’’ There is nothing in the grass itself (before being changed by the digestive tract) that would have predicted its change to something nourishing, i.e. food. Without a digestive tract grass is simply grass and there is no way for the observer to connect grass with everything in the world including certain digestive tracts. Mead labeled this type of ‘‘novelty’’ resulting from the interaction between grass and digestive tracts, as emergence (Miller, 1973, p. 41). We should note what the above does to the common sense notion of the future. The grass in isolation from the digestive track had no future, as food unless you posit an all-knowing God which, being an answer to everything, does not advance the purposes of a secular science. The future of grass as food only exists in the process of digestion which Mead views as ‘‘adjustment’’ of the grass to the tract and vice versa. Likewise, for Mead (1934, p. 2), mind was a true emergence from the interaction of structures in the brain and language – the latter also being an emergent from social interaction.

Roger Sperry’s Biosocial Concept of Emergence In 1964, the neurosurgeon and Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry (1913–1994) argued that consciousness and thus, mind, was decidedly more than an epiphenomenal result of the cellular matter from which it arose. That is, mind was a true novelty in nature. If mind were not more than the cells which gave it birth, it would have no reality of its own, and the term would be unnecessary. The reductionist view that ‘‘mind’’ was superﬂuous was taken for granted in biology during Sperry’s lifetime, and his thesis has only secured itself in this century because of discoveries cited below. Before Sperry, the allegedly airtight and irrefutable assumption was that ‘‘mind does not move matter;’’ that no physical action awaits on anything but another physical action (Sperry, 1993). However, he argued that mind was a true emergent arising from the neuronal functioning of brain cells and containing genuinely new characteristics fundamentally different from the parts giving it birth. What Sperry saw as ‘‘mental forces’’ could direct electrochemical trafﬁc between neurons at the cellular level (Schwartz and Begley, 2002, p. 42). He insisted that the causal potency of an idea becomes just as real as that of a molecule, cell, or a nerve impulse (Sperry, 1965, p. 82). In emergence, the whole is more than the parts taken separately.1 The important dimension of what

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Sperry is saying is that the emergent whole can work back to exert inﬂuence on the parts that give it life.2

On the Qualitative Difference between Mind Over Matter The fundamental difference between mind and body has to do with the mind’s intangible constructions. According to common sense understandings ‘‘reality’’ belongs to a thing existing in a particular space and time. A real object gives resistance to the penetration of its space. According to Meadian thought, mind involves a process of communicating with one’s self by means of signiﬁcant symbols. These symbols however, have virtually no tangible substance. In contrast to our bodily senses, the symbolic contents of minded processes are made up of purely intangible, extra-sensory, extramaterial ideas. They have no place in actual time or space. For example, this is true even for the term ‘‘space’’ which we never directly see. What we see is ‘‘the cat down the hill.’’ Space is the purely intangible conception of how long it would take us to get there. In this way the ‘‘airy’’ content of the emergent mind is fundamentally different from its cellular, and thus, materialistic sources. Mind, rather than immersing us directly in immediate tangibles and in some sense bringing us ‘‘closer’’ to them, gives us control over these tangibles only by looking at them from a distanced perspective, often as far away as possible – by standing back and apart from the felt reality of immediacy (see Lyng & Franks, 2002, p. 89). Nowhere is this more apparent than in self-awareness where we can be ‘‘lost in action’’ until we take the attitude of the other and see ourselves from their point of view. Only then can we gain voluntary control over our own behavior, and only then, according to Mead, is our behavior fully minded. Furthermore, self-awareness typically comes about when our habitual (unminded) behaviors are blocked and we are forced to relate the resistance to our own capacities in order to unblock action. As will be seen below, this distanced characteristic of mind, divorced from immediacy and facilitated by intangible symbols, becomes essential in applying mental forces to therapies that change synaptic brain structures.3 For Mead however, full mindedness went beyond taking the attitude of particular others and involved taking the role of the ‘‘generalized other.’’ In this more abstract step, the actor constructs an organized unity or composite ‘‘attitude’’ out of ever-expanding communities that formed the audience relevant to his or her ‘‘inner’’ dialog at the moment. Because it has to transcend particular viewpoints, this becomes the objective perspective – at least to the actor (Mead, 1934, pp. 155–156). For Mead, taking the role of the

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generalized other was the essence of rationality. In sum, while mind emerges from self-conscious behavior enabled by intangible symbols and taking the attitude of particular others, mind’s ‘‘full measure’’ involves the more distanced process of constructing generalized others where self-reﬂection and self control is guided by impersonal, socially formed standards. Given the imposing difference described above between the real and the mental, it was inevitable that Sperry would be charged with splitting mentality up into an irreconcilable dualism, but such is not the case. His ‘‘emergent mentalism’’ as he called it, conceived of conscious experience as a nonreductive dynamic emergent of brain activity that cannot exist apart from the brain. It had no room for disembodied consciousness, mind, or spirit (Sperry, 1993, p. 16). Mind cannot exist apart from the material brain. But that is only one half of the story.

Mind as Exerting a True Mental Force Over its Parts Sperry released science from its purely materialistic boundaries by showing that the emergent mind,4 now so different from the body from which it came, exerted a truly causal effect on its parts. As we have seen, if something causes changes in something else, it is real in any sense of the word. An unreal cause is hardly a cause! In this context, we can seriously talk about mind over matter while staying within the bounds of naturalism. The emergent character of mind does not mean that it is absolutely free of its parts, but that it overrides the physical and chemical elements giving it birth, and in turn can exert downward control over neural activity (Henninger, 1994, p. 23, italics added). The causal chains in the brain are twofold and cybernetic. First we have the upward chain of causation going from the parts to the emergent mind. Second, we have the downward control of the mind to the parts from which it originally arose. At ﬁrst sight this seems to collide with Leibniz’s statement that ‘‘nature takes no leaps.’’5 In a way it does and in a way it does not. Although the novelty of the emergent is indeed such a leap, it is a leap that carries with it the dynamics of the past and simply overrides it in power. According to Sperry, to override something does not mean that what is overridden has absolutely no inﬂuence on the emergent. ‘‘The old simple lawsynever get lost or canceled in the process of compounding the compounds. They do, however, get superseded, overwhelmed, and outclassed by the higher level forces as these successively appeary’’ (Sperry, 1964, p. 2). Thus, the continuity of the emergent with its past is preserved.

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Sperry was far ahead of his time and his position on emergence was ignored by the majority of his colleagues, if not his students,6 up to his death. However, as we shall ﬁnd below, he has been vindicated by new ﬁndings and application of his ideas in this century.

MINDED DISTANCE AS A LEVER FOR CONTROL IN THERAPEUTIC PRACTICES We have seen that mindedness involves ‘‘taking the attitude of the other’’ – responding to your own on-coming gestures as we would anticipate others would do and using this anticipated response to guide our developing lines of communication. Full mindedness involves depersonalized external evaluations and viewing one’s action from these objective standards. It assumes the teleological nature of human mentality and offers the only truly social and voluntaristic, alternative to deterministic conditioning as an explanation of behavioral control. Rather than being pushed into action by external factors in the past, we teleologically pull our own selves into action by our own anticipation of future consummated acts. Ironically, as I have noted, this self-consciousness which largely comprises mind (the distinctive capacity that makes us human) is usually ignored by current behavior modiﬁcation approaches based on the capacity for conditioning shared by all mammals. Implied in this approach are two features that become crucial for therapeutic practices that can change the synaptic structures of the brain. One is volition and agency. The other is the distancing from actuality that is involved in the cognitive process of taking the attitude of the generalized other and the self-awareness this enables. The latter allows for the ‘‘decentering’’ from self that makes possible that ‘‘sanity within insanity’’ captured in some of the letters from Zelda Fitzgerald to her husband, Scott while she was in a mental hospital: God! the point of view of sanity, normality, beauty, even the necessity to survive is so utterly arbitrary. Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood – or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experienceysometimes I think I would lose my mind if I were not insane.’’ (Bruccoli, 1991, p. 465)

This insight into her own state of mind could have been ﬂeeting, but it clearly demonstrates an area – a metaphorical space that is sanely observing its own insanity. Such a statement has to come from an abstract but important perspective in consciousness that is free from the scourge of psychological distress.

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In a chapter called ‘‘Your Suffering is Not You,’’ Kabat-Zinn (1990, pp. 320–321) describes a process very akin to Mead’s reﬂexivity and Zelda’s capacity for objective self-awareness. Rather than trying to ignore pain, Kabat-Zinn recommends ‘‘full mindfulness’’ of it. In doing so he describes with rare concreteness the phase of self-consciousness from which Zelda speaks and that Mead identiﬁes as a perspective. Strange as it may sound, the intentional knowing of your feelings in times of emotional suffering contains in itself the seeds of healing. ythe part of you that can know your feelings, that sees clearly what they are, that can accept them in the present, while they are happening, no matter what they are, in their full undisguised furyy that awareness itself has an independent perspective that is outside of your suffering. It is not battered by the storms of the heart and of the mind. The storms have to run their course; their pain has to be felt. But they actually unfold differently when cradled in awareness. (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, pp. 320–321, emphasis added)

NEUROPLASTICITY AND THE POWER OF MENTAL FORCE Important as Mead’s discussion about taking the attitude of the other turns out to be, it is not an empirical argument for mind over body. The development of this evidence comes from the work of Jeffery Schwartz on patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Neuroplasticity refers to changes in the brain’s neuronal-circuitry originating from minded volitional behavior. Schwartz’s telling work with humans attests to the causal power of the mind to forge this plasticity of the brain. However, his work was presaged by animal studies to which we now turn.

The Tale of the Silver Springs Monkeys The story of experimentation on macaque monkeys in Silver Springs, Maryland, in the late 20th century is recounted in Schwartz and Begley (2002), Begley (2007), and Doidge (2007). It is highly unpleasant from the perspective of animal rights as will be evident enough between the lines. Their story is relevant because in a number of ways it gave reason to believe that motivation and volition in humans could, with time and proper redeﬁnitions, cause new neuronal circuits to develop cellular matter. The principles learned challenged the widely held belief that motivation could not change neuronal structures. Although Mead’s position against any trace

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of self-consciousness in other animals is open to debate, the fact that we share volition, desire, and attention with other species is not. Without question, self-consciousness and role-taking plays a vastly more important role for humans. At the same time volition and intentional behavior may be seen as a shared capacity between humans and monkeys and, as will be shown below, there is much about monkey brains that also applies to human brains. The conviction that neuronal-circuitry in the matured human brain was ﬁxed for life was created by Charles Sherrington in 1895. He operationalized ‘‘volition’’ as the intentional behavior of very hungry (starved) monkeys wanting food. Monkeys whose sensory nerves were severed in one arm, but whose motor nerves remained intact in that arm, would not use it even though they had the motor equipment to do so. The motor nerves that move muscles were completely unharmed and available even if the nerves allowing feeling were not. Therefore, it was assumed that sensory feedback (feeling in the limbs) was vital to the ability for motor movement – no feeling, no movement. Even when Sherrington tied up the monkey’s good arm, the monkey would not use the feelingless, ‘‘deafferented’’ arm to grasp food put in front of it. It was as if the arm was nonexistent in the monkey’s cognitive system even though he was very hungry. Sherrington’s thesis went unchallenged as late as the mid-1950s even though a German researcher named H. Munk, as early as 1909, had found that under certain conditions it was possible to induce a hungry monkey, with its good arm restrained, to lift food to its mouth with its nerve-severed, ‘‘deafferented’’ arm. This was only possible if the halting and uncoordinated attempts with the bad arm were immediately rewarded consistently over time until the monkey learned to use it again. Unfortunately Munk’s ﬁndings went unnoticed until 1957 when Edward Taub ran across them. Taub was a psychologist who ran a lab close to Silver Springs near NIMH in Bethesda, Maryland. Following Munk’s lead he tested the hypothesis that deafferented monkeys retained the latent capacity for purposeful behavior in these limbs – but only if the monkeys were forced to use them and only if they were routinely and immediately rewarded. Taub’s efforts to test this resulted in a damaging lawsuit for animal abuse. However, he did succeed in demonstrating that under tightly controlled conditions monkeys could be made to use their numbed and allegedly incapacitated arms. Certainly, the monkeys did not use the arms on their own, but they could be forced to do so if they were motivated by near starvation. They were also conditioned to use their numb arm in order to avoid intense electric shock if they failed to try. As a result, Taub argued that Sherrington’s long accepted thesis

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had to be qualiﬁed: although sensation was normally needed for voluntary, purposive movement, the need was not ironclad law. Under the conditions Taub imposed, feeling was not necessary for initial success at movement, and with further conditioning monkeys almost fully recovered the use of their damaged arms. These crucial ﬁndings had to come after the death of the monkeys. An autopsy showed that new neuronal paths had been created by their extreme motivation and conditioning. These new paths allowed the eventual effective use of their feeling-deprived limbs. The somatosensory cortex controlling feeling from the body to the ‘‘cognitive’’ prefrontal cortex had been literally rezoned. The deafferented zone was no longer empty. Instead of receiving sensory input to the arm from the somatosensory cortex, the supposedly empty zone in the cortex had been replenished over the years by neuronal axons from the face! The monkeys’ consistent attempts to use their bad arms had rewired their feelings in a way legitimately described as ‘‘massive cortical reorganization’’ (Schwartz & Begley, 2002, p. 159). The monkeys had been able to feel again. This allowed the possibility that human neural wiring did not have to stop at early adolescence as neuroscientiﬁc dogma insisted at the time. One of the anomalies of Taub’s studies was that monkeys with the nerves of both limbs somatically severed eventually learned to move their arms out of necessity whereas monkeys left to their own devices and with only one limb disconnected did not. That is, with lesions only half as extensive, these monkeys seemed simply to forget the feelingless arm because they could use the other one. Knowing that it was possible for the monkey to be forcefully trained to use it, Taub coined the term ‘‘learned disuse’’ and in 1992 (after he was reinstated into his profession) he applied his forced conditioning procedure to human stroke patients whose arms were paralyzed. Unable to use the harsh methods he applied to his monkeys, Tuab would put the patient’s good arm in a sling and their good hand in an oven mitt – anything within the law to make sure they were motivated to use their ‘‘useless’’ arms. They also had to use their paralyzed arms to do the strenuous exercises Taub put them through. The results with what he called constraint-induced therapy were the same as with the monkeys – scans of his rehab patients’ brains indeed demonstrated the cortical remapping and thus the neural plasticity of the adult brain as the patients learned to reuse their limbs. As reported by Begley (2007, p. 122) the crowning achievement of constraint-induced therapy was reported in 2006 when 21 stroke patients who had experienced their paralysis for an average of four and a half years

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received Taub’s therapy 6 hours a day for 10 days. Twenty controls were also given strength training but nothing that targeted their useless arms. At the end of 2 weeks Taub’s group had shown large improvements that held up 2 years later. (For a larger study involving Taub with similar results see Wolf et al., 2006.) Other studies reveal that the brain area producing movements of the affected arm almost doubled in size. Areas recruited to take the place of damaged neuronal structures can be in areas close to the damage or can even come from the opposite hemisphere of the brain. The human brain throughout the aging process is not as immutably hard-wired as scientists had thought. (See for example, Taub, 2004, 2006.)

Nursing the Self Back into the Driver’s Seat in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder While Taub began applying what he had learned to stroke patients, Jeffery Schwartz applied Taub’s ﬁnding to patients suffering from OCD. As important as Taub’s work was, his therapy was not centered in the use of one’s mind as a causal force. One advantage that OCD patients possessed for Schwartz’s research purposes was that many were highly intelligent. More than any one else, they knew perfectly well the folly of their compulsions. In other words cognitive distortion was not an intrinsic part of the disease (Schwartz & Begley, 2002, p. 17). They knew nothing dreadful would happen if they did not follow the rituals of their compulsions, be it skipping cracks in sidewalks, washing hands continually, or counting cans in the pantry. They also possessed the sane calmness of recognizing the insanity of their compulsions. It was just that certain parts of their brains would not let them feel the convictions of their cognitions. The mind said one thing and the brain’s emotionally driven limbic system said another. Wentworth and Ryan (1992) have labeled feelings that overpower our minds as ‘‘ego-alien.’’ According to Schwartz and Begley (2002, p. 77) the notion of ‘‘bare attention’’ in Buddhist meditation involves the same act of viewing one’s ego-alien experience as a calm, clear-minded outsider. The point of Schwartz’s therapy was to use the cognitive distancing inherent in the reﬂexive process as a wedge to eventually gain control over the body. Before Schwartz’s work on OCD started, the reigning behaviorist therapies for the disorder ignored voluntaristic processes where the patient initiated the action and used his or her own volition to change his obsessions. One such approach was called exposure and response prevention

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(ERP). The prevention part begins with the patient ranking objects or situations triggering their OCD by the level of distress they cause. The therapist then exposed the patient to their fears. For a mild example, they might have them wipe their hands on toilet seats. The prevention was that they were not allowed to wash their hands despite over-riding impulses to do so. The therapist and patient would then wait until the intensity of the urge returned to preexposure levels. Needless to say, exposure to some of the more intense levels listed by the patient would make a normal person extremely distressed. Although effective for some patients, 20 to 30% of them never completed the program. Since it involved a therapist standing over the patient for long periods of the day, it was not an answer for the vast majority of sufferers. To Schwartz the approach was not only callous, but it ignored everything he knew about human agency (Schwartz & Begley, 2002, pp. 2–5). In stark contrast to ERP strategies, he relied on the patient’s own human capacities of reﬂexivity wherein the patient uses full mindfulness to stand calmly outside of the experience and observe the impulses from the perspective of the detached observer – as if she or he were someone else. One way to convince the patient of the latter was to teach them about the brain parts that malfunctioned in their problematic episodes and to show him or her the images from actual PET scans reﬂecting the disorder. Two areas of the brain become overactive in OCD patients and this is clearly visible in the scans. These areas involve the lower part of the prefrontal lobes and the stratium which is located deep in the brain forward of the ears. Taken together they comprise a ‘‘worry circuit’’ (Begley, 2007, p. 138). Overactivity in these circuits produce ego-alien convictions of foreboding as a matter of body chemistry regardless of one’s cognitions otherwise.7 Witnessing actual images of the overactivity in these speciﬁc parts of their brains helped patients to reinterpret their feelings as consequences of chemistry rather than their personal identities. One woman looking at her PET scan voiced this explicitly by exclaiming, ‘‘that’s not me its my OCD!’’ In this way patients came to deconstruct their overpowering feelings as ‘‘the electronic detritus of brain circuitry’’ (Begley, 2007, p. 140). This helped them to realize as Kabat-Zinn suggested, that they were ‘‘more than their pain’’ and in this case more than the gray matter of their brains. Mind, comprised of extra-sensory communicative process, was free of the senses. The essential part of Schwartz’s therapy was to get all of his patients to just that point of observing their emotional convictions from a detached standpoint ‘‘above the fray’’ of their bodies. This offered them the perspective on themselves that maximized their ‘‘sanity within insanity.’’

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Impulses to wash became interpreted as ‘‘not really them.’’ In Mead’s terms, patients were rejecting their obsessive identities and constructing another one independent of their disorder.

Program Implementation In the ﬁrst part of Schwartz’s four-step method of therapy referred to as ‘‘relabeling,’’ patients were helped to identify their compulsive urges as quickly and clearly as possible. Rather than interpreting their tendencies as an authentic desire to wash, they were encouraged to concentrate on the fact that the need was an illusion, no matter how powerful, caused by a ‘‘brain wiring problem or a biochemical imbalance lacking true information and content.’’ As described above, the major goal in the ﬁrst step is to see these ‘‘glitches from a rogue neurological circuit as separate from their will and their selves’’ (Schwartz & Begley, 2002, p. 82). Relabeling is a refusal to take OBC symptoms at face value. Cognition however can be relatively superﬁcial since it implies a mere change in how something is identiﬁed in a larger placement scheme. When this reinterpretation results in an emotional shift away from selfidentiﬁcation with the obsession toward a realization that it does not reﬂect the true self, the patient is entering the second stage referred to as ‘‘reattribution.’’ This involves the felt attribution of the OCD compulsions to the nonself. It is emotional insight. Relabeling blends imperceptibly into reattribution wherein the patient is hit with the realization that she is more than her disease. It is the ‘‘That’s not me!’’ response of the patient looking at the PET scan of her brain during an episode of OCD. Both stages reinforce each other making possible the patients’ mental clarity about who they really are. The third stage is ‘‘refocusing.’’ Here mere cognition and more substantive emotional realization come together in the actual implementation of the will to change behavior. The purpose here is not to banish the anxiety and dread involved, but to substitute an adaptive course of action in place of carrying out the OCD compulsion. This is obviously the hardest part of treatment pitting mind and its ‘‘independent space’’ against body and brain. Biologically, patients were beginning the task of creating a ‘‘good’’ neuronal circuit from a bad one. Here diversion from the compulsive behavior could be physical activity such as needlepoint, gardening, woodworking, or taking a walk. This stage characterized by behavioral empowerment, was helped by a ﬁfteen-minute rule that at ﬁrst set a reasonably ﬁnite length of time before giving in to a compulsive urge. This was not a period of passive waiting but

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of active adaptive behavior. Often this was enough time for the compulsion to diminish and for the patient to gather some degree of conﬁdence in moderating, if not completely subduing, their obsessions. According to Schwartz and Begley (2002, p. 85) refocusing reinforces the insight that active will is separable from passive brain processes. The last step of Schwartz’s training program for placing mind over matter was deﬁned as ‘‘revaluing’’ – a deeper form of relabeling he says. This step seems to incorporate the others with special attention to ‘‘mindful awareness’’ as emphasized in Theravada Buddhist Philosophy. It is also described it as ‘‘wise attention’’ enabling the quick recognition of OCD thoughts as senseless and false.

Findings Schwartz exposed 18 patients with moderate to severe symptoms to 10 weeks of the initial four-step program. They were PET-scanned twice in order to see if the positive behavioral changes were correlated with predicted changes in the brain parts associated with OCD. Twelve of the patients improved signiﬁcantly and their brain scans showed signiﬁcantly diminished metabolic activity in the particular parts that were overactive in OCD. This was the ﬁrst evidence that a self-directed, purely mindful, drug free therapy, designed to ‘‘change the way patients thought about their thoughts’’ had the power to change brain chemistry in a well-deﬁned brain circuit (see Schwartz, Stoessel, Baxter, Martin, & Phelps, 1996; Schwartz & Begley, 2002, p. 90). Since 2002 there have been a number of successful replications of his general principles by others in a wide variety of maladies, such as cerebral palsy, aphasia, and depression. This establishes a signiﬁcant degree of ‘‘external validity’’ for the work put forward on mind-formed plasticity by Sperry, Taub, and Schwartz among others.

Changing the Circuits of the Brain in Depression NIMH organized the most thorough evaluation of major treatment approaches to depression in 1989.8 Four therapies were evaluated: (1) cognitive-behavior wherein patients learn to think about their thoughts differently and to change their tendencies toward negativity, (2) interpersonal approaches centered on relationships and conﬂicts, (3) drug therapy using a popular antidepressant,

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imipramine, and (4) a placebo. In the most severe cases of depression, the antidepressant demonstrated the greatest improvement with the two psychotherapies in the middle and the placebo last. In mild to moderate cases of depression the two psychotherapies were equal to drug treatment.9 However, considering that the rate of relapse in treated depression is 50%, a more relevant evaluation would necessitate a study of treatments and recidivism. On the average, a patient with a serious case of depression will suffer four major episodes later on. The ﬁrst evidence that mindfulness training along the lines suggested by Kabit-Zinn and Schwartz could reduce relapse rates in patients suffering from three or more episodes was reported by a group of Cambridge researchers (Teasdale et al., 2000; Begley, 2007, p. 146). Teasdale, like Schwartz, thought that patients could escape repeated depressive episodes by learning to use the power of the mind to relabel their depressive thoughts10 ‘‘simply as brain events rather than absolute truths.’’ Thoughts and emotions, they learned, do not reﬂect reality. In a study of 145 patients who had at least one major episode of depression in the past ﬁve years, half were given 8 weeks of mindfulness therapy. Sixty-six percent remained relapse-free after 1 year compared to 34% of the other patients who received ‘‘treatment as usual.’’ Obviously to have this amount of relapse is disconcerting, but the difference in treatment effects are still signiﬁcant and 2 months of therapy is not excessive. A signiﬁcant question remained about the various effects of different kinds of therapy on the brain itself. Mayberg et al. (2002) hypothesized that when depression subsided, whatever the treatment, fMRI scans would show that activity in the cortex increased and activity in the limbic system, the seat of emotions, decreased (mind over embodied emotion). When she had the opportunity to test this hypothesis on 27 patients, she found differently. Cognitive-behavioral therapy reduced overactivity in the frontal cortex, which is seen as the seat of cognition including constant cogitations and ruminations. Paxil increased activity in the frontal cortex, but cognitivebehavioral therapy increased activity in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is involved in emotional aspects of memory without which learning cannot take place. Paxil lowered this activity. Cognitive-behavioral therapy produced a pattern opposite to that of antidepressants. Learning has a priority in cognitive therapies that it does not have in drug therapies. They found that cognitive therapy works from top-down while drugs work from the bottom up. Cognitive-behavioral therapies tend to decrease endless ruminations while increasing new patterns of learning (Goldapple et al., 2004). Although this study involved a small number of patients, the ﬁndings imply that training in mindedness behavior may produce fundamentally different thought patterns

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from those produced with drug therapy and could reduce those patterns leading to recidivism. To summarize, the results produced by Schwartz, and the others above using his therapeutic strategies, support the conclusion that consciousness and mindful volition is an emergent from the brain and cannot be explained simply by the brain’s material substance. This is especially true for his OCD patients, but may well be true in depression. The materialistic position would insist that the brain is changing itself and that there is no need to posit a separate, nonmaterial entity called mind to explain these changes. Although mental force, according to Schwartz, needs the brain to express itself, the mind is nonetheless a qualitatively different emergent that can act independently from, and actively upon, the cells from which it arose. The direction of causation relating brain and mind must be bidirectional according to Schwartz and Begley (2002, p. 95).

CONCLUSIONS The purpose of this essay has been limited to describing a convergence between several leading neuroscientists and G. H. Mead’s view of mind as an irreducible reality – and thus a necessary concept – in the analysis of human behavior. By describing current evidence for mind as a causal force in brain plasticity, its emergent reality was thereby supported. Whereas previous arguments for the reality of mind were general and complex, the evidence brought together by Schwartz and Begley (2002) is relatively straightforward. Mead saw the human cortex as indispensable to the existence of mind and selves, but neuroscience in his lifetime was not advanced enough to be useful to him (Mead, 1934, pp. 1–2, 236). The discussion describing Sperry’s more recent notion of emergence has contributed some detail as to how and why mind is a necessary factor in the organization of the self and the tangible brain (see also Gazzaniga’s 1988 argument in this regard). It was, of course, Mead who argued speciﬁcally for mind’s social nature but even here, neuroscience has painted a rich picture of the social nature of the brain as a whole. For example, Brothers (1997, p. xii) concludes that while material brains obviously exist as individual entities, a functioning brain is dependent on other brains and the broader symbolic structures that allow them to mindfully communicate. Central also to the neuroscience argument for our social natures, is the human capacity to construct theories

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of each others’ minds which has obvious overlap with Mead’s role-taking (Cacioppo et al., 2002). In addition to the limited argument above, several other issues run between the lines of this essay. One has to do with agency. Mead’s concept of role-taking remains one of our few voluntaristic options to behavior modiﬁcation models based on deterministic conditioning; it places emphasis on the actor’s own ‘‘reasons’’ and semiotics rather than external conditioning and determinate ‘‘causes.’’ The minded practices central to the success of the therapies described above are rooted in processes that deﬁne our humanity and are critical to the stress on agency in symbolic interaction. Fuchs (2001) contends that agency can be seen as a residual category resulting from unexplained variance in structural processes – in short, agency is an attribution that can be made by observers when structural predictions fail; it then becomes a default explanation. But, as empirical examples of agency, the successful efforts of the patients above do not appear to be ‘‘unexplained residuals.’’ The four-staged program implementation provides a substantial description of the patient’s self-healing. They are clear examples of actors who transcend mere words into a more active practice where word-formed thoughts lead them to more substantive deeds. (Lyng & Franks, 2002; Shalin, 2007). The change of synaptic structures according to one’s intentions involves a tangible reality that is more than a verbal exercise and more than attributions made by observers. The other related issue running as a subtext herein has to do with reductionism. In the last part of the twentieth century, many sociologists associated neuroscience with the crude reductionism of biosociology. Granted, Sir Francis Crick (1994) insisted that the emotions, thoughts and desires comprising lived experience and consciousness were merely the biochemical and synaptic activity of the tangible brain. But it is equally true that reductionism raises serious problems for many leading ﬁgures in neuroscience. Though reductionist, ‘‘bottom up’’ models are often preferred as research strategies, it cannot be said that on a theoretical level neuroscience as a whole is reductionistic in Crick’s sense. For example, Damasio (1994, p. 124) who is certainly eminent in the ﬁeld writes: I am not attempting to reduce social phenomena to biological phenomena, but rather to discuss the powerful connection between them. It should be clear that although culture and civilization arise from the behavior of biological individuals, the behavior was generated in collectivities of individuals interacting in speciﬁc environments. Culture and civilization could not have arisen from single individuals and thus cannot be reduced to biological mechanisms, and even less, can they be reduced to a subset of genetic

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speciﬁcations. Their comprehension demands not just general biology and neurobiology but the methodologies of the social sciences as well.

Edelman (1992, p. 166), like Sperry and Crick, a Nobel Prize winner, uses direct language about the matter: To reduce a theory of an individual’s behavior to a theory of molecular reactions is simply silly, a point made clear when one considers how many different levels of physical, biological and social interactions must be put in place before higher-order consciousness emerges.

Other leading ﬁgures, Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998, p. 264n) refer to the existence of reductionism in neuroscience but warn: Unfortunately, many people think that because reductionism is so often useful in solving problems it is therefore also sufﬁcient for solving them, and generations of neuroscientists have been raised on this dogma. This misapplication of reductionism leads to the perverse and tenuous belief that somehow reductionism itself will tell us how the brain works, when what is needed are attempts to bridge different levels of discourse.

This is not meant to be a balanced survey of neuroscience opinion on reductionism, but combined with others like Sperry, Schwartz and Brothers it sufﬁces to show that much of the ﬁeld is moving in a way that makes rapprochement with sociology more possible than previously believed. The commonsense notion of determinacy has the great appeal of promising simplistic mental closure to understanding the natural world. Because of this, it may always be inﬂuential regardless of evidence otherwise. Currently in the public world of application, behavior modiﬁcation approaches still win the day. Deterministic frameworks ignore the viewpoint of symbolic interaction and, as Schwartz insisted, the very capacities that deﬁne our humanness. Theoretically minded symbolic interactionists could beneﬁt from the dialog in neuroscience that transcends the simplistic deterministic/free-will dichotomies that block progress in understanding agency (see Dennett, 2003). The technical work of neuroscience makes available important evidence for the causal force of mindedness for our material brains and lives. This evidence can be useful even if it involves turning to the biological brain.

NOTES 1. For example, in sociology the decisions of a group can be very different from those that its separate members would have produced if they had not been in interaction with each other. This is especially true when social pressures make it

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difﬁcult for persons to speak candidly and an over-riding value is not placed on ‘‘thinking for one’s self.’’ Such emergent decisions, common in military settings, are the results of what we know as ‘‘group think.’’ Some scholars in the past have complained that the ‘‘more’’ in the statement that ‘‘the group is more than the sum of its parts’’ is a mysterious entity, but there is little mysterious about persons not feeling free to say things that will put them in a bad light with their colleagues and authorities. 2. TenHouten (1999, p. 45) covers the same ground as the above but adds thaty‘‘Sperry’s emergent mentalism needs to confront the proposition that a still higher level of organization, the sociocultural, exists not independently of ideas and consciousness, but at a level beyond what Sperry sees as the ‘‘top’’ and which contains its own irreducible, emergent properties.’’ TenHouten warns that there can be no reduction of society to mind. 3. That cognition gives control rather than some kind of experiential ‘‘connectedness’’ with reality is an important tenant in the pragmatism shared by Mead and Dewey. Symbols actually separate the inseparable and stop the unstoppable. The experiential essence of time is unbroken, continuous passage. Cognitions (and thus, mind) artiﬁcially break this unbroken duration into static seconds, minutes, hours, and days etc. This artiﬁcial rupture allows us to stop time dead in its tracks when we say, ‘‘Columbus discovered American in 1492.’’ This is clearly a case of the mental in contrast to the actual, however advantageous it may be to the human capacity for thought. Likewise, we separate the inseparable when we break the lived experience of water down into hydrogen and oxygen and their relation in the term H2O. 4. Note that in neuroscience discussions particularly, mind becomes reiﬁed into a substantial place or thing since grammatically it is a noun. Actually mind should be a verb since it is an active process as described above and should be considered as ‘‘minding.’’ 5. By this he means that nature works like time or duration in an unbroken continuum with no discrete breaks. At the ends of the continuum the differences in animal forms that have developed over the eons are discrete and obvious. But there was no clear-cut time, for example, when a categorical difference between reptiles and mammals became immediately evident. The Duck Billed Platypus to this day possesses a delightful mix of reptilian and mammalian characteristics. She both lays eggs and nurses her young. In a more current vein, the argument for global warming is disadvantaged because there will be no discrete warning before it is too late to turn it around. 6. His most notable student was Michael Gazzaniga who followed up on Sperry’s work on split-brain research. Here mind is conceived as an executor making ad hoc sense out of the many contradictory impulses produced by the modules of the brain below our awareness. See Gazzaniga’s 1988, Mind Matters: How the Mind and the Brain Interact to Create our Conscious Lives.’’ 7. The striatum receives inputs from the prefrontal cortex as well as the amygdalae, twin structures of the limbic system that are the seat of fear and dread. It is well known that the neuronal channels going up from the limbic system to the cognitive systems of the prefrontal lobes are more plentiful and robust than those coming down and exerting control of the emotional impulses of the limbic system. Self-conscious efforts to dismiss unrealistic fears (as in fear of ﬂying) face an uphill

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battle and are frequently ineffectual in normal persons, much less those afﬂicted with OCD (see Carter, 1999, p. 98). 8. An expanded version of this discussion can be found in Begley (2007, p. 242). 9. Begley (2007, p. 143) attributes the perception of the blanket superiority of medication to the incomparable capacity of high-proﬁt drug companies to promote their products. 10. Seriously depressed patients ﬁnd it hard to believe that such an overwhelming conviction of gloom could exist without any real veracity. The very fact that they feel so bad becomes clear evidence of their culpability and hopelessness. It is very difﬁcult for them to see such powerful forces as the result of arbitrary chemical imbalances with no real meaning. Extreme social constructionists may have the same difﬁculty in understanding this determinate force. Damasio’s (2003, p. 67) ﬁnding should give pause here: He describes the unintended electrical stimulation of a spot in the brain stem of a patient who had never before been acutely depressed. Upon this stimulation she was overcome immediately with feelings of sadness along with script-like language about the meaninglessness of life and her own unworthiness and lack of interest in living. When the probes were taken away, the feelings as well as the language disappeared just as immediately and she wondered what the whole thing was about.

REFERENCES Begley, S. (2007). Train your mind change your brain. New York: Ballentine Books. Brothers, L. (1997). Friday’s footprint: How society shapes the human brain. New York: Oxford Press. Bruccoli, M. J. (1991). The collected writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Cacioppo, J., Berntson, G., Adolphs, R., Carter, C., Davidson, R., McClintock, M., McEwen, B., Meaney, M., Schacter, D., Sternberg, E., Suomi, S., & Taylor, S. (2002). Foundations in social neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carter, R. (1999). Mapping the mind. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crick, F. H. (1994). The astonishing hypothesis: The scientiﬁc search for the soul. New York: Simon and Schuster. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Avon Books. Damasio, A. R. (2003). Looking for spinoza: Joy, sorrow and the feeling brain. New York: Harcourt Brace. Dennett, D. C. (2003). The self as a responding – and responsible – artifact. In: J. Le Doux, J. Debiec, & H. Moss, (Eds), The self: From soul to brain (pp. 39–50). New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1001. Doidge, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. New York: Viking Press. Edelman, G. (1992). Bright air, brilliant ﬁre: On the matter of mind. New York: Basic Books. Fuchs, S. (2001). Beyond agency. Sociological Theory, 19(1), 24–40. Gazzaniga, M. S. (1988). Mind matters: How the mind and the brain interact to create our conscious lives. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Co.

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Goldapple, K. Z., Segal, Z., Garison, C., Lau, M., Bieling, P., Kennedy, S., & Mayberg, H. (2004). Modiﬁcation of cortical–limbic pathways in major depression: Treatment-speciﬁc effects of cognitive therapy. Archives of General Psychiatry, 61, 34–41. Henninger, P. (1994). Roger Sperry’s theory of consciousness, its antecedents and consequences. In: W. TenHouten (Ed.), Social Neuroscience Bulletin. Vol. 7, No 2. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. New York: Delta Books. Lyng, S., & Franks, D. D. (2002). Sociology and the real world. New York: Rowman and Littleﬁeld Publishers. Mayberg, H. S., Silvia, J., Brannan, S., Tekell, J., Mahurin, R. K., McGinnis, S., & Jerabek, P. (2002). The functional neuroanatomy of the placebo effect. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 729–737. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, D. L. (1973). George Herbert Mead: Self, language, and the world. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ramachandran, V. S., & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind. New York: William Morrow. Schwartz, J. M., & Begley, S. (2002). The mind and the brain: Neuroplasticity and the power of mental force. New York: Regan Books. Schwartz, J. M., Stoessel, P., Baxter, L., Jr., Martin, K., & Phelps, M. (1996). Systematic changes in cerebral glucose metabolic activity after successful behavior modiﬁcation treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder. Archives of General Psychology, 53, 109–113. Shalin, D. N. (2007). Signing in the ﬂesh: Notes on pragmatist hermeneutics. Sociological Theory, 25(3), 193–224. Sperry, R. (1964). Problems outstanding in the evolution of brain function. James Authur lecture of the evolution of the human brain. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Sperry, R. (1965). Mind–brain and humanistic value. In: J. R. Platt (Ed.), New views on the nature of man (pp. 71–92). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sperry, R. (1993). A mentalistic view of consciousness. Social Neuroscience Bulletin, 6(15), 15–19. Taub, E. (2004). Harnessing brain plasticity through behavioral techniques to produce new treatments in neurorehabilitation. American Psychologist, 59(8), 692–704. Taub, E., Uswatte, G., King, D., Morris, D., Crago, J., & Chatterjee, A. (2006). A placebo controlled trial trail of constraint-induced movement therapy for upper extremity after stroke. Stroke, 37, 1045–1949. Teasdale, J. D., Segal, Z., Williams, J., Ridgeway, V., Soulsby, J., & Lau, M. (2000). Prevention of relapse recurrence in major depression by mindfulness based cognitive therapy. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychiatry, 68, 615–623. TenHouten, W. D. (1999). Explorations in neurosociological theory: From the spectrum of affect to time consciousness. In: D. D. Franks & T. S. Smith (Eds), Mind, brain and society: Toward a neurosociology of emotion, social perspectives on emotion (Vol. 5, pp. 41–80). Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Wentworth, W., & Ryan, J. (1992). Balancing body, mind and culture: The place of emotion in social life. In: D. D. Franks & V. Gecas (Eds), Mind, brain and society: Toward a neurosociology of emotion. Social perspectives on emotion (Vol. 1, pp. 25–46). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Wolf, S., Winstein, C., Miller, J., Taub, E., Uswatte, G., Morris, D., Giuliani, C., Light, K., & Nichols-Larsen, D. (2006). Improving upper extremity function among patients 3–9 months post-stroke: The EXCITE National Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA, 296, 2095–2104.

THE PASSAGES OF THEORY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ORTEGA–MEAD CONNECTION Natalia Ruiz Junco ABSTRACT In this paper, I orchestrate an encounter between Mead and Ortega in which their notions of action, truth, self, society, and individual agency are systematically compared. Thus, I offer a critical comparison of Ortega’s and Mead’s positions on the above issues, pointing to the strengths and weaknesses in their respective theories. My comparison shows how an encounter between Mead and Ortega can lead to the reﬁnement, extension, and ultimate improvement in Mead’s ideas, especially his conception of the relation of the individual to society.

INTRODUCTION Over the years, Mead’s thought has been compared to that of a surprisingly large number of other theorists producing a literature far too big to review thoroughly here. Although I applaud these efforts, I do not uncritically accept their conclusions. On the contrary, I take pains to point out how the most recent comparative efforts are founded on problematic assumptions. For instance, in Hinkle’s (1992) comparison of Mead and Habermas, she Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 81–100 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31005-9

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argues that Mead’s theory has become obsolete in a world transited by globalization, and thus calls for its revision. Her efforts spring from the belief that symbolic interactionism is ahistorical, politically puerile, and obsolete as far as our understanding of the serious plight of our present world goes (Hinkle, 1992, p. 316). Despite this, she (Hinkle, 1992, p. 316) believes, however, that commitment to social change can be discerned in Mead’s life, and demands the theory derived from his works make social change its goal. In the most effective part of her article, Hinkle goes against the grain of Habermas’ exegeses and criticizes the excessively behavioristic interpretation that he gives of Mead’s work. Despite its virtues, the point of this comparison appears to be pressing Mead’s ideas into Habermas’ mold. Here, Mead is depicted as a conservative with a heart of gold who sees ‘‘the social as organized, rational, and good’’ (Hinkle, 1992, p. 328). In this comparison, the main similarities between Mead and Habermas are their noncausal model of understanding self and society and their communicative concepts of rationality1 (Hinkle, 1992, p. 328). Likewise, Batuik and Sacks (1981) comparison of Mead and Marx is founded on the idea that Mead’s theory fails to provide a critical program for transforming society. The goal of their article is to show how Mead’s and Marx’s ideas can be successfully synthesized (Batuik & Sacks, 1981, p. 208). For Batuik and Sacks (1981, p. 211), both Mead and Marx viewed self and society not in conﬂict with each other ‘‘but as aspects (emergents) of a single social process.’’ The authors tinker a bit with Marx to ﬁt his theory to this notion, because, as they note, Marx clearly differentiated between corrupted human society, where human relationships are reiﬁed, and communist utopian society. Furthermore, the authors avoid mentioning the Marxian concept of ideology as deception put forth in The German Ideology, which could complicate the synthesis. In sum, Mead is brought to the rescue of Marx (and Engels) to inform the development of consciousness, something, the authors agree, necessary for social transformation (Batuik & Sacks, 1981, p. 213). Aboulaﬁa (1986) also agrees with the former authors that Mead’s theory is partial, and needs some change. His comparison of Mead and Sartre is more Hegelian in nature: he presents each theorist’s ideas as a thesis, and then provides the synthesis that previous theses taken alone lacked. Aboulaﬁa (1986, pp. xiv–xv) introduces Mead and Sartre as two starkly different theorists: Mead standing for social determinism of individuality and scientiﬁc logic, and Sartre standing for the opposite. For Aboulaﬁa, they are a necessary pair of opposites for creating a synthetic answer to the problem of selfdetermination, which he views as unsatisfactorily treated by Mead and Sartre.

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Finally, Lewis, McLain, and Weigert (1993) compared the ideas of Mead not only against those of Schutz, but also Ortega. To my knowledge, their study is the only previous explicitly sociological comparison of Mead’s and Ortega’s ideas.2 Lewis et al. (1993) analyze the Ortega–Mead connection in hopes of moving forward their vital realist perspective. The authors argue that Mead’s, Schutz’s, and Ortega’s ideas converge on such important matters as interaction between environment and organism; the nature of consciousness; the relation between consciousness and life; the nature of social reality; and the study of social reality as an ‘‘objective’’ thing. Despite their forceful arguments in favor of a Ritzerian metatheory or synthesis of Ortega’s and Mead’s ideas, they fail to stress sufﬁciently the insurmountable differences in these two scholars’ thought that make a synthesis of their ideas on the above matters an impossibility. Thus, Lewis and his colleagues adapt Ortega’s, Mead’s, and Schutz’s oeuvre to the exigencies of an ambitious theoretical synthesis. Unfortunately, when Lewis and colleagues preﬁgure the ‘‘passages’’ among these different theorists as ‘‘universal’’ structures that transcend their differences, they badly distort their ideas. Among other things, Lewis and his colleagues overlook that Ortega and Mead proffered two different conceptions of human life. As the authors note, Mead’s evolutionary theory comprehends behavior in its physiological as well as social aspects. Ortega’s theory, however, discusses life as always my life, your life, her life. In other words, Ortega’s concept of life cannot be separated from the ﬁrst-person experience of radical reality, about which I, you, or she cannot doubt. Life always involves the individual’s inescapable ‘‘life plan’’ and her organic transformation of personal circumstance (Ortega y Gasset, [1932] 2006, p. 125). Lewis and colleagues also overlook that Ortega viewed the individual as much more at war with his environment than Mead did. In Ortega’s view, conﬂict always marks the interaction between human beings and the social world because they invariably ﬁnd themselves in an antagonistic relationship with their social environment as soon as they try to realize their life plans. In my paper, I will critically compare Mead’s ideas against those of Ortega (1883–1955), a Spanish intellectual, who actively involved in the issues of his time and place. Some years before the turn of the century, Raymond Aron (1988, p. 359) referred to him as ‘‘the master of Spanish thought in our century.’’ He wrote in newspapers, inﬂuenced public opinion, and participated in Spanish political life. To sociology, Ortega contributed as a writer, and as the founder and editor of the journal Revista de Occidente

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[Journal of the West], which introduced sociological theory to the Spanish public (Gray, 1989, p. 141). As far as his contribution to the ﬁeld of sociology is concerned, however, his most important work is his Man and People. In comparing Mead and Ortega’s ideas, I will draw on recent Mead scholarship, which has convincingly made the case for a change in the way we understand his theory (Athens, 2005, 2007). Unlike in the case of earlier comparisons of Mead’s thought with other theorists, including Ortega, I will not build my analysis as a rehearsal of a ‘‘contract’’ between Mead and Ortega, where I decide which ideas of each thinker are similar enough to keep and which ones are dissimilar enough to discard from their body work for the overriding purposes of synthesizing their theories. When synthesis is made the overriding goal behind comparing different theorists’ ideas, the similarities among them grow like mushrooms in a rainforest. Instead in my analysis, I will compare four areas of their thought that will hopefully advance our understanding of the common problems that Mead and Ortega examined: (1) action, (2) truth, (3) self, (4) society, and (5) individual agency.

TRUE MATCH? THE ORTEGA–MEAD CONNECTION Action Mead and Ortega situate action at the very center of their theories. The term pragmatism, which William James coined in a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley in 1898, is straightforward in this respect (Menand, 1997, p. xiii). The Greek origin of the term pragmatism points to the centrality of action. Ironically, Ortega employed the same Greek root but in elaborating his concepts of pragmata and pragmatic ﬁelds, he disassociated them from the pragmatist philosophy. When Ortega made the ﬁrst allusion to pragmatism, he declared it a ‘‘sect’’ and disqualiﬁed its scientiﬁc character (cited in Graham, 1994, p. 149). For Ortega, pragmatism was to blame for making ‘‘practical utility appear to be a norm of truth’’ (Ortega y Gasset, [1957] 1960, pp. 41–44). Moreover, Ortega equated pragmatism’s idea of truth with Comte’s positivist ideas about knowledge (see Ortega y Gasset, [1957] 1960, pp. 43–44). Ortega’s incorrect views on pragmatism were embedded in his harsh critique of the misuse of physics as the model for all sciences, a problem he deﬁned as ‘‘the imperialism of physics’’ (see Ortega y Gasset, [1957] 1960, p. 41). The imperialism of physics thesis points to physics as the

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hegemonic science, a science producing an objectivity of facts through the exclusion of ‘‘subjective’’ elements, such as values and meaning (San Martı´ n, 2005, p. 121). Ortega noted that a collateral effect of the imperialism of physics was to consolidate quantitative reductionism in the study of the human condition (San Martı´ n, 2005, p. 128). It is unfortunate that Ortega created a caricature of pragmatism. Ortega and Mead had more in common on this score than Ortega’s distorted picture of pragmatism reveals. Like Ortega, Mead ([1934] 1992, p. 11) criticized positivists’ reductionism, speciﬁcally Watson’s radical behaviorism.3 Similar to pragmatists, Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 29) believed that ‘‘man [sic] is primarily and fundamentally action.’’ It follows from this basic premise that as one establishes a connection with objects, one’s connection to them is pragmatic. He stated that ‘‘since ‘to do’ and ‘to occupy oneself,’ ‘to have concerns’ is expressed in Greek by ‘practice,’ praxis – things are radically pragmata and my relation to them is pragmatic’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, pp. 53–4). We are surrounded with pragmata or the practical concerns that affect us, things without a ‘‘being by and in itself ’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 62). Thus, pragmata are ﬁrst and foremost elements of the individual’s subjectivity. According to Ortega, pragmata belong to one or several pragmatic ﬁelds. Ortega described pragmatic ﬁelds as areas of concerns that bring people to act together, but he emphasized their subjective side. Examples of pragmatic ﬁelds include the artistic, religious, scientiﬁc, and literary worlds (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 80). Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 80) argued that the integration of pragmatic ﬁelds brought order to social reality because these different ﬁelds are connected to each other. As will become clearer later, Ortega’s conception of pragmatic ﬁelds resembles Mead’s idea of society as a compendium of institutions4 (see Athens, 2005). However, Ortega did not uncritically accept pragmata, but detected a serious problem with the application of this notion. According to him, the problem with pragmatic ﬁelds is that they often fail to capture the reality of human concerns that originate in ourselves or others and, thereby, provides a faulty conception of how they affect our actions. For Ortega, pragmata do not represent our real concerns in life, but, as he liked to call them, ‘‘pseudothings.’’ Thus, our behavior toward them falls under the category of ‘‘pseudo-doing.’’ Likewise, Ortega argued that individuals doubt the nature of other individuals’ concerns: ‘‘[t]he reality of the other man, of this other ‘human life,’ is, then, of the second degree in comparison with the primary reality that is my life, that is my I, that is my world’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 97).

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Although Ortega’s observation appears to have Cartesian twist to it, he (Ortega y Gasset, [1932] 2006, p. 148) blatantly rejected any form of Cartesianism or idealism that ends in solipsism. While an ‘‘unofﬁcial’’ position, Ortega y Gasset ([1932] 2006, p. 191) also claimed that some individuals have ‘‘radical curiosity,’’ that results in the movement from interest only in oneself to interest in the other, and thereby beyond the ‘‘subjective interests’’ that make individuals only concerned with their egos. The problem with Ortega’s argument is explaining how intersubjective reality is created from different people’s radical curiosities. To complicate matters further, he also argues that the importance of the concerns of others is always less important to us than our own concerns. He appears to assume that there is a stratiﬁed construction of social reality built up somehow from our different individual incommensurate perceptions of it. Thus, Ortega apparently conceives of an experiential hierarchy of reality, in which individuals always place their own concerns before the concerns of other people. This strikes me as dissonant with interactionist’s tenets about the social construction of reality. Unlike Ortega’s conception of action, Mead does not emphasize the individual’s experience of subjective truths with regard to the social world of everyday concerns. Instead, Mead argued that problem-solving is the essence of human action, as characterized by analytical thinking addressing the ‘‘conﬂict between different lines of activity’’ (Mead, [1900] 1964, p. 7). The solving of problems deﬁnes the future of the human condition in Mead’s theory. For this reason, problem-solving is a sine qua non of Mead’s notion of utopian thinking: ‘‘[a] conception of a different world comes to us always as the result of some speciﬁc problem which involves readjustment of the world as it is, not to meet a detailed ideal of a perfect universe, but to obviate the present difﬁculty y’’ (Mead, 1899, p. 71). Although action is also characteristic of the human condition in Ortega’s theory, his notion of action entails a defense of uncompromising individuals vis-a`-vis those who submit to their circumstances. Among all human actions, the ones that Ortega feels are the most worthwhile are the ones that transform individuals’ vital circumstances. As these ideas suggest, Ortega’s individualistic notion of action is clearly at odds with Mead’s much more social conception of it.

Truth Perspectivism in Ortega’s theory is inaugurated as a distinct approach with the publication of Meditations on Quixote in 1914 (Kilgore, 1972, p. 500).

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Although Ortega believed that individuals have different perspectives on reality, he understood that this fact does not preclude them from taking for granted the existence of an objective world independent from their own particular views. People interact with each other, and consequently, they assume the objectivity of a world out there (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 108). Nevertheless, Ortega stressed that the objectivity of this world is antithetical to the subjective experience which individuals have of it. In other words, Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 142) suggested that living in the objective world full of ‘‘things that claim to exist independently of each one of us, indifferent to you, to me, and to anybody’’ is alienated living. This world of things, Ortega believes, is a world which fails to awaken in us the experiences of life as radical reality. The opposite to the primary experience of radical reality is precisely this experience of living ‘‘among interpretations of reality,’’ which others force upon throughout our lives (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, pp. 97–98). Ortega’s theory of truth reproduces the former dichotomies between the subjective and the objective and between primary and secondary experiences. In Ortega’s view, pure truth is irremissibly linked to both the experience of life as radical reality and the experience of discovery. In an early writing that is exemplary of his later theory, Ortega y Gasset ([1914] 2000, p. 67) stated, ‘‘[o]nce known, truths acquire a utilitarian crust; they no longer interest us as truths but as useful recipes. That pure, sudden illumination which characterizes truth accompanies the latter only at the moment of discovery.’’ As the above quote evinces, pure truths are antithetical to utilitarian ones. In Ortega’s view, truth can become part of the reiﬁed world of objects that adopt a ‘‘utilitarian crust.’’ The good news is that the pure may be separated from the impure or utilitarian through the Socratic method.5 What empirical context reﬂects Ortega’s ideas about truth today? One contemporary example of this would be the difﬁculty to come to terms with reality when this reality is habitually mediated as in the classic case of the mass media. The increase in mediated experiences would make it even harder to access our own life as radical reality. This feeling of human derealization resonates with the blurring of lines between the real and the unreal present in postmodern authors like Jean Baudrillard (1994). Unlike postmodernists, Ortega believed it is possible to make a choice and choose the (real) genuine life of authentic experiences of self over the (unreal) false life of mediated experiences. Thus, unlike Mead, Ortega offered a theoretical viewpoint from which to study what postmodernists claim is a new phenomenon: the postmodern mediated society.

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Ortega was also disenchanted with the notion of truth as collectively produced. He (Ortega y Gasset, [1914] 2000, p. 89) described the meaning of an object as ‘‘the mystic shadow which the rest of the universe casts on it.’’ The corollary to this is that most of the time we capture only the shadow of meaning rather than real meaning of an object, which sends our lives off track. This contrasts sharply with Mead’s ([1934] 1992, p. 71–72) deﬁnition of a symbol’s meaning as that which acts as ‘‘stimulus,’’ and usually ‘‘calls out’’ the same responses in different individuals (cf. Blumer 1969, p. 69). Interestingly, Mead’s and Ortega’s arguments share the premise that meaning is socially produced, although Ortega’s ultimate denial of shared meaning in historical situations sets Mead and Ortega apart. Unlike Ortega, Mead grounded his understanding of truth on the idea of the organization of perspectives, which the latter drew from Whitehead (Mead, [1927] 1964, p. 308). This idea implies that reality emerges from the combination of perspectives. This combination of perspectives constitutes our reality (Mead, [1927] 1964, p. 308; see also Mead, 1938, p. 119). For instance, Mead discussed in detail the scientiﬁc perspective. For him, objectivity in social scientiﬁc research is a function of the shared adoption of the scientiﬁc perspective, which advances rapidly according to procedure6 (Mead, [1927] 1964, pp. 310–11). However, in addition, Mead recognized another element of truth. Mead (1936, p. 29) argued that truth is also dependent on community recognition for its validation: ‘‘[i]f a thing is not recognized as true, then it does not function as true in the community. People have to recognize it if they are going to act on it.’’ This new understanding of truth as social recognition goes further than his orthodox ideas about the scientiﬁc method (Mead, 1899, p. 370). It implies that it is not the religious following of certain scientiﬁc procedures, but the social recognition of an object that makes that particular construction of reality hold. One could easily envision a situation in which the commonly accepted scientiﬁc object considered to be true among the scientiﬁc community resists acceptance as true by the public, because it is not yet true to them, and thus they cannot ‘‘act on it.’’ A case in point is global warming. To understand this discrepancy, Ortega contributes the concepts of beliefs and ideas – which lack direct counterparts in Mead’s theory. Ortega y Gasset ([1940] 2006, pp. 661–670) considered beliefs as the unexamined assumptions underlying our everyday existence. Individuals have beliefs without thinking about them, debating, afﬁrming, or denying them. They are ‘‘extremely radical’’ to each individual. Unlike beliefs, ideas are those mental constructs that individuals argue, refute, reﬂect upon, synthesize, etc. Scientiﬁc constructs are prototypically ideas. As with the

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world outside the scientiﬁc testing described by Mead, beliefs usually remain in the background of our minds. Thus, Ortega’s considerations lead us to a reformulation of the global warming case. According to Ortega’s theory, even if some individuals accept as undisputed the scientiﬁc truth of global warming’s effects on our climate, some would accept this merely as ‘‘idea,’’ and thus it will not be part of their practical, unreﬂected life. That idea will not have practical consequences in the behavior of those individuals. In this light, it is easy to see an afﬁnity between Ortega’s concepts and conceptualizations such as Giddens’ (1984) distinction between practical and discursive consciousness. In fact, Ortega y Gasset ([1940] 2006, pp. 661–670) argued that doubt opens the door for ideas to truly install themselves in individuals’ subjectivity. This is akin to the transition between practical and discursive consciousness. Thus, it would be possible that a process of reﬂection on unexamined beliefs and behaviors would lead individuals to transform their relationship with the environment, and thus take a stand in the global warming debate beyond the mere repetition or unbinding adoption of others’ ideas. In sum, the inclusion of different notions of perspectival truth in Mead’s and Ortega’s theoretical apparatuses has remarkable consequences for each of their theories. On the one hand, Ortega professed an implacable doubt about the authenticity of the social world and was prey to a subjectivist notion of human experience understood as antithetical to the objective world. On the other, he remained faithful to experiential truth: science will never be assimilated to ‘‘radical reality’’ for individuals; it is a social construction (Ortega y Gasset, [1940] 2006, p. 668). For his part, Mead conceived of the social world in terms of an organization of perspectives and stressed the scientiﬁc perspective as the most objective, although Mead did not espouse a one-dimensional explanation of truth.

Self The general conception of self in Ortega’s theory is expressed succinctly with his famous maxim, formulated in its full form for the ﬁrst time in Meditations on Quixote: ‘‘I am myself plus my circumstance.’’ In fact, Ortega used the verb ‘‘to save’’ in order to convey the dutiful purpose of transforming the circumstances one encounters in life. This is clear in another formulation of the same maxim, ‘‘I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I cannot save myself’’ (Ortega y Gasset, [1914] 2000, p. 45). This maxim is so germane to Ortega’s work that he declared it a succinct expression of his

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overall theory (cited in Marı´ as, [1957] 2000, p. 13). With the Civil War in Spain and his exile in France, Argentina and Portugal, Ortega came to understand the maxim in terms of a blatant confrontation of the individual with the insidious circumstances (Molinuevo, 2002, p. 102). The maxim, however, always retained the idea of life as a ‘‘perspective’’ deﬁned by a ‘‘proyecto vital’’ or ‘‘Bestimmung’’ through which individuals must transform their circumstances (Ortega y Gasset, [1932] 2006, pp. 125–129; see also Ortega y Gasset, [1958] 2006, p. 51). Despite the straightforwardness of his famous maxim, Ortega presented a dualistic notion of self based on two different arguments. The ﬁrst argument deals with the necessity of social interaction for the emergence of the self. In this vein, Ortega argued that for a self to exist, the existence of at least another different self is required. To put it in his words: ‘‘the ﬁrst person is the last to appear’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 111). This is similar to what Mead ([1927] 1964, p. 312) claimed: ‘‘[i]n the process of communication the individual is an other before he is a self.’’ The second argument that Ortega expounded entails an irreconcilable difference with Mead. Ortega believed that humans have different relations with their selves and thus can be divided into groups depending on how faithful they are to their genuine selves. According to this interpretation, one human being may be ‘‘true to his genuine self ’’ and another may be totally immersed in a ‘‘pseudo-life of convention’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, pp. 144–145). Moreover, social intercourse threatens to destroy the genuine self, because the individual is not true to herself in society. Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 99) argued that ‘‘[i]n solitude, man [sic] is his truth; in society, he tends to be his mere conventionality or falsiﬁcation.’’ This is why Ortega termed other selves as the ‘‘pure not-I’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 120) or the ‘‘anti-I’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 162). Therefore, Ortega’s theory put forth two conﬂicting claims based on the dichotomy between the falsiﬁed and the genuine: (1) that the self depends on social interaction for its existence; and (2) that the genuine self needs to break free from social interaction. The possibility to reconcile these two claims becomes even more difﬁcult to realize when one considers the fact that Ortega believed it was impossible for individuals know their genuine selves. He argued that we are always becoming what we are not yet, endorsing the famous Pindar’s maxim, ‘‘Become what you are’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 25). In sum, Ortega despised the inﬂuence of the group as an obstacle for individual authenticity. In Ortega’s opinion, society prevents individuals from being in touch with their authentic selves: they become mindless,

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traitors to their true selves, and obsessed with the execution of social activities in socially prescribed ways. However, these observations emerge from a particular vision of the actor as one who perceives no meaning in the surrounding social world that is imposed on her. Ortega’s observations here parallel those developed by Berger and Luckmann to explain the roots of inauthenticity displayed in social interaction.7 Unlike Ortega, Mead did not view the existence of social prescriptions and conventions as destructive to the self, but highlighted that selves are ‘‘social structures’’ (Mead, [1934] 1992, p. 140). Humans with selves are ‘‘objects’’ to themselves (Blumer, 1969, p. 62). In his careful treatment of the concept, Athens (1995) differentiates two versions of the self concept in Mead’s theory: the dialogical and the attitudinal. According to the ﬁrst version – ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘me’’ version – individuals depart from social expectations and express themselves in nonconformist ways through the ‘‘I’’ (see Mead, [1934] 1992, p. 221). Athens (1995, p. 249) criticizes this view, because it presupposes that the ‘‘me’’ can be at the same time the mere reﬂection of community’s expectations (object) and a reﬂexive ‘‘action’’ from where to exert judgment over the I (subject), thus conﬂating both categories – ‘‘me’’ and ‘‘I.’’8 The second ‘‘attitudinal’’ version – which Mead developed later – theorized that individuals create a self by learning to assume the attitudes of others toward their prospective actions, thus being able to act toward themselves as others would (Athens, 1995, pp. 252–257; Mead, [1934] 1992). For Athens (1995, p. 255ff ), the main problem of Mead’s late self concept is that it forces uniformity over all individuals, i.e., the self is reduced to the mechanistic acceptance of the generalized attitude. Athens’s (2007, p. 150) idea of people conversing with their ‘‘phantom communities’’ provides a corrective to this problem because the phantom community ‘‘springs from the biographies of individual corporal community members,’’ thus making it biographically and thus experientially impossible that two individuals would have constructed their communities of reference and their selves in exactly the same way and exactly at the same time. In other words, individuals exist on temporally discontinuous experiential realms, which makes perfect communion in meaning an impossible task for any two or more individuals (see Weigert, 1975, p. 55). This insight is shared by Ortega, who denied the interchangeability of experiential perspectives: my meanings will never be your meanings because you are not me. Mead’s earlier version of the self – the interplay of ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘me’’ – best approximates Orteguian concerns. Minimizing their obvious differences, Mead’s category of I has an intriguing correlative in Ortega’s category of the authentic self, whereas Mead’s ‘‘me’’ category resembles

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Ortega’s category of the inauthentic self. Another convergence between both theorists is their romantic inﬂuence. For instance, Shalin (1984) documents how Mead came to be inﬂuenced by his interest in the romantic self, always doubting and always in the making, something Ortega recognized so well in the vital destiny of Goethe who made an art of hunting his inescapable life plan (Ortega y Gasset, [1932] 2006, p. 131). The discussion of Ortega’s theory so far will sufﬁce as proof of the romantic imprint on his thought.

Society 9

Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 228) deﬁned society as ‘‘the continuous, stabilized living together of men [sic] in a collective unit, that is, a separate living together, separated from other co-livings and collectivities.’’ Ortega added to this an idea of dissociety: ‘‘every society is at the same time, to a greater or lesser extent, dissociety – which is a living together of friends and of enemies’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 151). Thus, he had a twofold concept of society, at the same time society and dissociety. Let’s start with the novel idea of dissociety. In his marginal notes of his copy of Man and People, Schutz wrote disapprovingly of the idea of dissociety, identifying it with ‘‘dissociology’’ instead of with sociology (Hermida-Lazcano, 1996, p. 50). Schutz was partly right in that this term, standing on its own, constitutes a grossly one-sided concept. However, he failed to understand Ortega’s early development of an incipient ‘‘conﬂict theory.’’ Taken together, Ortega’s terms of society and dissociety have the remarkable virtue of preceding the famous formulation of the ‘‘two faces of society.’’ In this formulation, Dahrendorf (1959, p. 157) argues that there are two main approaches to the study of society: one that views society as a cohesive unity thanks to the existence of common values; the other that views society as cohesive unity only because order is secured through violence and social control. The ideas of society and dissociety express a multilayered understanding of the social in Ortega’s theory. Dissociety is straightforwardly deﬁned as intragroup conﬂict, whereas Ortega’s statements about society strictu sensu are more ambiguous. On the one hand, the Spanish thinker argued that society is antithetical to interindividual behavior or social interaction. On the other, Ortega argued that interindividual behavior or social interaction should be described as action of a social nature (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, pp. 139–140). Ortega’s inconsistency should not obscure his believed-to-be

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great personal achievement: the distinction between the social and the interindividual (see Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 179). But, sociologists (not just interactionists) may ask, what is social action without interaction? For Ortega, social action without interaction is the type of encounter between individuals whose actions are not their responsibility. Using Orteguian terminology, this action should be properly classiﬁed as a ‘‘usage.’’ A ‘‘usage’’ does not have its origin in the mind of the person who performs it and it is commonly performed against her will (see Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 187). In other words, usages constrain individuals, but individuals are not directly responsible for executing them. They do not necessitate individuals to ‘‘adhere’’ to them (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 267). Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 183) even declared these acts ‘‘inhuman.’’ To illustrate the concept of usage, Ortega gave the example of two individuals shaking hands. Two hand-shaking individuals who enter into their respective realms of experience are not interacting. Shaking hands, against all evidence, is an action that is enacted by what Ortega called an ‘‘X’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, pp. 185–86). The two individuals of this example, who apparently intertwine their actions and their hands, are in fact letting ‘‘nobody’’10 assume the ultimate responsibility for their action. Ortega’s overall conceptualization of society, including his parallel notions of usages and beliefs, is not without merit or theoretical pedigree. His conceptualization inscribes itself in the ﬁliatory line formed by Weber ([1956] 1978), Bourdieu (1977), and Giddens (1984). All these authors, in different ways, have stressed the conventional, unconscious, and practical ways through which social life reproduces its uniformities without this being the conscious effect of individuals’ decision-making and predetermined actions. Moreover, Ortega’s overall conceptualization of society represents an interesting precedent to those favoring radical interactionism, and will be of use to the further development of their perspective (see Athens, 2007). Mead’s idea of society is recently the object of renovating interest (Athens, 2005). I think this discussion should start with Mead’s idea of impulses as giving rise to institutions. Mead ([1934] 1992, p. 228) based his arguments about human society on the existence of ‘‘socio-physiological impulses or needs’’ arguing that these become attitudes, such as attitudes developed from the sex impulse, the parental impulse, and the impulse of neighborliness. Mead ([1934] 1992, pp. 229–230) believed these impulses to be the elemental units ‘‘from which human nature is socially formed’’ and considered them ‘‘the individual or physiological pole’’ ‘‘in the general process of social differentiation and evolution,’’ the other pole being the ‘‘institutional,’’ described by the processes of interaction among individuals

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and between individuals and the collectivity in its institutional reality. Most importantly, this ‘‘impulsive’’ and ‘‘primarily anti-social’’ nature mostly remains under the control of the ‘‘rational or primarily social’’ nature of human beings (Mead, [1934] 1992, p. 230). However, Mead ([1934] 1992, p. 321) also spoke of the ‘‘social or impersonal aspect of the self ’’ as being informed by ‘‘the individual’s feeling of cooperation and equality with the other members of that social group,’’ whereas he presented the ‘‘asocial or personal’’ side, being informed by ‘‘the individual’s feeling of superiority.’’ This feeling of superiority creates conﬂict in the selves of individuals and should be viewed as a complementary idea to Ortega’s dissociety (Mead ([1934] 1992, p. 321). He (Mead, [1934] 1992, p. 259) deﬁned communication as ‘‘the medium through which these co-operative activities can be carried on the selfconscious society.’’ Consequently, society is prevented from developing further when individuals fail to take the role of others (Mead, [1927] 1964, p. 310; Mead, [1934] 1992, p. 328). After all, for a society to exist it is ﬁrst and foremost necessary that individuals take the shared perspective of the community, while being able to take their own as well (Mead, 1932, p. 165). Mead discussed the following institutions and their originating impulses: language, family, economy, religion, polity, and science (Athens, 2005). Unlike well-known interpreters, Athens (2005, p. 307) stresses the importance that institutions play within Mead’s theory of society, and deﬁnes Mead’s idea of society ‘‘as institutionalized social action per se rather than general social action.’’ There is a parallelism here between this distinction and Ortega’s distinction between the social and the interindividual. Despite this, I believe the most fruitful comparison between Mead and Ortega on this score comes with Mead’s concept of the generalized other. The generalized other is ‘‘[t]he organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self ’’ (Mead, ([1934] 1992, p. 154). For Mead, the generalized other represents the morality of the social group, and it is precisely through the adoption of a generalized other that infants learn the morality of their group. The problem with the generalized other concept is that it fails to include the unconscious ways in which individuals perpetuate social dynamics, which is something Ortega understood well through his concept of ‘‘nobody’’ (see Athens, 2007, p. 154). Taking all this into account, the difference between Ortega’s ‘‘nobody’’ and Mead’s generalized other can be summarized in two points. First, the generalized other serves an important role in the construction of an individual’s self and morality, although the individual is not automatically ruled by the generalized other given the interplay between the ‘‘me’’ and the

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‘‘I.’’ Second, ‘‘nobody’’ exists in open conﬂict with genuine individuality, and in accordance with usages. ‘‘Nobody’’ is an involuntary and amoral force that renders its subjects irresponsible for what they do.

Individual Agency In Ortega’s theory, individual agency is strongly represented by the individual who, despite imposing circumstances, is able to preserve genuineness. Speciﬁcally, the agentic individual is the one who is able to refuse ‘‘nobody’’-induced actions. As I have already noted, actions governed by ‘‘nobody’’ develop in the immutable ways that conventions dictate. Individuals become social automatons when they happen to delegate their actions in the nonperson of ‘‘nobody’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, pp. 173–174). For Ortega, individuals can easily metamorphose into mere executors of conventions without contact with their genuine selves. Therefore, society represents a real danger to individual freedom because it threatens to transplant individuals’ desires and initiatives with the anonymous will of ‘‘nobody’’ or ‘‘people.’’ Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 173) argued that a great proportion of individuals’ lives are wasted as a consequence of individuals merely following usages. Accordingly, the Spanish theorist conceived society as having much more in common with the workings of nature than with the social nature of humans: ‘‘[w]ill society, then, be a peculiar reality intermediate between man and nature, neither one nor the other, but a little of one and a great deal of the other?’’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1957, p. 175). The irony is that earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornados do not have agency. Since agency involves the power to decide whether to execute a particular action (Giddens, 1994, p. 56), it follows that ‘‘nobody’’ lacks agency. In Ortega’s theory, ‘‘nobody’’ is an amoral external force overpowering individuals. Only the select few are able to escape it, but they do it by placing it at a distance, as if distance from society is the only viable antidote against this morally numbing force. Since only the select few make it, Ortega’s theory engenders the problem of explaining how exceptional individuals become capable of agency, opposing this power structure that dwells in individual consciousness.11 Finally, individual agency in Mead’s theory is best described with the concept of the ‘‘I,’’ which signiﬁes ‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘initiative’’ (Mead, [1934] 1992, p. 177). However, the concept of the ‘‘I’’ would be simply one-sided without the ‘‘me,’’ which is a necessary ingredient in any conception of

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the ‘‘I.’’ Without the concrete ‘‘me,’’ there will be no generalized other or societal constraints against which the ‘‘I’’ could act. More importantly, Mead’s conception of how the ‘‘I’’ operates in the self is compatible with Ortega’s theory in the two senses. First, it is similar to Ortega’s concepts of ‘‘nobody’’ and beliefs inasmuch as it is an unconscious force in social life. However, the Orteguian concepts stress the inertia of social life, whereas the ‘‘I’’ represents the opposite. Second, the ‘‘I’’ is compatible with Ortega’s genuine self concept. However, there are differences between the two concepts. The concept of the ‘‘I’’ in Mead’s theory suggests the critical capacity12 of all individuals, who act upon an ideal, nonexisting society when they oppose their altruistic well-beingtogether to the narrower conception of well-being of society (Mead, ([1934] 1992, pp. 388–89). This critical capacity makes the individual ‘‘capable of setting himself apart from society and culture’’ (Weigert, 1975, p. 43). Although Ortega emphasized this critical capacity much more than Mead’s theory, Ortega also believed it was rare to ﬁnd anyone in society who exercised this capacity. He felt that most members of society take the easy road and sell out.

CONCLUSION Ortega’s and Mead’s theories are different. This does not mean, however, that they cannot be fruitfully compared. In my analysis, I have highlighted a few similarities and differences between the two theorists. I have examined in critical light Ortega’s and Mead’s ideas on several issues of importance to sociologists. I have also noted how Ortega’s theory complements Mead’s theory, and how Ortega’s concepts surpass Mead’s in their application to particular contemporary situations. Ortega’s romantic disappointment with truth as collectively shared led him to annunciate some postmodern insights that reﬂect the contemporary mediated experience of the self (see also Graham, 2001). Additionally, Ortega’s distinction of ideas and beliefs serves the purpose of theorizing contemporary situations characterized by the inefﬁcacy of scientiﬁc statements in the midst of a public who either does not believe or does not want to really believe them. But more importantly, Ortega’s conceptualizations, such as the distinction between the social and the interindividual, his perception of the unexamined and unintended side of usages, and his idea of dissociety, point to interactionists some areas where Mead’s theory needs revision. Anyone who is interested in rethinking

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Mead’s conception of the relation of the individual to society could deﬁnitely proﬁt from reading Ortega who views society and the individual more often than not at war rather at peace with one an other.

NOTES 1. Hoover’s (1986, p. 198) comparison of Adorno and Mead also points out that the main similarity detected between the two theorists lies in their antithetical position with regard to the canons traditionally associated with the ‘‘hard sciences’’ (Hoover, 1986, p. 198). 2. The other comparative treatments of the thoughts of Mead and Ortega are philosophical in nature. 3. As the readers of these pages probably know, interactionists use a variety of methods, both quantitative and qualitative (Herman-Kinney and Verschaeve, 2003). For a critique of positivism from an interactionist perspective, see Prus (1996). 4. A resemblance should also be noted between the concept of pragmatic ﬁelds and the interactionist concept of social worlds (Becker, 1984; Shibutani, 1955; Strauss, 1978). 5. The following quote stresses the Socratic component: ‘‘[h]e who wants to teach us a truth should place us in a position to discover it ourselves’’ (Ortega y Gasset, [1914] 2000, p. 67). 6. Mead’s pragmatist theory of truth rests on the assumption that our ideas about the world are hypotheses that need to be either veriﬁed or falsiﬁed empirically. This is only one of the two components of pragmatism, the second component being a theory of instrumental behavior (Mead, 1936, pp. 350–352). 7. For instance, Ortega y Gasset’s (1957, p. 144) idea that individuals usually lead a ‘‘double life’’ in varying degrees because of the dichotomous separation between the falsiﬁed and the genuine could be extended to incorporate insights by Berger and Luckmann. Building on Goffman, Berger and Luckman’s (1967, p. 143) well-known idea of secondary socialization is connected to Ortega’s characterizations of social life as inauthentic, falsiﬁed, and not genuine. Ortega’s perceptions tie naturally to Berger’s and Luckmann’s ideas about the separation of the holistic self and the different partial selves played in varied social situations. 8. Weigert (1975, pp. 48–49) also notes this problem, and introduces the concept of concomitant awareness, part of a larger theory of the substantival self to solve it. He deﬁnes concomitant awareness as ‘‘that prior and undivided awareness from which knowledge of oneself as intending to act and as having acted is itself derived’’ (Weigert, 1975, p. 48). 9. Ose´s Gorraiz (1989, p. 182) argues that Ortega’s early works do not show such a pessimistic image of society. Mead’s optimistic image of society appears early on in his writings. 10. This concept is interchangeable with people. 11. This is the same problem that Athens (2007, p. 148) detects in Mead’s treatment of the ‘‘I.’’

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12. This critical capacity of the ‘‘I’’ is only possible if ‘‘‘I’ is aware both of ‘I’ in action and of ‘I’ deﬁned as ‘Me’’’ (Weigert and Gecas, 2003, p. 267).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author thanks Fundacio´n Ortega y Gasset (Madrid, Spain) for their generous assistance. Thanks are also due to Alan Dahl, Carol Rambo, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this work. Special thanks are due to Lonnie Athens for his comments, his editorial savoir-faire, and for serving as an instigator of the author’s ideas.

REFERENCES Aboulaﬁa, M. (1986). The mediating self: Mead, Sartre and self-determination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Aron, R. (1988). The revolt of the masses. Partisan Review, 55, 359–370. Athens, L. (1995). Mead’s visions of the self: A pair of ﬂawed diamonds. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 18, 245–261. Athens, L. (2005). Mead’s lost conception of society. Symbolic Interaction, 28, 305–325. Athens, L. (2007). Radical interactionism: Going beyond Mead. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37, 137–165. Batuik, M. E., & Sacks, H. L. (1981). George Herbert Mead and Karl Marx: Exploring consciousness and community. Symbolic Interaction, 4, 207–223. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Becker, H. S. (1984). Art worlds. Berkeley and L.A., CA: University of California Press. Berger, P. L., & Luckman, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. Perspective and method. Berkeley and L.A., CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahrendorf, R. (1959). Class and class conﬂict in industrial society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1994). Central problems in social theory. Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley and L.A., CA: University of California Press. Graham, J. T. (1994). A pragmatist philosophy of life in Ortega y Gasset. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Graham, J. T. (2001). The social thought of Ortega y Gasset. A systematic synthesis in postmodernism and interdisciplinarity. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Gray, R. (1989). The imperative of modernity. An intellectual biography of Jose´ Ortega y Gasset. Berkeley and L.A., CA: University of California Press.

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Herman-Kinney, N. J., & Verschaeve, J. M. (2003). Methods of symbolic interactionism. In: L. T. Reynolds & N. J. Herman-Kinney (Eds), Handbook of symbolic interactionism (pp. 213–252). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Hermida-Lazcano, P. (1996). The taken-for-granted world: A study of the relationship between A. Schutz and J. Ortega y Gasset. Human Studies, 19, 43–69. Hinkle, G. J. (1992). Habermas, Mead and rationality. Symbolic Interaction, 15, 315–331. Hoover, M. C. (1986). Adorno and Mead: Toward an interactionist critique of negative dialectics. Sociological Focus, 19, 189–206. Kilgore, W. J. (1972). Freedom in the perspectivism of Ortega. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 32, 500–513. Lewis, D., McLain, R., & Weigert, A. (1993). Vital realism and sociology: A metatheoretical grounding in Mead, Ortega, and Schutz. Sociological Theory, 11, 72–95. Marı´ as, J. ([1957] 2000). Introduction. In: Meditations on Quixote (pp. 11–26). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mead, G. H. (1899). The working hypothesis in social reform. American Journal of Sociology, 5, 367–371. Mead, G. H. ([1900] 1964). Suggestions toward a theory of the philosophical disciplines. In: A. Reck (Ed.), Mead: Selected writings (pp. 6–24). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Mead, G. H. ([1927] 1964). The objective reality of perspectives. In: A. Reck (Ed.), Mead: Selected writings (pp. 306–319). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Mead, G. H. (1932). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: Open Court. Mead, G. H. ([1934] 1992). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1936). Movements of thought in the nineteenth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, G. H. (1938). The philosophy of the act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menand, L. (1997). An introduction to pragmatism. In: L. Menand (Ed.), Pragmatism. A reader (pp. xi–xxxiv). New York: Random House. Molinuevo, J. L. (2002). Para leer a Ortega. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Ortega y Gasset, J. ([1914] 2000). Meditations on Quixote. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ortega y Gasset, J. ([1932] 2006). Goethe desde Dentro. In: Obras Completas, Tomo V, 1932–1940 (pp. 109–247). Madrid: Santillana Ediciones and Fundacio´n Jose´ Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gasset, J. ([1940] 2006). Ideas y Creencias. In: Obras Completas, Tomo V, 1932–1940 (pp. 657–704). Madrid: Santillana Ediciones and Fundacio´n Jose´ Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gasset, J. (1957). Man and people. New York: Norton. Ortega y Gasset, J. ([1957] 1960). What is philosophy? New York: Norton. Ortega y Gasset, J. ([1958] 2006). Prologo para Alemanes. In: El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo (pp. 13–71). Alianza Editorial: Madrid. Ose´s Gorraiz, J. M. (1989). La Sociologı´a en Ortega y Gasset. Barcelona: Anthropos. Prus, R. (1996). Symbolic interaction and ethnographic research: Intersubjectivity and the study of human lived experience. New York: SUNY Press. San Martı´ n, J. (2005). Husserl y Ortega: Sobre la Crı´ tica de la Cultura en la Fenomenologı´ a. In: J. San Martı´ n & J. Lasaga (Eds), Ortega en circunstancia. Una ﬁlosofı´a del siglo XX para el siglo XXI (pp. 111–130). Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva. Shalin, D. N. (1984). The romantic antecedents of Meadian social psychology. Symbolic Interaction, 7, 43–65.

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Shibutani, T. (1955). Reference groups as perspectives. The American Journal of Sociology, 60, 562–569. Strauss, A. (1978). A social world perspective. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1, 119–128. Weber, M. (1978 [1956]) Economy and society: And outline of interpretive sociology. In: G. Roth & C. Wittich (Eds), Berkeley: University of California Press. Weigert, A., & Gecas, V. (2003). Self. In: L. T. Reynolds & N. J. Herman-Kinney (Eds), Handbook of symbolic interactionism (pp. 267–288). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Weigert, A. J. (1975). Substantival self: A primitive term for a sociological psychology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 5, 43–62.

CONSIDERING VIOLENTIZATION TOWARD THE SOCIETAL SCALE M. Spohn ABSTRACT A number of international relations’ mid-level theories about violence are inadequate to the task of explaining societal and group violence. Many of these theories, for example, confuse causality with correlation, or breakdown and then cannot explain why they fail. Building upon the theories of criminologist Lonnie Athens, both in their particulars and in their spirit of practical solution rather than entrenched debate, this article considers whether those theories of individual violence are suitable for extrapolation to the societal level. It explores some problems with the current theories in international relations, and reviews the theoretical foundations offered by Athens and some others, who have also laid strong groundwork for scaling Athens’ theories to the societal level by considering their applications to communities. A number of those theories, although based upon analyses of individual dangerous violent criminals, lend themselves particularly well to groups and communities, suggesting strong suitability of scaling to these levels, and to the societal one as well. Also considering critiques of Athens’ and Rhodes’ work, this article ultimately argues that Athens’ theories of violence, and those building upon them, constitute a strong foundation for theories of violence in international relations that relate to the societal scale.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 101–132 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31006-0

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INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT The ﬁeld of International Relations is currently awash in theories about what causes and perpetuates violence, and how we might analyze its patterns. However, most of the existing theories break down sooner rather than later, they often fail to take key realities into account, and when they break down, can rarely explain why they did – primarily because many confuse correlation with causality. Additionally, most of the traditional methods of quantitative analysis cannot take into account the many rich complexities of human political behavior, and most of the qualitative ones often do not tell us much that we do not already know. Both problems stem from the same things: discomfort with panning out to look at a much larger pattern, and historical difﬁculty with integrating realistic lifelike messiness into our models that so much value parsimony. It is as if each approach is a blind man grasping at the proverbial elephant, laying hands on a single aspect he expects is the whole of the creature. How may we best pull back for a look at the whole complex pattern, using methods that will admit the larger beast together and not just the pieces? This paper is concerned with whether a particular theory would serve as a strong basis for the analysis of societal violence, and speciﬁcally considers violentization: Lonnie Athens’ insightful model of how individuals become dangerous violent criminals. It offers critiques of his work and the viewpoints of those who have already built upon it, particularly Richard Rhodes. Athens, Rhodes, and a few others have stretched theoretical tendrils into possible community-level uses of Athens’ model, thus laying the scaffolding for its application to the larger societal scale. In beginning to analyze patterns of human violence in a new way, a new model should do a few things, and it would appear that violentization is a good platform for these. It offers a compelling theory of individual violent behavior that could be adjusted to the societal scale, may be an excellent method of organizing evidence of the pattern in several different types of real-world instances of violent societies, and does not get bogged down in outdated analyses or linear statistics. This may offer the researcher the means to investigate the patterns of human violence using newer, richer, explanatory methods that are capable of handling the messiness of human behavior, either through rich qualitative work or through newer quantitative methods (such as nonlinear dynamics, for example, which seeks to elucidate very complex patterns). In the process, a number of the ideas about human violence already extant may be challenged, from those of speciﬁc authors with speciﬁc insights, to some pervasive general notions, for example, that people

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turn to violence on either the individual or societal scale because they ‘‘just snap,’’ or that strong analytical methods cannot take into account sufﬁcient richness of the human political experience to be useful in the ﬁeld of international relations. Lonnie Athens faced similar problems in his area of the social sciences (criminology, as a subﬁeld in the larger ﬁeld of sociology) as we do in international relations. Speciﬁcally, the prevailing quantitative theories (largely linear-statistical in nature) did not explain enough, or why they failed when they did. We have a number of incomplete explanations about how societies become violent and how conﬂict breaks out, again grasping at part of the truth as blind men groping for parts of the explanatory elephant, but no theory yet adequately explains the overarching pachyderm possibility of conﬂict against the complex backdrop of human affairs. Athens faced a contentious, artiﬁcially dichotomous, and inadequate body of explanation just as we do in international relations. His ﬁeld questioned whether individual violence was biophysiological or social–environmental, whereas International Relations considers whether causes of societal violence rest with the individual (leadership, decision-making capabilities, human nature) or with the structure and nature of an arguably inequitable international system that may foster conﬂict. Athens’ ﬁeld calls this debate ‘‘nature versus nurture;’’ ours, ‘‘the agent–structure debate.’’ Both are asking very much the same question: does violence come from within or from without? It is likely that the answer in both cases is similar, just as the question is. Individuals do not only interact with other individuals, they interact with their societies, with themselves, and with their own internal values. Violence is not merely something that occurs between states or between individuals – it also begins within individuals. Violence is learned and taught and cyclical, interpersonally, between and within societies, and even as part of a larger historical pattern. To point the ﬁnger at a single factor: poverty, imbalance of power, class, situational intractability, expected utility, race, human naturey is not simply to offer an incomplete explanation; it is to ignore the rich complexity that characterizes our experience as human beings. We are complex. Our minds are complex. Our interactions are complex. Our behavior is complex. An accurate explanation of that behavior must necessarily embrace that complexity. Athens interviewed hundreds of convicted dangerous violent criminals to ﬁnd out what their experiences were like (particularly their social experiences within their primary family groups), what they did, why they did it, and what they thought about as they did it. He rejects the

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quantitative trends in his ﬁeld in favor of qualitatively and closely examining events and the people who participated in them and looking for rich patterns that might develop without limitation or reduction. Athens expected to learn something new in his ﬁeld by undertaking to understand violent events and their participants. He refrains from describing a deﬁnite pattern until all the information is considered, and then lets the data deﬁne patterns rather than trying to make a pattern ﬁt a preexisting theory of which factors causally affect situations. Athens talks about a four-stage pattern of violentization, which is detailed closely in the next section. He further shows that the violence in each case is not a result of the person or group ‘‘just snapping;’’ that the violence is purposive. So far, it would seem violentization offers an ideal framework for considering the patterns of human violence. In terms of his model’s falsiﬁability, Athens sees near misses as being a truly important component as to how to determine that a model is working: ‘‘These comparisons of interpretations formed in completed violent and in near violent situations suggest that the occurrence or non-occurrence of three possible events determines whether or not a violent criminal act is committed’’ (Athens, 1980, p. 29), he tells us, and then goes on to enumerate those three things: a ﬁxed line of indication, restraining judgment, and overriding judgment. Athens also speciﬁcally tells us, ‘‘I made a vigorous effort to ﬁnd people who had appeared likely to have undergone many of the past signiﬁcant social experiences which comprised the stages in the newly developed experiential process, but who still did not become dangerous violent criminals. In other words, I made a diligent attempt to ﬁnd people whoy should become dangerous violent criminals, but who in all likelihood had not done so’’ (Athens, 1989, pp. 24–25). The people Athens selected, based on his observations of the social experiences of dangerous violent criminals, were domestic assault victims and nonviolent criminals. After extensive interviews, Athens came to the conclusion that the theory was sound, and that he wished to make a single reﬁnement to the model: that each stage of violentization had to be completely undergone before the next stage could be entered. The importance of stage completion is discussed in the beginning of the ‘‘violentization’’ section of the discussion of Athens’ work, below. This seems exactly right: the only way to determine what a control group might be is not to consider whether it is peaceful, but whether it is relatively peaceful and was very nearly violent. One may then hope to see the distinctions between the patterns from which violence emerges. In terms of its modeling, the project of considering larger, pattern-based models to

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explain human violence situates itself as decidedly poststatistical. Correlational models, after all, stopped being useful when the world stopped having only two overarching spheres of inﬂuence at the end of the Cold War, if they were ever truly explanatory to begin with. The kinds of models that will bring us the greatest utility in the future are those that seek to describe and predict patterns – including those of sequences in a process. Their primary concern is with whole patterns of violence rather than strict statistical correlation, and they get so much closer to the description of reality – and to consensus – than the overwhelming portion of the existing theories. We should not fear complexity in our pattern discernment; it is what tells us we are coming closer to the messy realities of life. If that complexity breaks a model or two, then we need only use models designed to handle them.

THEORETICAL FOUNDATION: ATHENS, RHODES, AND OTHERS Lonnie Athens’ theory of violentization on the individual level is both convincing and rigorous. The patterns of his observations are also evident on a societal scale already, lending this method yet another strong recommendation. Athens’ model has a wider application, which has been hinted at by Athens himself as well as other authors, but has not previously been closely investigated, or extended beyond small communities to larger societies. Finally, Athens’ model offers some fresh insights into the problem of violence with which the ﬁeld of International Relations struggles.

Lonnie Athens’ Key Theories One of the most appealing things about Athens’ theory of violentization is that it represents a departure from the work of social scientists before him, citing not poverty, race, or other often-blamed factors, but instead the nascent criminal’s personal social experiences, as the root of metamorphosis into violence. In The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals, Athens takes the issue directly with several of those theories. Speciﬁcally, he critiques the contemporary debate about the origins of violent individuals: the biophysiological (as characterized by Mednick), which posits that fear of reprisal from a parent or other censuring agent, inhibition, relief from

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abandoning plans of violence, and learning these responses (all basically contingent on the sympathetic nervous system) are what make children engage in violent behavior (see Athens’ discussion of Mednick’s theory in Athens, 1989, pp. 8–10); and the social–environmental (as exempliﬁed by Wolfgang and Ferracuti – see Athens, 1989, pp. 10–12), which socially categorizes people by race, subculture, class, and certain personality characteristics caused by their environments. Athens takes issue with both sides as neither offers a sufﬁcient explanation of the formation of violent behavior. How do violent norms and attitudes combine to produce violent criminal acts, he asks, and how are violent values and norms acquired in the ﬁrst place? He cites evidence that ‘‘a nature–nurture dichotomy is clearly untenable, incorrect, and meaningless,’’ and that a stronger explanation must necessarily engage the continuous and complex interactions between the subject and his environment (Athens, 1989, p. 12). After engaging several authors and theories in his ﬁeld of criminology, Athens determines that the answer as to how individuals become dangerous violent criminals lies not in the sympathetic nervous system, poverty, class, or genetics, but in the individual’s social experiences. The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals is where Athens lays out his theory, also offering excerpts from dozens of case studies to back it up. These excerpts came from the extensive interviews he conducted. Although Athens’ body of work is extensive and growing, some of his concepts and theories have special relevance to the question of whether violentization offers a good foundation for societal-scale analysis of violence. The discussion below is limited to these. Violentization, the process by which Athens proposes people become dangerous violent criminals; the ‘‘phantom community,’’ an internalized community with which these people converse as they make sense of their experiences and themselves, and decide what proper courses of action are; and some applications to wider communities based on Athens’ research into small communities such as urban neighborhoods are each considered.

Violentization Before Athens’ work, it was widely assumed that when a person without a mental illness or personality disorder began exhibiting violent criminal behavior, it was because the individual had ‘‘just snapped’’ – that this behavior was totally unpredictable and irrational. Athens presents extensive evidence to the contrary.

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The study of these data shows two things. First it suggests that violent actors do form interpretations of the situations in which they commit violent criminal acts. Further, the interpretations that they form out of these situations account for their violent actions. y [T]hey implicitly or explicitly indicated to themselves that they ought to respond violently. Thus, the data show that violent actors self consciously construct violent plans of action before they commit violent criminal actsy . (Athens, 1980, p. 19)

In interviewing hundreds of dangerous violent criminals, Athens discovered that these individuals make speciﬁc decisions to behave as they do, and further, within the context of their own social experiences, their responses are in fact quite rational, and often even predictable. These criminals’ social experiences simply make up a different context for decision making and a different set of rules and norms than those upon which nonviolent people rely. This extends to entire societies as well: the society’s norms may be shifted by the same process, such that violent behavior is normal, expected, and necessary. ‘‘Violentization’’ is Athens’ term for the four-stage process that every dangerous violent criminal has completed in the process of becoming just that. His ﬁndings are that everyone who completes all four stages becomes a dangerous violent criminal, while everyone who does not complete all four stages does not. Athens’ model has been rigorous enough to stand up to 100% of the cases investigated. Additionally, no other explanation is so complete, or rings so true. Poverty, for example, is a poor explanation for the creation of violent criminal personalities because billions of poor people never commit a violent crime. Urban decay, frustration, class, race: these are all similarly poor explanations, and for the same reason: there are too many human beings who face these very factors day after day for their whole lives and yet never do resort to violent behavior. These are classic cases of confusing correlation with causality, a fallacy we observe frequently in International Relations’ theories of violence as well. Richard Rhodes, whose work is discussed in more detail below, found Athens’ methods similarly compelling, and describes Athens’ methodology, and his own comfort with it. It is included here for two reasons. First, because this is a part of the discussion that illustrates the careful nature of the model; and second, some critiques considered below claim that Athens’ development of the model lacks methodological rigor. It is therefore important to cite explicitly that such rigor is in fact displayed throughout in his development of the violentization model. Athens derived his violent socialization model of violence development (Athens, 1992) retrospectively, using analytic induction, Hume’s ‘‘method of universals’’ (Athens, 1997, pp. 115–120). This methodology establishes causality by identifying what is unique in the

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background of an exemplary population – in this case violent criminals – while its requirement that all members of a class but no nonmembers exhibit a complete set of the identiﬁed unique features provides for falsiﬁcation. Models derived by analytic induction, unlike models derived by quantitative statistical methodologies, are logically unaffected by the n of the population studied (an n of 1 has been sufﬁcient historically in medical research to identify the cause of a disease) but their universality is tested with every new case. Since it has long been hypothesized among social scientists that serious personal violence has multiple causes, Athens’ choice of a methodology that demands universality sets a high standard. Not only violent criminals (the usual population for studies of serious violent behavior and the population Athens studied) but also police ofﬁcers and military combatants who use force voluntarily without provocation (in socalled acts of police brutality and military atrocity) must have experienced and completed violentization or the model is falsiﬁed. (Rhodes, 2002, p. 93)

In one of his articles, Rhodes offers the following anecdotal evidence that violentization occurs in the real world and even in larger groups. This speciﬁc example is of evidence of violentization within the SS-Einsatzgruppen in Nazi Germany (A complete discussion of the phenomenon Rhodes discusses here in article form can be found in his Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). He concludes that ‘‘Athens’ violent socialization model evidently applies to the training and activities of military and police and of mass killers as well as of violent criminals’’ (Rhodes, 2002, p. 106). He is quite correct: These same methods may employed on the societal scale, and are very effective, particularly in preparing such organizations as the South African Police (SAP) to be able to engage in extremely violent behavior against groups such as protesting children and innocent bystanders. Athens proves also that many other assumptions about the nature of punishment and fear as deterrents are erroneous, and that many previously held assumptions (such as the previously mentioned nature versus nurture arguments and assuming that those who committed violent acts ‘‘just snapped’’) are inaccurate as well (Athens, 1989, Chapter 2). What is unique about Athens’ approach is that he actively pursued close contact with violent criminals through extensive interviewing, that he made a clean break with previous theories and started with gathering new, uninterpreted, direct evidence, and that he set out to come up with a whole-pattern explanation rather than a reductionist one: ‘‘ythe real key to discovering how people become dangerous violent criminals is to ﬁnd some way to develop a theory from studying them which does not split in two the biophysiological and social environmental sources of their violence. Put more positively, the key lies in ﬁguring out some way to develop a theory which integrates

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rather than segregates the effects of social environmental and biophysiological factors’’ (Athens, 1989, p. 14). Table 1 summarizes the stages of violentization and their characteristics. While each stage is, in itself, an important part of the process of violentization, fully completing each stage before going on to the next is equally important, because, ‘‘Until people have completely undergone a social experience, they have not had it. y Of course, it is only a matter of common sense that unless a social experience is completely undergone, its impact cannot be felt’’ (Athens, 1989, pp. 25–26). Athens also gives a more detailed summary of what exactly is so important about having the full social experience of stage completion. Not only does the complete experience constitute truly having undergone it, but not completing a given stage generally means exiting the process of violentization altogether (Athens, 1989, p. 27). The stakes of stage completion being explicated, let us take each of the stages singly and consider the experiences themselves, with an eye toward recognizing them when we see them on a larger scale in the next section. Brutalization is the ﬁrst stage of violentization. More complex than the notion that to be abused is to grow up to be an abuser, it instead exhibits three distinct substages. These substages – violent subjugation, personal horriﬁcation, and violent coaching – are often undergone simultaneously, but can occasionally be undergone many years apart. However, as noted above, before the stage is truly complete, all three substages must have been undergone. ‘‘y[T]here is a real and indisputable unity between them. They all involve in their own way people undergoing coarse and cruel treatment at the hands of others that produces a lasting and dramatic impact upon the subsequent course of their lives. Thus, these experiences may be thought of as constituting a trilogy’’ (Athens, 1989, p. 27). Although the three substages are often intertwined, violent subjugation is the ﬁrst discussed. We might wish to term this stage merely as ‘‘being abused,’’ but violent subjugation has very speciﬁc characteristics that make it more than a simple description or legal designation. Its primary characteristic is the use of violence or the threat of violence by an authority ﬁgure speciﬁcally for the purpose of dominating a subordinate (Athens, 1989, pp. 28–29). It is less mere senseless ‘‘abuse’’ than a tool of domination with speciﬁc goals in the authority ﬁgure’s mind. This brutal force, Athens tells us, also takes two speciﬁc main forms: coercion and retaliation, each with its own goals. ‘‘The goal of coercive subjugation is only to achieve momentary submission on the part of the subject and compliance with some present command. The goal of retaliatory subjugation is to achieve a more

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Table 1. Stage

Aspects of Violentization (Adapted from Athens, 1989). Substage

Brutalization Violent subjugation

Description & Characteristics Three simultaneous substages (below) Undergoing violent correction and domination by a member of the subject’s primary social group. Characterized by: Violent domination of an authority ﬁgure or would-be authority ﬁgure belonging to the subject’s primary social group An element of either coercion or retaliation The subject’s experience of being battered to a point of submission The humiliation and violent retaliatory fantasies that follow

Personal horriﬁcation

Characterized by:

Violent coaching

Exposure to the gloriﬁcation of violence and incitement to use it (does not include explicit training in the use of violence however). Characterized by:

Witnessing other members of the primary social group undergoing violent subjugation (witnessing need not be visual) Being frightened and angry for the victim, giving way to a desire to rescue him Deciding that one is in reality powerless to intervene Turning feelings of anger and shame upon oneself

The formation of an informal mentoring relationship with a more experienced member of the primary group who has violent credibility Instruction from the coach to the novice not about how to accomplish violent feats, but rather, when, and against whom Instilling a sense of responsibility for attacking protagonists using a number of encouraging or coercive techniques Encouraging novices to use at least enough force in an altercation to prevail, regardless of potential harm inﬂicted on a protagonist. Belligerency

Beginning with trying to sort out what has happened to him, the subject makes a resolution to use violence to protect himself or members of his primary social group, or sometimes to achieve some other goal.

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Table 1. (Continued ) Stage

Substage

Description & Characteristics Characterized by: Introspection Dealing with feelings of anger and humiliation brought on by the subject’s brutalization experiences A sudden crystallization of his problem and desire for action A conscious decision to use violence to avoid future exposure to further brutalization experiences.

Violent performances

The subject tries his hand at being a violent individual. Successful performances lead to the next stage; unsuccessful ones lead to a lack of completion and occasionally deeper psychological problems, or simply to resolving to use more powerful weapons. Characterized by: Questioning whether the subject will have the resolve to gravely harm another person Anticipation of being provoked (seriously or moderately) Attacking a protagonist with the result of decisive victory or defeat, draw, or no decision (Perhaps eventual) resolution to continue as a violent person, or revert to being a nonviolent one.

Virulency

The subject is treated with a new respect, and as dangerous. He becomes entrenched in his role and ironically assumes the same kind of personality as the hated person who brutalized him early in his process. The cycle often begins again. Characterized by: Self-satisfaction with having successfully completed a violent performance Reactions of others that he is dangerous, potentially mentally imbalanced, as a result of ‘‘having gone too far’’ in his violent response to provocation A new sense of pride and self-importance, and ﬁnally An unmitigated violent resolution, constituting malevolency and bringing the subject full circle to being a brutalizer rather than the brutalized This, then, is how the cycle of violence perpetuates itself within families. Genetics are not to blame, nor are environments. Rather, to be raised by someone who has undergone full violentization is to undergo it oneself

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permanent state of submissiveness on the part of the subject and thereby ensure his future obedience and respect’’ (Athens, 1989, p. 36). Thus we can also view the stage of brutalization in general, and violent subjugation in particular, as the expression of that desire for domination, as well as the subject’s ﬁrst bitter taste of it. Consider this experience in the context of, say, colonization, where a small population dominates a larger one with violence, and what develops from that. This theme continues throughout Athens’ model of violentization, and into discussions about communities. The second substage of brutalization is personal horriﬁcation. It is frequently concurrent with violent subjugation, as often the same member of the subject’s primary group is subjecting both the subject and his or her intimates to similar treatment in his or her assertion of dominance. Personal horriﬁcation is essentially the witnessing of the violent subjugation of others (Athens, 1989, p. 38). That the (often helpless) witnessing of someone else’s violent subjugation might be especially traumatic may be counterintuitive. However, Athens tells us, the essence of the impact is that very trauma, and the combination of the two things together (violent subjugation and personal horriﬁcation) has a substantial and lasting effect. Not only that, but the combined effect is much more psychologically damaging than either one of them could be alone. Furthermore, the impact on the subject is not purely physical, or even physical–psychological; the experience goes much deeper. Athens argues that the combination of violent subjugation and personal horriﬁcation begin to change the subject’s psyche, self-perception, and interpretation of the world. ‘‘In short, the harmful repercussions which can potentially ﬂow in the wake of the combined experiences of violent subjugation and personal horriﬁcation are far greater than either one of them alone’’ (Athens, 1989, pp. 44–45). The ﬁnal substage of brutalization is violent coaching. Usually at the same time the subject is undergoing violent subjugation and personal horriﬁcation, essentially learning about violent domination in the most difﬁcult way possible for the human psyche, someone in the subject’s life is also teaching her what proper responses to violence should be. The violent coach is usually an older family or community member with some sort of violent credibility. This credibility is important, as if it is not present, the would-be violent coach is merely seen as boasting and is not given much credence. A violent coach must be capable of forming a sort of violent mentoring relationship with the subject, even if it is not formalized. ‘‘Although violent coaching is informal and implicit rather than formal and explicit, the goal behind it – prompting violent conduct – is plainly obvious to all’’ (Athens, 1989, p. 46).

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A number of different techniques are used to illustrate to the subject how she should conduct herself in potentially violent situations, from merely bragging about and glorifying violence, to outright haranguing her to respond more violently to certain kinds of situations. ‘‘yNovices are taught that they should not try to pacify, ignore, or run from their protagonist, but should physically attack them. Further, novices are taught to use at least enough force to ensure that they will prevail in an altercation, even if it means gravely harming the protagonist’’ (Athens, 1989, p. 47). Most importantly, the violent coach does not actually give the subject training or lessons in how to ﬁght, or teach her how to do it; he only instills in her the sense that she ought to react violently, and that that is the correct course of action in certain situations. Given the violent coach’s perceived track record with violence and his or her credibility with the subject, that is often enough. On the societal scale, all manner of violent coaching is evident, from harangues, pirate radio shows, and pamphleteering, to police, military, and paramilitary training. Belligerency is the next stage of violentization after brutalization. The subject, systematically abused both physically and psychologically, enters a state of deep personal reﬂection. Most of this stage occurs internally to the subject – it is where he determines that what he has been told about how people should behave toward each other is not how the world actually works, and tries to ﬁgure out how to reconcile this, and how to live his life from that point on. He also becomes very philosophical about the nature of humanity and social behavior, and the disconnect between what he is told society is supposed to be like, and what his actual experience has been. ‘‘The need for the subject to take stock and come to terms with the brutalization experience,’’ Athens tell us, ‘‘is not any different from the need of most people to take stock and come to terms with other agonizing experiences such as the death of a loved one, the dissolution of a long and previously happy marriage, or a prolonged bout of unemployment’’ (Athens, 1989, pp. 57–58). This reﬂection generally leads the subject to the conclusion that the world is not a safe place (at least for him), and that the only way to prevent further violent subjugation or personal horriﬁcation is to take violent action if provoked. The stage is completed with this resolution. Belligerency would seem to be the most difﬁcult stage to prove when considering a societal conﬂict from the outside. Just when did a society or segment of a community decide to proceed down a violent path? Often, however, many individual reports will tell the same tale of violent resolution, or publications declaring intent come to light at a certain time, and often an ultimatum can illustrate the violent resolution as well.

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The next stage of violentization is called violent performances. The subject tests his newfound resolution to use violence against others. Many real-life contingencies, such as fear, interruption, or wavering resolve on the part of one or the other party in a violent performance, make the circumstances surrounding violent performances potentially problematic. ‘‘As important as the circumstances surrounding the subject’s violent performance is the immediate outcome of his performance,’’ Athens is careful to point out. Whether the violent performance is a clear-cut win or loss, or whether it is a ‘‘draw’’ or ‘‘no decision’’ (Athens makes the distinction that a ‘‘draw’’ is more of a tie, whereas a ‘‘no decision’’ is generally where the altercation was interrupted. In either case, there is no decisive win/lose outcome) of some kind, the outcome marks a pivotal moment in the development of the dangerous violent criminal, and its clarity is crucial (Athens, 1989, pp. 64–65). In many ways, the violent performances stage is a key point of no return in the development of the dangerous violent criminal. Once a clear-cut victory has been achieved, the subject’s path is more or less clear: he will most likely proceed toward virulency and becoming a dangerous violent criminal. In a clear-cut loss, however, especially several major defeats in a row, the subject’s newfound resolution and nascent violent persona are in jeopardy. ‘‘On the other hand, instead of sapping the subject’s belligerency, defeats can sometimes greatly strengthen it. In this case, the subject raises serious questions about his aptitude for violence, but does not have any real doubt about his resolution to be violent’’ (Athens, 1989, pp. 68–69). In other words, based on these early performances, the subject determines whether or not he is up to the task of supporting his violent resolution. Lack of success can create a serious personal crisis; or it can drive those who previously only have been using ﬁsts or other body parts to obtain guns, knives, or other weaponry that might give them a decisive edge in violent combat. If the concept of unsuccessful violent performances somehow leading to personal crisis and psychological disorders seems difﬁcult, Athens’ views on what happens when a violent performance fails is perhaps better explicated in one of his articles as he describes what happens more generally when any failed test of a new experience occurs: If the crucial test of experience is repeatedly failed, however, after or even prior to any self-adjustments, then a very different conclusion must be drawn. At this critical point, people may conclude, not that their newly uniﬁed selves need minor alteration, but instead that the entire composition of these selves must be completely altered. yThey are now left in the unenviable position of having neither old uniﬁed selves in which refuge can be found nor new uniﬁed selves on the immediate horizon in which comfort

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and hope can be taken in someday achieving. Unless the fortitude can somehow be mustered to restart completely the arduous process of assembling different uniﬁed selves, their present divided ones will be kept. Thus, they will be destined to remain in a permanent state of disorganization, which if prolonged enough, can culminate in psychosis. (Athens, 1995, p. 578)

Basically, the failure to use violence successfully is not merely a personal physical failure, but ﬂunking a crucial test of self, made all the more painful because this new self is consciously constructed and newly emerging. It is traumatic enough to learn that we may not be who we think we are; it is all that much moreso when we have made the conscious decision to become that person. Therefore, ‘‘People almost invariably decide to embrace rather than reject their new possible, uniﬁed selves, for reasons that are easy to imagine’’ (Athens, 1995, p. 580). Namely, that the alternative is to completely disassemble one’s new self-construction as a failure, and then subsequently, have no other psychological place to go. ‘‘y[P]eople in the ﬁnal stages of the violentization process will all too gladly embrace ‘malevolent’ selves’’ (Athens, 1995, p. 579). Why would they not? It is psychically stable and the alternative is not. The parallels to group violence and violent performances are obvious: people, whether individuals or groups, go to great lengths to free themselves from direct oppression. How they go about it is determined by what kind of domination they are experiencing (violent, economic, political, or otherwise), and whether the individual or group has resolved that violence is an appropriate response to it. After a successful violent performance, the subject is ready to undergo the ﬁnal stage in violentization: virulency. He discovers that people treat him differently than before – often as if he is now dangerous and unstable – and people he knows now see him as a different person, an ‘‘authentically violent individual’’ (Athens, 1989, pp. 72–73). The subject is now experiencing what Athens terms social trepidation: others avoid the subject and are careful not to provoke him. Should he embrace his new violent notoriety, the subject often experiences a sort of exultancy and begins to feel invincible. He is certain that he is the truly dangerous individual others perceive him to be, and that any derision toward him is both unwarranted and quite dangerous. Further, he makes a stronger violent resolution toward others, ‘‘with the serious intention of gravely harming or even killing them for the slightest or no provocation whatsoever, whereas before he had resolved to do this only if more than minimally provoked by someone. With this last development, the experience of malevolency, the ultimate irony surfaces in the subject’s life: he has now gone full circle from a hapless victim of brutalization to y the

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same kind of brutalizer whom he had earlier despised’’ (Athens, 1989, pp. 75–76). At this point, the subject’s former primary social group may no longer ‘‘ﬁt’’ him (they may, for example, avoid him for fear of physical intimidation). He may seek out other malevolent companions (Athens, 1989, p. 76). The subject has at this point undergone the full process of violentization. His perceptions about ‘‘normal’’ behavior regarding violence have effectively been altered. Each stage, and therefore the full experience, now complete, the subject begins the cycle of violence anew, this time in a position of dominator rather than that of dominated. On the societal scale, we see how groups violentize others, and how the cycle can continue quite briskly. What internal processes, however, made this transformation possible? Let us turn our attention from what can be witnessed from the outside to what goes on inside the subjects themselves.

Phantom Communities The concept of phantom communities, perhaps best deﬁned by Athens as internal sketches of people the subject respects, and what those people might think and feel about him and his actions, is important in Athens’ work because it describes the speciﬁc way in which people change themselves through internal dialog. That perception of self as constructed through this process is essential to violentization. The self is a process: we change ourselves as our experiences unfold, and as we interpret them. ‘‘People soliloquize through conversing with ‘others’ who inhabit their corporal and phantom communitiesy Through soliloquizing, they interpret the situations that confront them daily in their corporal communities, and on the basis of their interpretations, assemble their actions’’ (Athens, 1998, p. 676). There is more here than just interpretation, however. Soliloquizing, adds Athens, also allows people to ‘‘paint our self portraits by reﬂecting on the perceptions of our corporal community members through our phantom community members’ eyes’’ (Athens, 1998, p. 677). In the case of individual violentization, the self becomes a violent one through an internal, not just an external, process. The phantom community is also important in the context of the considering violence on the societal scale because it treats whether an entire community or society can undergo violentization together, and that the internal dialog that takes place within an individual is replaced with an external, if often still intimate, one.

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On the other hand, if people reinvent themselves with every single new experience, this would create what Athens and Rhodes term ‘‘the absurdity of the biographical-less self.’’ Clearly our concepts of self are rooted somewhere and are not merely the result of the latest experience. The way that people manage to have selves that endure beyond their immediate, passing experiences is to bundle and record the sets of attitudes and perspectives they accumulate. This is the function of the phantom community: the phantom others that retain them, and with whom we converse when we ‘‘talk to ourselves,’’ give us that social context we need while at the same time allowing us to be uniquely ourselves – a product of all our own unique experiences (Rhodes, 1999, p. 82). It is this social context we rely on when we ask ourselves what we perceive and what we should do about it. If one’s phantom community is comprised of maleﬁc individuals: brutalizers, violent coaches, and so on, the things one should do when confronted with certain social situations differ greatly from what a paciﬁstic phantom community might advise one to do about a given situation. As we create our own phantom communities, our own internal advisors with whom we confer, our outward behavior changes. As we change, and meet new people whose ideas we share and whose opinions about us we value, we sometimes replace certain members of the phantom community. When it is a gradual process, this is just a normal part of the internal change we all undergo as we move through life. However, having an incomplete or contradictory phantom community (or a fragmented one, as can result from the above-mentioned repeated failures to complete a violent performance), as someone might who was undergoing major psychic change or trauma, is very difﬁcult. The key elements of phantom communities for the purposes of this study, then, are several. First, the phantom community is a set of characters with whom an individual conducts her internal soliloquies. Second, these soliloquies are the key platforms upon which new selves and personal transformations are built. Third, we tend not to care much what society at large thinks of us, but only what our set of phantom others – our own phantom communities – think of us. This is especially important in violentization for explaining why dangerous violent criminals do what they do, and that the context of their actions is reasonable to them: it both constructs and preserves the set of maxims that informs their reactions and behavior – and it is these norms that make violence acceptable in the subject’s mind, even if it may not be in the views of the larger society. Finally, the cohesion of the phantom community is a requirement for the cohesion of the self.

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Communities and Violence The ﬁnal conceptual element to be examined directly from Athens’ theories is the work he has already done with regard to different kinds of communities, violent and otherwise. This work is newer, however, the fact that he has considered community violence in his work is important, and he has identiﬁed some useful frameworks for possible subsequent consideration of the societal scale. Athens seems to postulate a kind of two-stage process for a malignant community: the malignant individual has undergone violentization, and then the community in which he lives does if there are enough other malignant individuals there such that they become the dominant type in a particular community. The larger project discussed here instead would postulate that an entire society can undergo violentization as a whole, and that there need not be a critical mass of violent individuals at the outset to do so. Indeed, in some instances, a single person, or a small group, such as Slobodan Milosevic, or the BJP leadership in Gujarat, may violentize a large segment of the population, which in turn carries out the rest of the process on the larger society. The differences in our approaches may be accounted for in a few different ways. First, Athens is dealing primarily with the character of urban neighborhoods and not the social processes of entire societies. He does not deal directly with issues such as civil or interstate warfare in his current body of work, and does not purport to do so. He is also more concerned with the character of individual neighborhoods – that is, speciﬁc physical locations and the individuals that inhabit them – than the motion of larger social situations that boil over, with which the larger potential framework would be more concerned. Finally, Athens is dealing here with societies that are small enough that they generally do not have ofﬁcially designated leaders – that is, no group of resident individuals would have a legitimate monopoly on violence there – and the loss of that monopoly is a key feature of the proposed larger project’s argument. An urban neighborhood is a smaller, more self-organizing community than, say, a nation-state, or a large region thereof. In short, the speciﬁc items upon which these perspectives are based are different. However, since this piece considers building on Athens’ theories and presents them as the basis for extrapolating a broader model, it would seem quite useful to discuss the work Athens himself has done with social extrapolation. In expanding his work from the individual to the neighborhood, Athens contends that dominance is still the deﬁning order of human society, whether the dominance sought is over a family, a neighborhood, a gang, or

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a state’s army. In a few of his articles, Athens has attempted to show how different minor communities (such as neighborhoods) exhibit different levels of violent behavior in part because of the dominant personality types who reside there. In his ‘‘Violentization in a Larger Social Context,’’ Athens recognizes three basic types of minor communities: Civil, malignant, and turbulent: In civil minor communities, the ‘‘non-violent dominance engagement’’ is the predominant institution for settling dominance disputes. During non-violent dominance engagement, the opponents engage in psychological, economic, and legal warfare against one another. The weapons used to wage psychological warfare range from gossiping about, ridiculing, snubbing, avoiding, and deluding rivals to shunning, ostracizing, disowning, betraying and defaming them. The weapons used to wage legal warfare range from legally separating from and divorcing their rivals to ﬁling various types of criminal complaints, and civil suits and injunctions against them to passing laws that outright discriminate against them. The weapons used to wage economic warfare range from refusing to hire and promote rivals to demoting and ﬁring them to charging them more for services and products. Although these different means of waging dominance engagements may be used separately or in conjunction with one another, the goal behind them is the same. It is always to force rivals to relinquish their claims on a higher position and accept their lower position in the community’s pecking order. One should not mistakenly conclude from what has been said that non-violent dominance engagements are relatively benign social experiences. To the contrary, when the combatants unleash their most potent psychological, legal, or economic weapons on one another, non-violent dominance engagements can be extremely cruel. In fact, even non-violent dominance engagements where only psychological warfare is used can become vicious enough to belie the old schoolyard saying that, ‘‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’’ The words spoken and actions taken during the use of psychological warfare may not break people’s bones, but they can scar people’s minds for life. (Athens, 2002a, pp. 23–24)

Further, certain kinds of nonviolent engagements may certainly be considered violent on a societal scale when they threaten the subsistence or even the existence of a group of people. This also translates well to the societal scale, speciﬁcally with regard to the threat to, for example, the subsistence of the Peruvian peasantry at the hands of their indifferent government, and multiple legal and economic threats from the apartheid government of South Africa to the majority of its citizens. On the larger societal scale, it would be quite difﬁcult not to consider such threats violence. Athens continues: Among the three types of violent people considered, it is usually the marginally violent person who rises to the top and violent and ultra-violent persons who sink to the bottom in a civil minor community. Marginally violent people conﬁne themselves to the use of psychological, economic, and legal warfare to settle dominance disputes, except under

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the extreme circumstances where they need to defend themselves or intimates from an opponent who actually or threatens to physically attack them. On the other hand, violent and ultra-violent people will employ brute physical force to win a dominance engagement even when their opponent does not threaten to or actually physically attack them or an intimate. (Athens, 2002a, pp. 23–24)

Why the marginally violent individual sits at the top of the dominance hierarchy in a civil community is twofold: that is the person most capable of wielding the usual weapons of domination effectively, and the community does not tolerate direct violence. Conversely, postulates Athens, the fact that the marginally violent person sits at the top of the dominance hierarchy in a civil community is a large part of what makes it a civil community to begin with: ‘‘In short, the predominant individual types in every minor community have their own relatively unique phantom communities, self portraits, patterns of action, and insignia of dominance. Thus, based on the predominant individual type that inhabits a community and its prevailing norms for resolving dominance disputes, three speciﬁc kinds of minor communities, whose inhabitants may be from any racial or ethnic background, can be demarcated’’ (Athens, 1998, p. 678). Athens goes on to contrast the previous discussion of the civil minor community with its marginally violent individuals at the top of its dominance hierarchy with the malignant minor community with ultraviolent individuals at the top of its dominance hierarchy: In contrast to minor civil communities, in malignant minor ones, the violent dominance engagement is the predominant institution for resolving dominance disputes, so that in addition to the use of possible psychological, economic, or legal warfare, physical warfare can be used to settle dominance disputes. Of course, in a civil major community, the violent dominance engagements that are institutionalized in malignant communities would operate as a bastard institution. The weapons used to wage violent dominance engagements include ﬁsts, blunt objects, knives, handguns, riﬂes, bayonets, submachine guns, and bombs. Rivals are beaten, raped, stabbed, cut, burned, and shot until they relinquish their claims to higher positions and accept without complaint their lower positions in the pecking order. Among the three types of violent people considered, it is the ultraviolent and violent persons who rise to the top and marginally violent persons who sink to the bottom of a malignant minor community’s dominance order. (Athens, 2002a, pp. 26–27)

It is also important to note that, however well established a minor community may seem, it is rarely fully malignant or fully civil. It exists somewhere on a continuum and changes frequently. Civil, malignant, and turbulent minor communities are not static entities; they are in a constant state of evolution and devolution. Malignant minor communities may evolve into turbulent ones, and turbulent minor communities may further evolve into civil ones.

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Conversely, civil minor communities may devolve into turbulent ones, and turbulent minor communities may further devolve into malignant ones. Thus, turbulent minor communities are always in transition from either malignant minor communities to civil minor ones or from civil minor communities to malignant minor ones (Athens, 1998, pp. 684–686). They represent minor communities, in which, according to Park and Burgess’ (1921) apt words, ‘‘the old order is passing, but the new order has not yet arrived.’’ (Athens, 2002a, p. 34)

This of course echoes the one of the major functions of the phantom community in the transition of the individual: the outer individual changes in part by replacing his or her phantom community. A turbulent self is one in which the phantom community has not yet become uniform with itself; it is in a state of ﬂux. Thus it is with the turbulent community: always in transition to a different state or order. Let us now consider some other authors who have built upon Athens’ work and what insights they have to show us with regard to human violence.

BUILDING UPON ATHENS: RHODES AND OTHERS In his 1999 book Why They Kill, Richard Rhodes discusses Athens’ theories and personal and academic background, and then applies his theory of violentization to several famous cases of violent individuals. Rhodes begins to draw Athens’ theory of violentization out to a societal level and provides some important connections and deﬁnitions. He also further explains the idea of a society being violent. Opening the discussion with an excellent illustration of a society where vengeance takes the place of punishment, Rhodes describes medieval Europe’s incredibly high rates of civil and personal violence. ‘‘The civilian past was far more violent than the civilian present. The historical evidence of much higher rates of personal violence in past times is abundant and incontrovertible.’’ He cites homicide rates per 100,000 people in various countries in Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and today. The estimated homicide rate in fourteenthcentury London, for example, is 36 to 52 per 100,000, while in 1994, it was a mere 1 per 100,000 (Rhodes, 1999, pp. 215–216). In explaining how this transition took place, Rhodes explains that the monarchies began to monopolize access to military force and weaponry as they also began taxing the property of individuals. The emerging middle class, ‘‘depending upon this double monopoly for its very existence,’’ had to ﬁnd other ways of resolving its quarrels than direct personal violence. Thus was born civil litigation (Rhodes, 1999, pp. 223–224).

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Although our societal norms about personal violence and dominance in western Europe and the United States have changed over time due to the further development of these structures, violent societies still exist here. Rhodes points out that violent neighborhoods still persist in nonviolent modern cities (indeed, so it is with the aforementioned instance of a smaller violent society within a larger, more stable one: the Gujarat riots of 2002). Building upon Athens’ theories about neighborhoods from ‘‘Dominance, Ghettoes, and Violent Crime,’’ discussed above, Rhodes adds to the discussion toward the end of Why They Kill. He explains that Athens’ analysis of modern neighborhoods within cities is equally applicable to ‘‘the larger communities of Western Europe, within which personal violence declined across the past ﬁve hundred years’’ (Rhodes, 1999, p. 228). Rhodes’ connection to Athens’ work is perhaps most widely observed in his Why They Kill, which enjoyed some critical acclaim and broad sales among the general public. In fact, Rhodes’ book represents many people’s ﬁrst (and sometimes only) exposure to Athens. Rhodes’ interest, then, is a large part of how Athens came to the attention of many readers. Further, in the section below about critiques of Athens and Rhodes, these two authors have been taken together largely because most of the critiques respond to Athens’ theories through Rhodes – most are reviews of Why They Kill. Few direct critiques of Athens’ work are available, and most of those deal with his later work. However, Rhodes is not the only author to have built upon, or responded to, Athens’ theories. In addition to dozens of book reviews of both authors (whose ﬁndings and recommendations are attended below), Violent Acts and Violentization: Assessing, Applying, and Developing Lonnie Athens’ Theories, released in 2002, features nine essays about next steps for building on violentization from a number of different professional and theoretical perspectives. His work is being replicated, challenged, and used as a foundation for further research on an ongoing basis. Of particular interest in this publication is ‘‘Violent Socialization and the SS-Einsatzgruppen,’’ also by Rhodes, and based in part of his book The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust). Referenced above (during the discussion of Rhodes’ views of Athens’ methodologies), Rhodes discusses Third Reich’s use of ‘‘y[C]ore violentization techniques to prepare Einsatzgruppen death squads for the potentially disabling trauma they were about to experience carrying out the ‘Final Solution.’ ‘‘Rhodes provides a level of historical support for violentization, showing how it can be a traumatically damning process of subjugation and adaptation for the perpetrator amid the widespread destruction of victims’’ (Rice, 2003, p. 3). In this way, Rhodes

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points the way to a framework for analyzing human violence at the societal scale using violentization. Other essays from that book are discussed below. Precedent for successful application of Athens’ theories to collective violent behavior is extant.

CRITIQUES OF ATHENS AND RHODES Of course, not everyone who comes into contact with Athens’ theories agrees with them. For the most part, however, critiques taking issue with Athens’ and Rhodes’ (and others’) theories take two forms: having missed the point or not read closely enough; and strong reactions to the graphic nature of dangerous violent criminals’ undiluted accounts of their experiences. In the ﬁrst case, for example, one critique of Athens’ Violent Acts and Actors from a Christian journal suggested that Athens’ entire theory was wrong because it did not allow any possibility for redemption (DiIulio, 2000, p. 4). Leaving aside the question of whether or not a strict allegiance to Christian ideals makes a sociological model accurate or functional or not, the statement itself is not accurate. While Athens (1989, p. 97) believed that the rehabilitation of dangerous violent criminals was extremely difﬁcult to accomplish – having reached the top of the social dominance hierarchy in their respective social groups, they would be unlikely to want to change back (in the process, replacing an entire phantom community and remaking the selves they had worked hard to create) – he never denied this possibility to begin with, and in any case, he seems to have grown explicitly more optimistic about it over time. In Violent Acts and Violentization, for example, Athens co-authors an essay with a reformed dangerous violent criminal. In the course of the essay, the former felon reveals his development into a dangerous violent criminal, but also discusses, among other things, his murder of his own mother, and his having been subsequently labeled ‘‘incurably insane.’’ What brings him back to being a marginally violent person (one who will use violence in selfdefense) from being a dangerous violent criminal is his awareness of his own patterns, and the active choices he makes to change his persona and his life. He is grateful to have been diagnosed ‘‘incurably insane’’ and hospitalized for his violent acts rather than having gone to prison, speciﬁcally because it allowed him to consider reconstructing his own psyche, and ultimately, to do it. Rather than having been found ‘‘criminally insane,’’ or ‘‘not guilty by reason of insanity,’’ suggests Starr, a better legal designation might be,

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‘‘guilty but in need of and susceptible to treatment.’’ Starr’s closing is particularly telling of the possibilities for redemption: I am living proof of the value of providing this verdict option to judges in the special case of disorganized, dangerous violent offenders because while living outside the conﬁnes of a mental institution for almost 20 years, I have not been arrested for, much less convicted of, any serious crime. I hope to devote the remainder of my life to helping create and carry out rehabilitation programs especially designed for changing disorganized, dangerous violent criminals, a special category of offenders, among which I once included myself into ‘‘marginally violent people,’’ the category into which I would now place myself. According to Athens (1997, pp. 145–146), a marginally violent person will only commit a grievous act of violence to defend himself or someone else from serious physical harm or death. I believe that the key to creating such programs is ﬁnding an effective way to change people with divided, mitigated, or unmitigated violent phantom communities into people with united, nonviolent ones. (Athens & Starr, 2002, p. 74)

In other words, certain dangerous violent criminals, with the proper treatment, can change their lives from the inside out. There is a possibility for some, and Athens is clearly in support of this stance, having co-authored the article with Mr. Starr. Recovery for many dangerous violent criminals is unlikely: if one’s entire life has been spent in pursuit of violent domination and one has ﬁnally reached that pinnacle, why change? Athens does, however, allow for the possibility of redemption. The critique that he does not is therefore not valid. A few other critiques suggest that Athens’ theory fails to consider women – Jefferson (2002, 2), for example, suggests that they show up ‘‘rarely and in an undifferentiated way;’’ others suggest he does not treat them at all – that he interviewed only male offenders, and therefore somehow considers female ones irrelevant. One reviewer claimed that women, who do not tend to be, for example, serial killers as often as men, would then somehow be omitted from Athens’ studies (Gutin, 1999, p. 3). Most negative reactions to Athens’ work, and Rhodes’ building upon it, do not directly engage much of anything about the theories themselves, complaining that it fails to address something outside its scope, and this assertion is no exception. Athens’ subjects do include women – this criticism is also patently inaccurate. In addition to the quoted pieces from the discussion of violentization that indicate that violence should be used in certain situations whether the subject is male or female, among other characteristics, a number of the dangerous violent criminals he interviewed were women, and Athens is careful to point this out: ‘‘ythe novice group of unseasoned violent offenders was composed of thirty young adult male and female offenders whose ages ranged from early to late teensy’’ (Athens, 1989, p. 22). Athens

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also sets up the case studies he uses for frequent illustration, and is explicit about how both men and women exhibit violent behavior in violentization: ‘‘In Case 29, the subject is in his early teens, was last convicted of an armed robbery, and his subjugator was his mother. Finally, the subject in case 38 is a female in her late teens whose last offense was criminal homicide, and the subjugator is her mother. Thus, these cases show both males and females in the roles of subject and subjugator’’ (Athens, 1989, p. 33). An account of violentization could not get more gender-speciﬁc or more directly responsive to the possibilities of women being or becoming violent than that. How the reviewer missed these key points is somewhat mysterious, but perhaps a lack of close reading may result from the reactions of reviewers to the graphic elements of the texts. Athens does note that fewer females than males tend to complete the entire violentization process and suggests that this may stem from a perception that women are seen by potential violent coaches as being less worthy of such violent coaching. A word about Athens’ failure to treat the ‘‘criminally insane’’ (another critique that, like that above, is brought up from time to time but is not actually supported by Athens’ or Rhodes’ work) comes from Rhodes himself: ‘‘Lonnie Athens found no evidence that mental illness causes violent crime. Some of the violent criminals he interviewed had been diagnosed as mentally ill; most had not. They all had in common not mental illness but violentization’’ (Rhodes, 1999, p. 199). Violentization emphatically deals with the process of dangerous violent criminals’ formations of what constitutes reasonable actions. It does not deal with the distinction between organic insanity and criminal insanity; rather, it deals purely with those who might have been ‘‘normal’’ members of society and how they become dangerous violent criminals through social experience and training. While Athens does dispel the myth that someone who committed a violent act ‘‘just snapped’’ – all those he interviewed formed speciﬁc plans about what they were about to do based on their interpretations of the situation and what they believed was appropriate to do, then carried it out – he never purports to treat those with genuine organic mental diseases, and even explicitly states such, among other things that his work is and is not, at the beginning of The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals. Why all the critiques stemming from an apparent lack of close reading? As previously noted, Athens uses dangerous violent criminals’ exact words when describing their experiences and thought processes as foundational evidence for his theories and models. His works are peppered with ﬁrsthand accounts of assaults, murders, rapes, and other violent crimes from the point of view of, as well as in the language of, the perpetrators themselves.

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Granted, it may not be comfortable to read at ﬁrst, but being put off by graphic ﬁrsthand discussion of the criminal mind is a poor reason not to attend a book closely, particularly if one has been contracted to do so, or is curious enough about the theory to have been interested in becoming familiar with it in the ﬁrst place. Rhodes also reprints some of these accounts, and the reviews of Why They Kill sometimes respond to them in the same way. Most of the book reviews (the primary style of critique of Athens’ theories thus far) that take issue with Athens do seem alarmed by the presentation of the subject matter. While it is true that unﬂinchingly reading the case studies takes a bit of practice, the curious reader ﬁnds great value in Athens’ letting his subjects speak for themselves rather than trying to protect us from their words. Some reviewers, however, are quite upset by it, and others grossly oversimplify Athens’ rich model of violentization to merely, ‘‘those who have violence done to them will do violence in return’’ (Gutin, 1999, p. 3) – a stance against which Athens himself directly cautions as being overly simplistic. The closest critiques of Athens’ work have to do with concerns about his data collection, theory replication, and Athens’ and Rhodes’ claims that all dangerous violent criminals, bar none, have undergone the process of violentization. Rhodes states that these are not as problematic as they have been made out to be (Rhodes’ claim of 100% accuracy is discussed in great detail in Why They Kill). Perhaps the sharpest and arguably the most articulate critic of Athens’ work is Ian O’Donnell (2003). He begins by citing in great detail psychological experiments in conformity. It is not clear, however, what these studies bring to the critique, as Athens is not arguing the nature of conformity. O’Donnell’s primary contention seems to be that people need not undergo violentization in order to follow directions to be cruel to others (O’Donnell, 2003, p. 756). However, he offers no alternative explanation as to what makes one person capable of carrying out horriﬁc acts of violence and not others, suggesting that ordinary people will instead just do whatever is expected of them, even if that means perpetrating violence on others. It is not clear why he rejects the notion that the ‘‘rewiring’’ that occurs during violentization is a reasonable explanation for what makes some people capable of such things and others not. It is further not clear why those who do violence should not have had to have undergone violentization to do so, or how his observation is really at odds with the theory. O’Donnell gives a shorthand version of this critique in an issue of Contemporary Sociology (2004), where he suggests that one of violentization’s primary ﬂaws is its lack of falsiﬁability – a claim disproved above. O’Donnell seems particularly

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perturbed by this aspect, however, and in each of his responses to violentization is sure to dedicate some lengthy discussion to it. In his 2003 article, for example, O’Donnell says of Rhodes’ Why They Kill: Rhodes extends the discussion of violentization by ﬁnding cases that ﬁt or strengthen the model. These include Cheryl Crane, who aged 14 killed her mother’s lover (Rhodes, 1999, pp. 143–155); heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson who after serving a term of imprisonment for rape returned to the ring to bite off a piece of his opponents ear (ibid. pp. 167–174); and Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of US President John F. Kennedy (ibid. pp. 175–198). It seems that if we interrogate the biographies of violent people with sufﬁcient care, the traces of violentization will gradually become exposed. (O’Donnell, 2003, p. 755)

This is so puzzling because it would seem to suggest that the model of violentization is in fact rather effective if its patterns are so very pervasive within the psyches of violent people. O’Donnell’s next statement suggests that he intends to do ‘‘the opposite,’’ instead using cases that test the model and critique its weak points. However, he does not cite any of these cases, instead launching into a discussion of conformity and genocide, which are outside the very explicit scope of violentization laid out by Athens himself. O’Donnell also suggests that violentization ‘‘would seem to imply a relentless increase in violence’’ (O’Donnell, 2004, p. 721), but it is not at all clear what might have prompted that assumption or how that would work. O’Donnell’s parting questions are these: ‘‘How can violentization explain the mother who kills her newborn child to avoid social stigma or economic ruin, or the young man who ﬁghts to defend his home or the executives who decide to manufacture a drug despite its known toxic side effects?’’ (Ibid.) O’Donnell neither explains exactly how or why any of these examples that he brings up actually contradict the theory of violentization, nor cites any empirical evidence supporting his claim that they do negate the theory. For example, why does a person ﬁghting to defend his or her home necessarily contradict the theory of violentization? One would need a lot more information about the background of the man in question and his perception of the actual circumstances surrounding the illegal entry into his home before such conclusion could be drawn responsibly. Despite O’Donnell’s interesting arguments, his critique is another that does not seem to have attended to Athens’ own introduction of the theory. So much so, in fact, that O’Donnell even inexplicably puts the size of the sample that Athens bases his theory at a mere 58 cases, a fraction of the true total. Interestingly, Jeffery T. Ulmer, one of the editors of both Contemporary Sociology and Violent Acts and Violentization, makes similar observations in

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a follow-up comment in the former publication. He is equally puzzled by the ‘‘relentless increase in violence’’ comment, and also adds that O’Donnell leaves out the important dialectical nature of violentization (Ulmer, 2005, p. 241). That is, O’Donnell ignores some key points of violentization that are explicitly laid out, and does not seem to engage the process that is violentization – the ‘‘rewiring’’ aspect undergone by the subject’s psyche being an important part of that. Despite these few criticisms, most responses to Athens’ work have been quite positive. The method is novel and careful, the theory is innovative yet elegant, and it is gaining widespread acceptance. To examine Athens’ Internet presence, for example, is not only to index his publications, but to ﬁnd them on criminology and sociology syllabi posted on course websites at universities across the United States and Canada. While Athens’ (2005) theories are still in the process of development (in no small part because his career continues), and some reviewers are taking a wait-and-see stance, the theories have clearly lent some fresh approaches to old concerns in his ﬁeld. Those fresh approaches can also help us in International Relations with fresh insights in an old search for answers, particularly as many of the problems in determining what makes individuals violent have been similar to those in determining what makes societies violent: poverty, bad neighborhoods, nature vs. nurture arguments, and the like.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS In the ﬁeld of International Relations, most popular mid-level theories fail at some point, and are then unable to explain why they fail, or they are so inexorably tangled up in debate for its own sake that they have become constructs with little practical value toward solution – they only function as pieces of an ongoing debate that drifts further and further from application to real-world problems. Worse, a great number of them confuse correlation with causality, stating that poverty, or the existence of a drug trade, or a certain kind of elite class are what causes violence, and that is simply not accurate. They are at best markers that should suggest to us that violence might be nearby – such factors often go hand-in-hand with an ineffective or indifferent governing body that does not maintain a monopoly on violence – and at worst, distractions from true insights as to what could truly be causing it. This project like Athens has grown out of a sense of urgency in identifying true causes of violence, and frustration with the current theory of the ﬁeld to

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do so. This frustration comes not from ignorance of what exists already, but out of impatience for it to arrive at a location of practical explanatory value that does not have to explain away its inevitable breakdown as ‘‘simply the exception that proves the rule.’’ If it does not work, the theory has failed thus far. Modify it, or try a different one. Let us not cling to what does not explain what it purports to explain. Athens’ contribution to the social sciences does not end with his theory; the proposed larger project embraces his method also, in the same spirit of trying to solve rather than trying to invent new debate. Clearly, building upon Athens’ theories, and also following something of his methodology, can lend us a great deal of insight in International Relations when considering human violence at the societal scale. Violentization offers an excellent framework for analysis by allowing us to consider various stages of an unfolding conﬂict and observe their characteristics. Those characteristics are immediately apparent when examining various conﬂicts, creating at least a methodological order in the chaos of conﬂict. Better yet, they leave the complexity of human interaction intact and allow us to consider not just the odd input or output, but the whole rich pattern. How, then, would it work? Using violentization as a framework, we could analyze various recent conﬂicts in stages and parts to see if the pattern is indeed represented there: perhaps violentization is not merely the process by which an individual becomes a dangerous violent criminal, but also the process by which the larger society loses its monopoly on violence. Consider what happened in the former Yugoslavia if not the explosion of ‘‘ancient ethnic hatreds’’ that had failed to explode for hundreds of years before the early 1990s? Could Milosevic have violently coached a large segment of the Serbian population, and used them to violentize the larger society as a means to attain the ‘‘Greater Serbia’’ he sought? What about South Africa as it struggled under apartheid, and then with democratizing? Were there signs of belligerency within the population after the SAP had repeatedly brutalized unarmed protestors, some of them children? The Shining Path of Peru claims its ‘‘Beginning of Armed Struggle’’ (BAS) was the destruction of a ballot box: essentially its ﬁrst violent performance. Does the destruction of government property truly constitute a violent act? Further, does the threat to the Peruvian Peasants’ subsistence posed by the government constitute one? If they do, does violentization explain the process of the violence that ensued? During the Gujarat riots of 2002, members of the Muslim community were widely the victims of violence, yet the Hindu extremist government blamed that community for the violence. What light

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can the nature of violent performances and virulency shed on these claims? What can the historical case of Tombstone under the Earps tell us about how violent societies may stabilize? The patterns violentization suggests as to how people become dangerous violent criminals offer a useful framework for answering questions that can help us debunk inaccurate theories of violence in International Relations and construct newer, or accurate ones. Once a number of cases have been analyzed using violentization, we may then also consider its potential predictive value. In the current international security climate, where so many resources are expended on conﬂict, which conﬂicts are truly likely to ignite into terrible conﬂagrations? Can they be stopped before the governing body loses its monopoly on violence? Because of the previously-discussed unlikelihood (although not impossibility) of recovery of the fully violentized individual, Athens recommends intervention in the process (Athens, 1989). It would certainly be a sound recommendation for the international community to intervene in early conﬂicts displaying similar traits of violentization. Additionally, a small border skirmish and an impending conﬂagration will look distinctly different, as the latter would likely display much stronger markers of the violentization pattern and would not exit the process. Armed with an understanding of violentization as a framework for analyzing conﬂicts, it would be clearer which conﬂicts threatened to become systemic and which not. This would of course allow the international community to determine in which conﬂicts it should take an active interest, to which it might most effectively allocate resources, and at what points. Consider how differently history might have proceeded if the international community had been able to observe, for example, that the SAP were not just engaging in police brutality to control the majority population, but had a speciﬁc framework of violent domination they were using in their interactions with protestors? Might the international community have better understood the severity of what was occurring and the implications for the future of South Africa and its political stability? If analysts listening to BJP speeches in February of 2002 had been able to identify not just jingoistic communal rhetoric but violent coaching, could they have investigated the regional politics more closely and defused tensions in Gujarat before thousands of Muslims brutally lost their lives? Can we now say that South Africa, whose government still does not hold a true monopoly on violence (largely outsourcing it to private security ﬁrms), is out of the proverbial woods? Might Gujarat reignite again as it has in the past? How might these possibilities be prevented?

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Clearly, violentization is not merely another novel theory of violence. If successfully applied to violent societies as it has been to dangerous violent criminals, it offers a number of practical and profoundly useful applications. By not engaging in meaningless debate of whether violence comes from within or from without and instead considering the whole of a dialectical pattern, violentization gives us a more meaningful, real-world analytical tool, both on the individual and societal levels.

REFERENCES Athens, L. H. (1980). Violent criminal acts and actors: A symbolic interactionist study. New York: Routledge. Athens, L. H. (1989). The creation of dangerous violent criminals. New York: Routledge. Athens, L. H. (1992). The creation of dangerous violent criminals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Athens, L. H. (1995). Dramatic self change. The Sociological Quarterly, 36, 571–586. Athens, L. H. (1997). Violent criminal acts and actors revisited. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Athens, L. H. (1998). Dominance, ghettos, and violent crime. The Sociological Quarterly, 39, 673–691. Athens, L. H. (2002). Violentization in larger social context. In: L. H. Athens & J. T. Ulmer (Eds), Violent acts and violentization: Assessing, applying, and developing Lonnie Athens’ theories. Cambridge, UK: Elsevier Science & Technology Books. Athens, L. H. (2005). Violent encounters: Violent engagements, skirmishes, and tiffs. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 34, 1–48. Athens, L. H., & Starr, R. (2002). One man’s story: How I became a ‘‘disorganized’’ dangerous violent criminal. In: L. H. Athens & J. T. Ulmer (Eds), Violent acts and violentization: Assessing, applying, and developing Lonnie Athens’ theories. Cambridge, UK: Elsevier Science & Technology Books. DiIulio, J. J., Jr. (2000). Book review: Murder most maleﬁc. FirstThings.com, the Journal of Religion and Public Life. Available at http://www.ﬁrstthings.com/ftissues/ft0003/reviews/ diiulio.html; Internet. Accessed 12 May, 2007. Gutin, J. (1999). Book review: Why they kill: The discoveries of a maverick criminologist by Richard Rhodes. Available at http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/09/28/rhodes; Internet. Accessed 12 May, 2007. Jefferson, T. (2002). Book review: The creation of dangerous violent criminals. In Achilles Heel 13. Available at http://www.achillesheel.freeuk.com/br13_01.html. Accessed 12 May, 2007. O’Donnell, I. (2003). A new paradigm for understanding violence? Testing the limits of Lonnie Athens’ theory. British Journal of Criminology, 43, 750–771. O’Donnell, I. (2004). Untitled book review. In: L. H. Athens & J. T. Ulmer (Eds), Violent acts and violentization: Assessing, applying, and developing Lonnie Athens’ theory and research. Contemporary Sociology, 33, 720–721.

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Park, R. E., & Burgess, E. W. (1921). Introduction to the science of sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rhodes, R. (1999). Why they kill: The discoveries of a maverick criminologist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Rhodes, R. (2002). Masters of death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Rice, S. K. (2003). Book review: Violent acts and violentization: Assessing, applying, and developing Lonnie Athens’ theories, edited by Lonnie Athens and Jeffrey T. Ulmer. Available at Rice Consulting: www.rice-consulting.com/Lonnie%20Athens%20b% 20review%20scs.pdf, 3; Internet. Accessed 12 May, 2007. Ulmer, J. T. (Ed.) (2005). Comment to the editors. Contemporary Sociology, 34, 440–441.

HOW I BECAME A CRIMINOLOGIST Marshall B. Clinard People have often asked me ‘‘how did I decide to become a criminologist?’’ Looking back over my life, I think two key factors played a part in my making this decision. To begin with, I am a product of the Great Depression. I was born on November 12, 1911 in Boston, Massachusetts into a middle class, New England family. My mother, who was a graduate of the Boston School of Elocution, taught public speaking. My father, who was a jovial and convivial man, did quite well for himself as a ladies wholesale shoe salesmen. However, when we moved to California he experienced some difﬁculties in his sales career when he tried his hand at selling shoes outside his native area of New England. He made the mistake of underestimating the value of the personal relationship that he had cultivated with shoe dealers in New England and as a result he lost a great deal of money and forced us to return to Boston. My mother made it quite clear to me that I was not to become a business man like my father. Despite his death in 1926 from pneumonia and overwork, I attended Governor Dummer Academy, a preparatory school in Newburyport, Massachusetts, which I graduated from in 1928. After moving later that year to San Diego, California, I enrolled at San Diego State University, where I became a member of the track team. My coach thought that I showed promise of becoming a track star. When the stock market crashed in 1929, however, my mother lost most of the money that my father had invested. To help support my family, I had to

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take a job in a grocery store. It became so difﬁcult for us to make ends meet that my maternal grandmother had to ask the butcher for ‘‘dog bones,’’ so she could make stew for my two younger sisters, mother, and me. My new role in the family and events that were taking place in the world at the time matured me beyond my years. After completing the ﬁrst 2 years of my undergraduate education at San Diego State University, I transferred to Stanford University in 1930. While at Stanford, I got a job in the student dining halls to help pay for my tuition and room and board. By the time that I earned my bachelor’s degree from there in 1932, the country had slid into a full-scale depression. Jobs were scarce. The lack of employment opportunities was partly responsible for my going to graduate school, ﬁrst at Berkeley and, then, later at Stanford. As soon as I realized that there were very few teaching jobs in anthropology, I returned to Stanford where I switched my ﬁeld of graduate studies from anthropology to sociology. When I received my M.A. in sociology 2 years later at Stanford, the country was still in a mess. In fact, social conditions were so appalling that many graduate students were interested in doing something of an applied value, so they could help improve society. I felt very strongly back then and still do now that sociology must have some applied value, such as in the case of economics, political science, and psychology, or else it would eventually become an extinct discipline. In fact, my feelings about this matter remained so strong that over 30 years later I (1966) still felt compelled to write a paper, ‘‘The Sociologists Quests for Respectability,’’ in which I argued that sociology must become a ‘‘good for something’’ discipline. By my way of thinking, criminology has always been and probably will always remain an applied area of sociology. Thus, it is a good for something specialization in sociology which value to our larger society has yet to be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction, mine included. But this does not completely explain why I got into criminology in the ﬁrst place. I feel that much of what one decides academically is not purely a rational choice, but also a product of circumstance. While a graduate student at Stanford, I worked as a reader in criminology (I had done very well in this course as an undergraduate). A reader’s job was essentially to read and grade exam papers. However, the professor who taught the course was so preoccupied with other things that I also held his student ofﬁce hours for him and took responsibility for organizing and supervising the ﬁeld trips that the class took to Alcatraz and San Quentin. I can still remember my shock at what I saw in one room at San Quentin. A large number of ropes hung from the ceiling with heavy weights attached. The ropes were being stretched in

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preparation for their use in hangings even though the crimes had yet to be committed. This sparked my lifelong opposition to capital punishment, which I am glad to say is now shared by a large segment of our society. Because I was a reader in criminology, I went on frequent ﬁeld trips to prisons, and often talked about criminal behavior and the criminal justice system. Fellow students and some of the faculty at Stanford began referring to me as a ‘‘criminologist.’’ They began labeling me as a criminologist even though I was doing my graduate work in social psychology, serving also as a reader for Richard La Pierre in his undergraduate social psychology course, and writing my master thesis on people’s negative reactions to cripples under his direction. Thus, despite the fact that I had taken only one undergraduate course in criminology, I became known among my fellow students, professors, as well as others as a ‘‘criminologist.’’ Their deﬁnition of me was obviously not based on my formal academic training. Instead, it was based on what Herbert Blumer (1969) argues was their interpretation of the meaning of my actions. Thus, as George H. Mead (1934) would explain it, I gradually began acting towards myself as others acted toward me until I ﬁnally began seeing myself as they saw me, which was as a criminologist. In the undergraduate criminology course in which I was a reader, we used as our textbook Sutherland’s (1924) Criminology, which he (Sutherland, 1934, 1939, 1947) changed the title in subsequent editions to Principles of Criminology. It was largely because his book left an indelible mark on my thinking that I decided to go to the University of Chicago where he was a member of their faculty of sociology. Shortly after arriving in Chicago in 1935, Sutherland fortunately hired me as his research assistant. The country had not yet escaped the grips of the depression. Jobs and money were still hard for most people to come by. To supplement the income that I earned from my job as a research assistant, I also had to work an assortment of other odd jobs. The best job that I had while in Chicago was as the Director of Field Trips for the University’s summer school program. We visited a variety of places around the city, including the Gold Coast, Little Poland, Little Italy, black neighborhoods, and even the infamous Chicago stockyards. Besides organizing the ﬁeld trips, I gave sociological lectures during them about the places that we visited. The ﬁeld trips became so popular among students that it became necessary for me to hire an assistant. In addition to providing food on the table and a roof over my head, my work as Director of Field Trips gave me a ﬁrst-hand look at many areas of Chicago, and in the case of Little Italy, something of the ﬂavor of the organized crime in the area (I used to even point out to the group a telephone pole that had bullet holes in it).

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In Sutherland’s role as my mentor, he exercised a decisive inﬂuence on my career. While working as his research assistant, he had me read each day a variety of newspapers to look for and cut out articles on corporate crime. He then had me classify the offenses described in newspaper articles based on several factors, including the nature of the particular violation committed. It is my understanding that my work provided, at least, part of the data that he (Sutherland, 1949) later used in his book White Collar Crime. It was because of the work that I did as Sutherland’s research assistant that I (Clinard, 1946, 1952, 1983, 1990; Clinard & Yeager, 1980) developed my lifelong interest in corporate crime. After I later became a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, I picked up the nickname ‘‘little Sutherland.’’ However, Sutherland’s inﬂuence over me was not limited to the criminological problems that I later choose for study. He (Clinard, 1949, 1957, 1959) also inﬂuenced greatly my understanding of how people come to engage in criminal behavior. To this day, I (Clinard, 1974, pp. 89–90) have been a staunch believer in his theory of differential association. His theory is that criminal behavior is a product of socialization and is learned like any other behavior. Like Sutherland, I believe that human beings can be socialized to engage in any type of behavior. If culture is viewed as learned or acquired behavior, then the theory of differential association is perfectly consistent with subcultural explanations of criminal behavior. As Sutherland (1956, p. 9) was fond of stating: ‘‘any person inevitably assimilates the Surrounding cultureya Southerner does not pronounce ‘r’ because other Southerners do not pronounce ‘r.’ Since I was originally trained as an anthropologist, his theory struck a deep chord in me. In a paper that I (Clinard, 1949) later wrote called ‘‘Criminal Behavior is Human Behavior,’’ I tried to develop Sutherland’s ideas further. While a Fullbright Professor in Sweden in 1954 directing a research project that I conducted in Swedish prisons, a group of inmates, many of whom had participated in my project, hosted a Christmas Eve party for me. During the party, I asked some of the inmates why so few Swedes committed bank robberies. They replied, ‘‘to hold up a bank and order the tellers and customers inside to put their hands up would cause Swedes a great deal of embarrassment to comply with.’’ In my mind, their answer to my question conﬁrms in rather dramatic fashion the impact of cultural factors on a criminal’s choice of crimes. Even in the heyday of Merton’s anomie theory, I still felt that Sutherland’s theory of differential association provided a far better explanation of crime and deviance. In 1962, I organized a special session on anomie at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association

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that was held in Washington, D.C. I asked some of the leading criminologists and those in deviant behavior in the country to address the issue of whether anomie theory explained adequately the forms of crime or deviance that fell within their particular areas of expertise. Charles Snyder delivered a paper on alcoholism, Alfred Lindesmith delivered one on drug addiction, James Short delivered one on gang delinquency, and Edwin Lemert one on social control. There were also other presenters. Merton was also given an opportunity to speak after all the papers had been delivered. As I recall, he kept his rebuttal at a very high level of abstraction and never addressed most of the concrete points made by the earlier presenters whose overwhelming opinion was that anomie theory did not do a very good job of explaining the areas of crime or deviance in which they were experts. Over a thousand persons attended the session which made it one of the most highly attended ones in the entire history of the ASA (Clinard, 1964a, pp. v–vi). Before the meetings ended, the Free Press offered me a contract to edit a book from the papers presented at the session. In my lengthy introduction to it, I (Clinard, 1964a, pp. 1–56) did not pull any punches, but shot from the hip at anomie. A word or two is in order about my feelings toward Sutherland personally. I always found him to be a warm, kind, and open man who was sincerely interested in my academic career. He held his graduate seminars in his apartment, which was located near the university. Mrs. Sutherland, who provided refreshments for us, always joined in the discussions. He always encouraged us all to express our opinions on the topic under discussion and always waited until we had ﬁnished saying everything that we had to say, before expressing any of his own views on it. Unfortunately, after studying with him for only a year, he left the University of Chicago to become the director of an institute of criminology at the University of Indiana. However, we kept in close contact by corresponding regularly with and seeing one another during his frequent trips back to Chicago to deliver lectures (as he said, ‘‘different titles, same lecture’’). After he died, Mrs. Sutherland sent me a portrait of him which has hung in my study ever since. At Chicago, I was also inﬂuenced greatly by Herbert Blumer. Blumer had been an all-American at Missouri and played professional football for the Chicago Cardinals under the legendary George ‘Papa’’ Halas. I can still recall hearing about a headline in the Chicago Tribune’s Sports page, ‘‘Blumer, A.B., M.A., Ph.D, Stands Out in Big Win.’’ I doubt there has ever been a member of any faculty who cut as an imposing physical ﬁgure as Blumer. Although he was imposing physically, he was a warm and gentle man whose mental prowess matched his great athletic ability. Graduate

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students in the department of sociology, who held him in awe, were expected to take his social psychology course where we learned about his conception of ‘‘symbolic interaction’’ and other important concepts of Mead, Dewey, Cooley, and others. In preparation for our graduate exams, we practically committed to memory his (Blumer, 1928) doctoral dissertation, ‘‘Method in Social Psychology.’’ Of course, Blumer also stressed the great importance of using qualitative methods in sociological research in his classes. My course work with him, together with the exposure to the research on urban problems done by members of what is now referred to as ‘‘The Chicago School’’ demonstrated to me the necessity of using qualitative methods in sociological research. Some of the monographs that came out of the Chicago School included: Ghetto, Vice in Chicago, The Hobo, The Taxi Dance Hall, Brothers in Crime, Jack Roller and Professional Thief. I (Clinard, 1941, 1942, 1964b) employed qualitative methods, similar to those used in these books in my doctoral dissertation, ‘‘The Process of Urbanization and Criminal Behavior: a Study of Culture Conﬂict,’’ which was done under Ernest Burgess, who took over the supervision of my doctoral studies after Sutherland went to Indiana. I have also used qualitative methods in other research that I have since done or inﬂuenced my graduate students. Unfortunately, the discipline of sociology has taken the wrong road by emphasizing only quantitative research since the days when the Chicago School studies were done and I did my graduate work. In my judgment, if sociology does not drastically change its present course, it will eventually destroy itself (Clinard, 1966). At the time that I was doing my doctoral studies in the sociology department at Chicago, the faculty included, in addition to Blumer, Burgess, and Sutherland, William Fielding Ogburn, Ellsworth Faris, Louis Wirth, and Everett Hughes. Among this group, there were quite a few seminal thinkers, outstanding teachers, and stimulating personalities. If I had to select one person to place at the top of this distinguished list after Sutherland left, it would be Herbert Blumer. During all my years of study at different universities, I never came across a professor who could deliver lectures as effortlessly as him without the use of any notes. His lectures were not only well-organized, but also delivered with a certain dramatic ﬂair that made a lasting impression on you. While at Chicago, I was President of the Sociology Club, which was comprised of both undergraduate and graduate students. As part of my duties as President, I arranged for speakers and presided at our Annual Dinner to which the faculty was invited. At one dinner, Ellsworth Faris, who was the department chairman at the time, sat next me. Looking at the

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faculty who were in attendance, he said to me, ‘‘this was once a great department.’’ I took Faris’ comment to mean when both Robert Park and W. I. Thomas were active members of it. In my mind, however, our department was still a very distinguished one. Although the department of sociology may have not been at the very height of its glory then, I was glad that I went to Chicago when I did. My only regret was that I arrived there a few years too late to take a course from Mead and ﬁnish my doctoral work under Sutherland. Despite Mead’s death in 1931 (Athens, 2007), however, Blumer (1937) and Faris (1937) kept his ideas very much alive in the department. Faris had studied under Mead and Blumer had studied under them both. After Sutherland left, however, Burgess was the closest thing we had in the department to a criminologist. He had done some important work in criminology and had coauthored with Park and Burgess (1921) The Principles of Sociology, which at the time, students referred to as the ‘‘green bible.’’ Burgess had not only gained considerable fame, but I also imagine funds from the publication of this book. Unlike Sutherland, Burgess was a very reserved, quiet, and private man who was primarily interested in his research. He was also notorious for not answering his correspondence. After taking a position at Iowa while working on my dissertation, I used the telephone to communicate with him, often when I was in Chicago itself. I sometimes wonder what course my academic career and personal life would have taken if I had not lived through the Great Depression and I had not been labeled a ‘‘criminologist’’ back when I was a student at Stanford. The answer is simple. I would have lived a much less rich and full personal and professional life. Becoming a criminologist enabled me to travel widely in both developed and underdeveloped countries and study crime there, visit criminal justice institutions and agencies around the world, and attend national and international conferences on crime, where I have had an opportunity to talk about its prevention and control not only before American scholars, but also before scholars from around the world. Just before World War II and during World War II, I was much connected with criminology and criminal justice. In 1941–1942 I was Chief of Criminal Statistics, Bureau of the Census. During World War II, from 1943 to 1945, I was in charge of the Analysis of Violations of Price and Rationing Regulations and Laws as a Principal Statistician in the Enforcement Department in the Ofﬁce of Price Administration in Washington, D.C. As a result, after the war, I published in 1952 The Black Market: A Study of White Collar Crime.

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My ﬁrst teaching job was before the war at the University of Iowa. Shortly after the war ended, I joined the faculty of sociology at Vanderbilt University and in 1946, I moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where I remained until I retired in 1979. I took various leaves, the ﬁrst was in 1954 to study the crime situation in Sweden where I was a Fullbright Research Professor conducting a criminological study using inmates of eight prisons. I took leave again in 1958–1960, 1962–1963 as a resident consultant to the Indian Government supported by the Ford Foundation in an effort to change the Indian slums by self help. I later published a book on this work, Slums and Community Development: Experiments in Self Help. In 1968, the Rockefeller Foundation asked me to go to Makerere University in Uganda, the leading university of East Africa, to further strengthen the University. While there we trained a group of students in research methods and I conducted a study of crime in Uganda. This, with the research I did in other developing countries, was published as, Crime in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective. In 1973–1974, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, I made a study in Switzerland of their reputed low crime rate. This work was published in 1978 as Cities With Little Crime: The Case of Switzerland. My work in criminology has been recognized by a number of awards. In 1971, I received from the American Criminology Society, the Edwin H. Sutherland award for Distinguished Contributions in Criminology. I received an Honorary LLD given to me by the University of Lausanne in 1985 for my contribution to criminology and my study of Swiss crime, which had been published. My work in white collar and corporate crime, was recognized in 1984 by receiving the Donald Cressey Award from the National Association of Fraud Examiners. I also take some satisfaction in knowing that in a small way I (Clinard, 1957; Clinard & Quinney, 1967) have contributed to ﬁnding solutions to the crimes committed on the streets of slums, and in the corporate boardrooms perched on top of our cities’ skyscrapers. Like my former mentor, Edwin Sutherland, I have worked hard to correct the imbalance in the amount of attention that society and the profession of criminology have devoted to the solution of conventional street crime and corporate crime. I think that I (Clinard, 1946, 1952, 1968, 1983, 1990 and Clinard & Yeager, 1980) can state here without fear of later contradiction that I have devoted over my long career as much time and energy studying crimes that people of higher socioeconomic class commit in their executive suites as I have to the study of crimes that people of lower socioeconomic status commit on the streets. Corporate crime is far more likely than conventional street crime to

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endanger capitalistic societies. In my estimation, it could only take two or three corporate crimes of the magnitude of Enron WorldCom in 2002 to occur simultaneously, or in quick succession with one another for this to become reality. At some of the informal gatherings of criminologists, I have often proposed a toast, ‘‘to more crime, for without it we would not be employed and have the opportunity to contribute to the understanding of crime and its control.’’ I have often heard people say if they had their life to live over again, then they would choose a different line of work. In my case, I have no regrets about the symbolic interaction with others early in my academic training which resulted in my becoming a ‘‘criminologist.’’ There is no doubt in my mind that I would make the same decision again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Lonnie Athens for his suggestions of additions to and bibliographic help with this paper. While a student of mine at Wisconsin, I sparked his interest in the work of the ‘‘Chicago School’’ in my seminar on deviant behavior which he took during his ﬁrst semester as a graduate student. Although at the time, he was a teaching assistant for a statistics course, he later became a teaching assistant for me in my criminology course and got hooked on qualitative research. After introducing him to Herbert Blumer during a talk that he gave at Madison and with my encouragement later went to Berkeley, Lonnie later went to Berkley where he did his doctoral studies under Blumer’s direction.

REFERENCES Athens, L. (2007). Mead, George Herbert. Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology, 2861–2864. Blumer, H. (1928). The method of social psychology. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Blumer, H. (1937). Social psychology. In: E. Schmidt (Ed.), Man and society (pp. 148–198). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interaction: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Cities With Little Crime. (1978). The case of Switzerland. New York and London: Cambridge University Press. Clinard, M. (1941). The process of urbanization and criminal behavior: A study of culture conﬂict. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Clinard, M. (1942). The process of urbanization and criminal behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 48, 202–213.

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Clinard, M. (1946). Criminological theories of violations of wartime regulations. American Sociological Review, 11, 258–270. Clinard, M. (1949). Criminal behavior is human behavior. Federal Probation, 13, 21–26. Clinard, M. (1952). The black market: A study of white collar crime. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Clinard, M. (1957 (1974)). The sociology of deviant behavior (13th ed., 2007). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Clinard, M. (1959). Criminological research. In: R. Merton, L. Broom & L. Cottrell, Jr. (Eds), Sociology today (pp. 509–536). New York: Harper & Row. Clinard, M. (1964a). Anomie and deviant behavior. New York: Free Press. Clinard, M. (1964b). The relation of urbanization and urbanism to criminal behavior. In: E. Burgess & D. Bogue (Eds), Contributions to urban sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clinard, M. (1966). The sociologist’s quest for respectability. The Sociological Quarterly, 7, 399–413. Clinard, M. (1968). ‘‘White collar crime’’. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: MacMillan and Free Press. Clinard, M. (1974). Some implications of ‘the new criminology’. International Journal of Penology and Criminology, 2, 85–91. Clinard, M. (1983). Corporate crime and ethics: The role of middle management. Beverly Hills: Sage. Clinard (1990). Corporate corruption: The abuse of power. New York: Prager. Clinard, M., & Quinney, R. (1967). Criminal behavior systems: A typology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Clinard, M., & Yeager, P. (1980). Corporate crime. New York: The Free Press. (Reprinted with a New Introduction, 2005, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books.) Crime in Developing Countries. (1973). A comparative perspective (with Daniel Abbott). New York: Wiley. Faris, E. (1937). The nature of human nature. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago. Park, R., & Burgess, E. (1921). The principles of sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slums and Community Development. (1963). Experiments in self help. New York: The Free Press. Sutherland, E. (1924). Criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Sutherland, E. (1934). Principles of criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Sutherland, E. (1939). Principles of criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Sutherland, E. (1947). Principles of criminology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Sutherland, E. (1949). White collar crime. New York: Dryden Press. Sutherland, E. (1956 (1973)). Edwin H. Sutherland: On analyzing crime. Edited and introduced by K. Schessler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

QUILTS AND EVERYDAY LIFE$ Colleen R. Hall-Patton ABSTRACT The term ‘‘everyday’’ can be found in almost every qualitative sociological study done today, though its usage, meaning, and importance are often taken for granted. The everyday world has not always had such a prominent place, however. This paper examines the development of ‘‘the everyday’’ an as area of study through everyday life sociologies and cultural studies, using quilting to compare sociological usage to the development of the everyday as a topic in the arts in the 1960s. As a focal point for discussions of art hierarchies, as cultural resistance, and as a form of women’s cultural production, quilting’s role in everyday life illuminates the new way of seeing that everyday life sociologies developed.

Most of the time, the term ‘‘everyday’’ is used with an assumed understanding of what it means without deﬁning it. We assume everyone is using the term in the same way and that sociology’s usage is coterminous with societal usage, neither of which is strictly true. What is meant by ‘‘everyday,’’ why is it important, and how has it been studied? Symbolic interactionism (SI) and cultural studies both focus on ‘‘everyday life.’’ SI’s focus on the everyday was initially in reaction to the emphasis on positivistic approaches to the social world that were not conducive to

$

This paper is derived from a presentation at the SSSI Symposium in Las Vegas, NV in 1999.

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studying such phenomena as etic vs. emic viewpoints, freedom of choice, and emotions. Such topics are best studied using qualitative methods in natural settings. SI’s emphasis is on understanding meanings rather than predicting behavior (Blumer, 1969, pp. 2–3; Denzin, 1992, p. 39). Cultural studies approaches the everyday as the place where private and public spheres connect. It is a place to see how institutions modify and are modiﬁed by individual behavior. Like SI, cultural studies is interested in degrees of freedom, but its focus is on ﬁnding cracks in the monolith of hierarchical structures in order to widen them and utilize them for transforming society (Agger, 1993, p. 30; During, 1993, p. 24; Storey, 1993, p. 195). Thus, though both approaches focus on everyday life, their reasons and goals differ substantially. The importance of everyday life, however, has not been a focus of the social sciences alone. During the 1950s and 1960s, artists of the Pop Art movement also chose everyday life as a topic for examination and representation. After examining sociology’s approaches to the everyday, I correlate how artists’ treated it. I then take an in depth look at one particular artist and quilter, Jean Ray Laury. Her writings, designs, and editorship have greatly contributed to the creation and evolution of the current quilt revival. By examining her usage and interpretation of everyday life, we can see a concomitant broader usage of this term in the 1960s which implies broader ways of seeing both within and beyond sociology. In the last part of the paper, I contrast the interpretation of the everyday in the arts and in sociology by placing the origins of everyday life sociologies in a broader cultural framework and suggest how lesser used methods such as material culture analysis provide different insights into familiar activities.

EVERYDAY LIFE AND SOCIOLOGY One of the ongoing problems addressed by those studying everyday life is the justiﬁcation of the area as a valid research topic. A sample listing of synonyms from a popular culture source, Roget’s Thesaurus (1995), begins with it ‘‘having no remarkable features’’; it is ‘‘commonplace, common, conventional, ordinary, mundane, quotidian, plain, run-of-the-mill, simple, usual, workaday, and not remarkable.’’ To be common is to have no special quality or to be of mediocre or inferior quality; it is not noteworthy, unusual, or outstanding (American Heritage Dictionary 1992). Based on such deﬁnitions, the everyday is hardly an area to make a substantial, original contribution to the ﬁeld of sociology without considerable justiﬁcation.

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The ﬁrst sociological usage of the term ‘‘everyday life’’ comes from Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), in which he focused on everyday interaction rituals. Douglas’ edited 1970 volume Understanding Everyday Life ﬁrst applied the term ‘‘everyday’’ to the new sociologies developed within the University of California system. Douglas described everyday life sociology as ‘‘a sociological orientation concerned with experiencing, observing, understanding, describing, analyzing, and communicating about people interacting in concrete situations’’ (Douglas, 1980, p. 1). This approach brought together phenomenology, ethnomethodology, existential sociology, dramaturgy, and SI (Denzin, 1992, p. 14). The central tenet of everyday life sociologies is respect for the integrity of the phenomena being studied by observing people in their normal everyday social world rather than in the laboratory (Adler, Adler, & Fontana, 1987, p. 219; Fontana & Van de Water, 1977, p. 101). Studying the ‘‘everyday’’ requires observing actual interactions between people. By focusing on immediate surroundings and personal relationships, everyday life sociologists made the family, homelife, and popular culture more acceptable academic subjects. The core deﬁnition of ‘‘everyday’’ for everyday life sociologies includes such areas as emotions, irrationality, degrees of freedom vs. determinism, emic vs. etic viewpoints, interactional vs. structural analysis, and how to apply sociological perspectives. Researchers rejected the subject–object dualism of such macrosociological procedures as objectiﬁcation, detachment, control, and manipulation of abstracted concepts and variables used by positivists and instead saw everyday life as contextualized, situated, and concrete (Adler et al., 1987, p. 219). Everyday life sociologists assumed that circumstances change reactions, and that participation and/or observation changes the process. Because interaction ﬂows in both directions, subjective experience is not subordinated to objective observation (Adler et al., 1987, p. 228). How much an individual can rely on stocks of knowledge, or ‘‘everyday life recipes’’ (Douglas, 1980, p. 15) depends on each situation. They focus on ‘‘the observation of the concrete, natural (or uncontrolled) events of everyday life as the starting point of their scientiﬁc studies, rather than abstract speculations about culture or social structure’’ (Douglas, 1980, p. 200). Observation of naturalistic interactions and members’ insider (emic) meanings contrasted to surveys’ abstract, outsider (etic), hypothetical interpretations. This opened up the study of other ways of knowing in such areas as creativity and emotion. Within everyday life sociologies, two directions emerged for how to study everyday life: phenomenology’s more detached intellectual approach and

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existential sociology’s engaged, immersed approach. Spiegelberg differentiates these understandings of the everyday by contrasting phenomenology’s bracketing of the everyday world in order to study consciousness to existential sociology’s focus on existence within the everyday world (Fontana, 1980, p. 166). Sociologists who interpret the everyday lives of people by remaining close to their actual experience have been criticized for having a romantic, sentimental identiﬁcation with the lonely, unhappy, deviant, and powerless individual while ignoring the biographical, historical, and structural factors that inﬂuence and control people’s lives (Denzin, 1992, p. 25). Because all forms of everyday life sociology use a microsociological perspective focused on interaction, they lean towards individual choice, while acknowledging its structured, but not wholly determined, context. Fontana and Van de Water (1977, p. 103) see these observations as based on universal human experiences that should not obscure the orderliness of nonobjectiﬁed thought nor the disorderliness of the social world. Everyday life sociology reminds us that social life includes seeing both order out of chaos and chaos out order. I once ran across a saying on a church bulletin board that said ‘‘Life is 10% how you make it and 90% how you take it.’’ Everyday life sociologists focus on the 90% that interprets events while acknowledging the small amount of free choice (the 10%) humans have. It points out the importance of the deﬁnition of the situation (Anderson, 1977, p. 187).

THE EVERYDAY AND THE ARTS The unexamined nature of everyday life became a resource for art in the same way it became a resource for sociologists. Canonical deﬁnitions of art have tended to view it as separate from everyday reality, even when everyday objects and experiences were used as inspiration. Art offers a particularly useful view of what is occurring in a given culture at a speciﬁc time because it distills larger cultural themes into a concentrated form (Bascom, 1969, p. 119). To deal with questions of what is and is not art, for this paper I use Melville Herskovits’ inclusive anthropological deﬁnition of art, which is ‘‘any embellishment of ordinary living that is achieved with competence and has describable form’’ (Herskovits, 1947, p. 80). Thus an Inuit spoon, a quilt, and a Van Gogh painting are all equally art.

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In considering everyday objects of folk and ethnic origin as art, this approach is not unlike that of artists of the 1950s who developed a new interest in the art and objects of commercial, popular culture. Pop Art, whose most familiar examples are Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book art and Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup cans, is unlike previous 20th century art movements because it used commercial contemporary culture as a visual source rather than deploring it (Janson, 1970, p. 541). Pop Art changed America by seeing art in everyday objects, by dissolving the separation of art from everyday reality even though everyday experiences and objects had been represented (Scherman, 2001, p. 81). Partly because of Pop Art, the historical boundaries between art and life, art and politics, and artist and audience are more blurred than they have been since pre-Renaissance times. Art is neither pure, neutral, nor separate from the rest of society, but reﬂects and reproduces power structures. For example, feminist researchers have looked at how the deﬁnitions of art, artist, and woman sustain this power system, and how the identiﬁcation of women’s art as merely domestic, decorative and quotidian serves to dismiss its importance as serious art (Broude & Garrard, 1982, p. 12). By the early 1970s, those within the women’s movement who questioned hegemonic hierarchies of art media used quilts to demonstrate how they were interconnected to gender hierarchies. One example of this reevaluation was Patricia Mainardi (1982, p. 331), who elevated women’s needlework to the same place in Women’s Studies that African Art occupies in African Studies. Women’s traditional needle arts are as much an expression of and a response to their experiences of modernity as the ofﬁcially acclaimed work of men. For instance, Jean Ray Laury (1966, p. 12), an artist who used quilts as her chosen medium starting in the 1950s, suggested using simpliﬁed forms of everyday objects in applique as a protest against mass production. Part of the effort of the early 1970s to put quilts on an equal footing with painting emphasized the formal aesthetic qualities of quilts and discarded the affective components. Emotions are identiﬁed as of lesser value than logic, and associated with women (Johnson, 2004, p. 166). However, when the producer and intended user are in close personal contact, the production context remains salient to the user. A major component of that context is emotion based. The study of emotions is one of the offshoots of the study of everyday life, valuing a part of human interaction not previously emphasized. Because of its association with family, needlework has been accorded secondary status in the production/reproduction hierarchy (Parker, 1984, p. 5), though that made it an acceptable art form for women because of its

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domestic association. Women’s roles as wife and mother were perceived as compatible with needlework, though sometimes needlework was also used to control the fragmentation that came with their roles by belaying interruptions because they were already busy and working (Hinson, 1970, p. 19). Within traditional art hierarchies, quilting has been considered a folk art. One of the problems with this deﬁnition is that the nature of folk art is considered to be completely outside professional art worlds and done as a part of everyday life without clearly deﬁned aesthetic standards (Becker, 1982, pp. 246–247). Becker’s view of quilting reﬂects common understandings of quilting in 1982 when the scholarly study of quilting was in its infancy. For the time, Becker pushed the envelope to even consider quilting as any kind of art form. The romanticized histories available then did not include the history of quilting since 1900 and focused on rural practices. Thus the inﬂuence of professionals such as Ruby McKim, Jean Ray Laury, and others with formal art schooling, the inﬂuence of commercialization by syndicated newspaper patterns, and batting and pattern companies, and national contests from the 1930s to the 1960s that involved tens of thousands of quilters were missed. These complicate our understanding of the situatedness of folk art and its relation to the larger art world and to consumption. Without those inﬂuences, quilting ﬁt Becker’s folk art deﬁnition of being ‘‘utilitarian’’ (Becker, 1982, p. 247), ‘‘routine, ycustomary, ynatural’’ (Becker, 1982, p. 249) and ‘‘sentimental’’ (Becker, 1982, p. 256). Needlework ﬁts within Agger’s views of the everyday by representing the lower status in binary hierarchies of production/reproduction, society/ nature, male/female, logic/emotion, high culture/popular culture, and work/ leisure (Agger, 1993, p. 4). He sees everyday life as an arena for social transformation by defamiliarizing common understandings and demonstrating how it has been constructed as an arena of noninterest. Human experience becomes a social text which can be deconstructed to expose the ideological and assumed meanings embedded in everyday life (Denzin, 1992, pp. 73–74). Pop Art expanded the subject matter for art to include popular and mass culture. Op Art looked at how the process of perception operated. These two very different art movements of the 1960s are often combined by the general public and contrasted by Janson in The History of Art (1970, p. 543). In one of the most widely used texts in art history classes for decades, Janson contrasts how artists and the general public perceive everyday life by explaining the underlying theory of Op Art.

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When we use our eyes in everyday life, we take it for granted that the world around us is as we perceive it. Only when we ﬁnd a discrepancy, when ‘our eyes deceive us,’ do we become aware of the complexities of the process, although most of us do not know how to analyze these. (Janson 1970, pp. 543–544)

Janson’s description of using optical illusions to problematize the everyday is similar to Pollner and Zimmerman’s sociological approach to the everyday. They sought to bring to consciousness how everyday assumptions permeate the very way we study everyday life much as op art problematizes the assumptions about vision. While Janson explained Op Art in the 1960s, Zimmerman and Pollner’s phenomenological approach to everyday life noted sociology’s ‘‘embeddedness in and dependence upon the world of everyday life’’ (Zimmerman and Pollner, 1970, p. 81). Thus, by ‘‘problematizing’’ it, we see the discrepancies and underlying assumptions. A quilting example from Jean Ray Laury described a class assignment to depict apples using applique. Everyone sliced their apples vertically except one woman who sliced hers horizontally, exposing the ﬂower shaped arrangement of seeds inside. From that, the whole class learned the value of individual viewpoints and felt freed to try new views of the fruit, and perhaps later, other objects they depicted (Laury, 1966, p. 32). As John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1972, p. 8), ‘‘the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.’’ Phenomenologists try to get below that very beginning assumption. Zimmerman and Pollner criticized those studying everyday life who assumed that their interpretations of members’ interactions were simply a more rigorous version of the same questions and assumptions made by members. Artists then are like researchers because they do not assume they reﬂect the average art consumer. Artists start by assuming they have a superior understanding of everyday meanings and will lead the way in exposing those meanings. Phenomenology sees researchers as more effective if they problematize the existence of the obvious rather than taking it as a common base of understanding for researchers and members alike. Zimmerman and Pollner (1970, p. 87) suggest going beyond these assumptions to examine the process by which members create the perceived social order, to investigate these common-sense methods as phenomena in their own right. They see the everyday world as extremely situated and contextual, and suggest that any perceived relationships between individual moments by either members or researchers are accomplished rather that assumed. By taking members meanings, and thus seeing every situation as unique, researchers can investigate the process by which members accomplish the perception of regularities, structure, labels, and purposes.

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Artists, who are seen as having a special ability because of their training, create discrepancies and optical illusions to uncover this meaning making process and make commonplace items seem strange and problematic. They problematize portions of contemporary life such as the distinction between image and reality or original and reproduction. Such art plays with our concepts of aesthetic distancing, the proper subjects and materials for art, and seek a discomforting disjuncture with our usual perceptions, breaking down the assumed relationships in much the same way as phenomenologists problematize perceived regularities and purposes. One of the changes in perceived relationships has been the erasure of public/private boundaries. An individual’s or group’s relationship between the popular and everyday lifeworld is structured and mediated by a political aesthetic which transcends traditional views of what is considered to be the artistic experience (Denzin, 1992, p. 133). Everyday life has become aestheticized and politicized. Pop culture’s artistic production became its own system of communication, using forms of expression and representation which needed no justiﬁcation of being ‘as good as high art’ (Hebdige, 1979, p. 129). Both artistic expression and aesthetic pleasure were intimately bound to the destruction of existing codes and the formulation of new ones for subcultures. Artistic production reﬂects this process of redeﬁnition, integrating new ideas, and questioning old ideas. Cultural studies problematizes the relationship of everyday life to overarching institutions, such as how the personal is linked to political structures (Agger, 1993, p. 2). Five areas in particular (cultural objects, the individual, family, sexuality, and work) shape these lived experiences (Denzin, 1992, p. 80). Changes in daily living can be seen to both inﬂuence and be inﬂuenced by larger structures. Because ‘‘experiences become political when the actions and emotions they express connect to the political economies of everyday life in ways which reinforce class, race, and gender stereotypes’’ (Denzin, 1992, p. 135), everyday life is an exemplar of power relations. Using Gramsci’s concept of culture as an area ‘‘where hegemony is constructed and can be broken and reconstructed’’ (Forgacs, 1993, p. 186), popular culture has become an important site for the examination of everyday life and the negotiation of power within it. Examining the values associated with quilting recognizes their emphasis on the physical and emotional labor of creating a family, reproducing society, and supporting or questioning power relations. Some of these values include different aesthetic rules and judgments of what is creative from canonical art including the social embeddedness of quilts, their use as creative expression when other

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art forms were inaccessible, and the focus on the ‘‘economy’’ of needlework that denies the huge investment of time. Women’s cultural production not only follows its own aesthetic values, but uses the creative imagination to perform the emotional work of tying family and friends together. Quilts are an expression of continuity across generations, a demonstration of female capability, of ties to and independence from the overall economy. Traditional art forms like quilting reﬂect women’s ‘‘voices’’ which cultural studies has overlooked. This oversight itself reﬂects the minimizing of traditional values such as thriftiness, ‘‘making do,’’ and emotional labor. It also ignores the interactions between society and cultural production where women have already used quilts and their surrounding art world to voice their concerns, visions, and aesthetics. Examples such as mourning quilts, friendship quilts and politically named quilt patterns like WCTU, Whig Rose, and Coxey’s Army are evidence of two centuries of negotiating between old and new technologies, changing commodities and new forms of aesthetic and political expression while balancing familial and community obligations. bell hooks discusses these same values in relation to the secondary status accorded African American cultural production, including quilts (hooks, 1990, p. 105). Patricia Hill-Collins uses quilts as an example of ‘‘beauty occurring via individual uniqueness juxtaposed in a community setting and on the importance of creating functional beauty from the scraps of everyday life’’ (Hill-Collins, 1991, p. 89). For her, quilts become a political statement about the integration of art and life by providing an alternative to oppositional dichotomies inherent in Western social thought. Howard Becker’s use of quilting as an exemplar of folk art acknowledges the secondary position of women’s art forms that support traditional values such as thriftiness, but missed the connections to the larger art world in twentieth century quilt practices (Becker, 1982, p. 258).

JEAN RAY LAURY AND EVERYDAY LIFE Jean Ray Laury’s approach to the everyday world negotiates these same issues. She reminds us that we not only respond to other people and ideas, but ‘‘Others’’ and ideas embodied in the material objects that surround us. As I use the term ‘‘material’’ in this article, keep in mind the double meaning of it as not only ‘‘things,’’ but a synonym for ‘‘fabric,’’ not only ‘‘material culture’’ but the ‘‘fabric of our lives.’’ Laury connects the concerns of everyday life with ‘‘humble’’ materials and the ‘‘simplicity, honesty, and

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direct freshness’’ found in Early American quilts and coverlets (Laury, 1966, p. 15). Her 1966 book, Applique Stitchery, recognized a renewed interest in the textile arts. The book encouraged readers to consider applique a ‘‘charming, personal, and vital art form, using the humble materials of everyday to offer unpretentious works of real value and deep meaning’’ (Laury, 1966, p. 11). She used the term ‘‘stitchery’’ to distance her work from commercialized needlework that used stamped patterns, directions, and preassembled kits. She rejected hackneyed patterns such as ‘‘the rows upon rows of obese, sunbonnet girls in pale green and lavender’’ (Laury, 1970, p. 17) in order to emphasize creativity and innovation. This reﬂects the everyday life sociology viewpoint of the individual as an active participant in social change (Kotarba, 1984, p. 225). Quilts could be creative instead of merely copying. It also values women as cultural producers rather than as commercial consumers. Much of the work in cultural studies assumes that consumers’ innovations are merely in their novel combinations of purchased goods. Quilting begins with basic designs and commercial fabric, but there are so many creative decisions in every step of the process that even people taking the same class can produce wildly variant end products. Laury was one of the few writers in the 1960s emphasizing this level of creativity for quilters. Agger’s examples of resistance indicate the types of areas considered ‘‘everyday’’: housework, discourses, and practices of quotidian modernity, and popular culture (Agger, 1993, p. 155). These areas are interesting because they offer the possibility of abolishing hierarchies by valorizing that which has not been valued by either the academy or society in general. Cultural studies examines the interstices between the individual and institutions in order to ﬁnd modes of resistance that would otherwise be missed. The colonization of everyday life by consumer capitalism is another way that structure is imposed on the everyday yet paradoxically provides a place for resistance. Mass media has erased the traditional boundaries between private and public to an extent previously unknown, permeating and dominating the language and experience of everyday life (Denzin, 1992, p. 146). In a similar way to cultural studies, Laury emphasized the importance of hand crafted articles for the home to counter the overwhelming presence of impersonal, mass produced items. Though mass production fulﬁlled material needs and desires, it ignored people’s need for individuality and for an inﬂuence on their environment. Laury’s approach counters Simon and Gagnon’s ‘‘anomie of inﬂuence,’’ best described as a stagnating sense of

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self when life gets too comfortable (Kotarba, 1984, p. 228). Mass media and production tries to utilize this sense of self to push for further consumption. As Laury noted When nights turn chilly and you need an extra cover, a machine-made blanket will stop your shivers, but a handmade quilt satisﬁes something far beyond the physical need for warmth. The evident devotion displayed in these everyday articles gives them an added signiﬁcance. (Laury, 1966, p. 12)

Clark notes that Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotion began at the same time as the everyday life sociologists (Clark, 2002, p. 159). Laury recognized the emotional work women incorporated into their quiltmaking, speciﬁcally focusing on positive emotions and connections. While Douglas pushed for the inclusion of emotions in sociological study, his work reﬂected a longer standing focus on negative emotions (Clark, 2002, p. 158). Quilts are literally material evidence of the warmth of emotional connection in contrast to consumer goods, which only touch the surface of emotional connectivity. Quilters often speak of wrapping themselves and others in the warmth and love exempliﬁed by quilts. As Clark wrote of the ‘‘signiﬁcant sacriﬁces of time, money, planning and emotions’’ (Clark, 2002, p. 176), I am reminded of the weeks, months or years that may go into the making of quilts that make them so symbolically signiﬁcant to Laury. She minimized the distance between ﬁne and decorative arts by ﬁnding the difference in the artist’s intention rather than the materials used. Quilts are an example of connecting aesthetics and domestic production, a view Laury consciously promoted in her books. The creativity and redeﬁnition of self that came with it were one way of countering the sense of overdetermination of women’s roles and lives. While existential sociologists found the lack of intrinsic meaning meant ultimate choice rather than nihilism, Laury’s work used stitchery as a way to take back control of meaning making in a world only too happy to deﬁne women’s lives for them, the ‘‘feminine mystique’’ Betty Friedan deﬁned in 1963 (Friedan, 1963). Laury is an academically trained artist who used textiles to combine art and family. She encouraged her readers to use everyday materials like needle and thread because they were accessible, familiar, and part of everyday life. When sewing classes were mandatory for girls, the knowledge of how to wield needle and thread and use a sewing machine were nearly universal among women. Besides providing materials, everyday life itself became a source for what to portray in one’s art. ‘‘Ideas may be found in familiar everyday surroundings; they are simply there waiting to be discoveredy ideas must come from your own experiences and responses’’ (Laury, 1966,

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p. 19). As hooks (1990, p. 103) described the accessibility of everyday aesthetics in the contrast of red chili peppers, lace curtains, and streaming sunshine, so Laury contrasted lace doilies, wool yarn, and burlap (Laury, 1970, p. 71). Such views were understood as available to all, regardless of race, gender, time period, or formal art training. Agger sees the potential for creating new cultural practices and products at the level of everyday life. Out of the direct line of control of mass consumption, he sees ‘‘ample political possibilities for creating a populist culture in which cultural producers have much more control over their product, and hence their reception’’ (Agger, 1993, p. 128). Agger recognizes the alternative lifeworld away from the male gaze in art and literature that feminist cultural studies opens up (Agger, 1993, p. 128). In effect, he echoes Laury’s view from almost 30 years earlier of how quilting is tied to the everyday in ways that mass culture could never be. Even in the process of valuing home production, hooks also misses the production difference. She writes about the experience of creation from her grandmother’s standpoint, yet she herself is a consumer rather than a producer, and has only second hand access to the feelings generated by the quilts. Laury encourages her readers to own those feelings for themselves, not to adopt them from previous generations or attempt to coopt them from mass production. Josephine Donovan blends Cultural Studies, SI, and feminist approaches to the everyday in a way much like the informed aesthetic of Jean Ray Laury. She valorizes the ‘‘nondominative process art of women’s domestic aesthetic praxis, their use-value production’’ (Donovan, 1993, p. 53). Domestic art, such as quilts, remains part of its maker’s world, unlike traditional high art forms like painting, sculpture, and architecture which become commodities. Domestic art implicitly criticizes commodity culture by remaining outside it. Donovan links the separated view of self and art and self and nature to the Renaissance development of perspective, which created the viewer as the omnipotent eye that views art from the outside (Donovan, 1993, p. 54). The ‘‘aesthetic gaze’’ is impartial, elevated, and rational, devaluing beauty that is embedded, emotional, and touchable (both literally and ﬁguratively). Donovan (1993, p. 60) sees domestic art as a process of discovery, when the art creates the artist, the book writes the author, and the ‘‘existential moments of discovery’’ come from ﬁnding the sacred embedded in the profane. Drawing on interpretations of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and Alice Walker, she sees the best domestic art as allowing the random incidental occurrences of everyday life to shape the art (Donovan, 1993, p. 60). Its value comes from its embeddedness, its ties to personal and local

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history, and the way it embraces use value and rejects commodiﬁcation and the hierarchy of the marketplace. It is the antithesis of the impartial rational aesthetic gaze, art for art’s sake, which is often deﬁned as a male gaze (Berger, 1972, p. 54). Jean Ray Laury’s ﬁrst quilt provides a way to examine an aesthetic that values the everyday as both source and subject. It was made in 1956 both as a gift for her son and as a project for her Masters degree in design. It is a remarkable quilt for the time, and clearly indicative of Laury’s art school origins and artistic development. It is described as a delightful, completely unorthodox quilt depicting all the things that interested and excited her childrenythe ﬁrst contemporary quilt I had ever seen that really came off successfully; yet it was far simpler and more direct in stitchery than the many ﬁne traditional quilts in the exhibition. (Roxa Wright in Laury, 1970, p. 170)

Laury ﬁlled the quilt with images of toys, foods, plants, animals, and common household objects. Many of the objects, such as toothbrush and toothpaste, electrical plugs and outlets, measuring spoons, telephone poles, salt and pepper shakers, and egg beaters, are portrayed in quilts made 15–20 years later, but none before hers. The choice of objects combined her son’s individual interests and things that seem to describe more generic children’s interests in games, desserts, candy, bugs, the sun, moon, and stars. Everyday objects, because of their perceived importance to a child, became creative resources for the quilter. She emphasized a mindfulness of taken-for-granted ‘‘everyday objects which may seem humdrum and ordinary to adults’’ (Laury, 1966, p. 21) to open the mind to creativity and design possibilities. The ‘‘humdrum’’ nature of everyday life is situated, structured, and constrained by ritual, routine and taken-for-granted meanings. To Symbolic Interactionists, uncovering everyday life means bringing patterns of thought and assumptions back into consciousness to examine assumed meanings. Through interactional structures, meanings are reiﬁed, and thought patterns, actions, and interpretations are patterned and regularized (Denzin, 1992, p. 27). As Laury uses mindfulness to patterned objects and situations to expand creativity, SI uses a similar raised consciousness to see the patterns of everyday life. To Laury, this mindfulness blended multiple dimensions of her work, using the everyday world to link creativity and aesthetics, emotions and intellect, art and craft, and artist and mother. The quilt demonstrated the simultaneous universality and uniqueness of common objects, as well as the uniqueness and universality of a child, childhood, and mother/child relationships. A similar way of seeing directs Symbolic Interactionists to

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view underlying patterns that structure the seemingly random everyday world. Laury’s quilt captures mundane, common, ephemeral objects. Toothpaste gets used up, caterpillars become butterﬂies, ice cream melts or is eaten. Childhood itself is ephemeral because children change and eventually grow up. Traditional still lifes have long focused on the ephemeral: those individual objects (leaves, ﬂowers, fruit, game), that die and decay. Their beauty and replaceability reﬂect both the timelessness and ephemeral nature of everyday life. Like existential sociologists and traditional still lifes, Laury used the ephemeral to illuminate the small miracles of everyday life. This approach to the everyday is congruent with the approach of everyday life sociologists: looking with expectancy to ﬁnd the signiﬁcant in what grownups often consider ordinary and humdrum. Laury differs from sociologists in her deeper examination of the personal, emotional, and creative, where the wholly idiosyncratic connects to the universal. Through this delving, she consciously valorizes domestic production in the face of mass consumption, and emotional as well as intellectual connections to art. Or, perhaps her work embodies the highest goals of existential sociology: to embrace the pursuit of meaning in its totality, rather than through a mythical stance of detachment from the world (Fontana & Van de Water, 1977, p. 126; Johnson, 1977, p. 209). Existential sociology considers everyday life to be incredibly complex, problematic, and situated to the point that no theoretical framework can fully encompass it (Fontana, 1980, p. 156). Existential sociologists also reject the nihilistic meaninglessness of Sartre’s existentialism and instead celebrate the seemingly universal need to create meaning along with the ultimate choice humans have in doing so (Kotarba, 1984, p. 231). While the universal human experiences of birth, death, pain, pleasure, eating, and sleeping are so broadly deﬁned as to be virtually meaningless (Fontana & Van de Water, 1977, p. 102), that universality also allows great latitude for cultural and personal variation across time and space. As an example of the frequency of applying meaning, over 60% of the quilts made during the 1960s that are documented in the Nevada Heritage Quilt Project commemorated special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas, weddings, births, and graduations (Hall-Patton, 2004, p. 178). The quilts themselves plus the time, materials, and effort of making them created additional meaning for those occasions. The meaning of everyday life is found in action itself, not in reﬂection or interpretation of events. Quiltmaking provides space to contemplate the process of change as quilters commemorate it. Studying everyday life means

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being present in the very acts of living, of doing, of being at the moment they occur, and being mindful of ourselves as part of the process. An early twentieth century writing contains a favorite quote of many quilters that demonstrates the role of choice. The Lord sends us the pieces, but we can cut ‘em out and put ‘em together pretty much to suit ourselves, and there’s a heap more in the cuttin’ and the sewin’ than there is in the caliker [calico=fabric]. (Hall, 1907, pp. 74–75)

The best way to study everyday life is to embrace the uniqueness of each event, to integrate rationality and emotion, science and art, mind and body, researcher and researched, sacred and profane, and past, present, and future. At its most transcendent, existential sociology could be said to recognize the very miracle of existence itself by taking the time and attention to focus on common, ordinary experiences that may border on the miraculous. For example, giving birth is a way of participating in one such everyday miracle. As Lynda Sexson noted The most slender and ephemeral of our everyday experiences resonate with the most profound of religious symbols. To look at them with this awareness is to illuminate the sacred quality of experienceyWe can discover or recognize the sacred within the secular, or the miracle in the ordinary. (quoted in Bowen, 1998, p. 3)

Laury emphasized the tactile and the visual, employing thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations. To Laury, these made the creative process richer and more meaningful, but her approach contrasts with traditional art’s detached gaze which utilizes the visual separated from the emotive. Laury’s unity and immersion provides the entree to awareness of everyday existence that existential sociology seeks.

CONCLUSION What can we learn as sociologists from Laury’s work that bridges the gulf between ﬁne art and women’s needlework? She made the creation of art accessible to a general public either unaware or discouraged from being creative themselves. She reached an audience of a size most sociologists only dream of by tying ideas to very concrete manifestations that made eminent sense in people’s lives. She valued the perceptions and life experience that make for individual ways of seeing and knowing, not only celebrating them but guiding artists in adding value and meaning to their lives. She

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demonstrated how to do this by using the largess of mass production to achieve individual goals. To step back 40 years, the mid 1960s were a time when some Americans began reevaluating the 20 years since the end of World War II. After the wholesale embracing of consumer culture during the 1950s, writers, artists, and scholars began to question what had been lost in the consumer surge. At the same time, writers valued women as unique individuals beyond their roles as wives and mothers; changes in perceptions of quilting helped express this. Everyday life sociologists consider themselves successful when they manage to see beyond and transcend such roles. The everyday became a touchstone for all of these groups as they noticed the loss of simple, everyday pleasures, ties to the past, to family, and to their material representation in objects like quilts. This also demonstrates how similar ideas are found in widely divergent segments of society. The creation of everyday life sociology at this time was a recognition of the importance of common, concrete experience. This study illuminated how situated and embedded the normal experience of day to day living is. The everyday is composed of patterns of events, behavior, objects, and interactions that are simultaneously unique and heavily inﬂuenced by larger cultural factors. Even at its most idiosyncratic, the inﬂuence of larger social structures is apparent. The everyday sometimes linked the most prosaic with the most profound. However, we must also pay attention to our methods of learning about the everyday. Jean Ray Laury’s view of how to approach ‘‘stitchery’’ and the revelations that may be found there can also be applied to our study of everyday life. Both Laury and everyday sociologies push us towards studying people and phenomena with more than our eyes and ears. We need to use our emotions, our contact with deep understandings, and an openness to the magic and wonder found in all of our lives. As Laury says, I am neither a deep thinker nor a profound one, I make no attempt to be profound in my work. I can offer only a personal response, and if that response arrives at something basic, it will evoke a response in someone else. There are two essential lessons to be learned in approaching stitchery as an art form. The ﬁrst is to learn to see. The second is to learn to care. Learning to see requires looking with expectancy. Nothing is insigniﬁcant. (Laury, 1966, p. 30)

By following her ideas, we may obtain the multidimensional linking of thought and feeling, sacred and profane, individual and institution that Laury ﬁnds in her art.

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Laury’s approach coincides with art curator Henry Geldzahler’s understanding of Pop Art. In deﬁning the genre’s view of how to see something as art, he said, ‘‘All you need is a pair of eyes, an open, willing spirit, and a soul’’ (Scherman, 2001, p. 77). hooks emphasized the contemplation of the everyday for fresh insights into life in general and aesthetics in particular that ‘‘we must learn to see’’ (hooks, 1990, p. 103). An intimate engagement with our subject matter yields richer results and capitalizes on the strengths of qualitative methods. Material culture methods provide an additional viewpoint for understanding social phenomena. They provide another way to ‘‘learn to see’’ which expands and complicates our studies, yet adds a richness and grounding we could hardly ﬁnd otherwise. They enable us to see the uniqueness and universality inherent in everyday objects and activities by engaging our whole selves, not just our intellect, but all ﬁve senses and our emotions as well.

REFERENCES Adler, P., Adler, P. & Fontana, A. (1987). Everyday life sociology. American Review of Sociology. Annual Reviews Inc. 13, 217–235. Agger, B. (1993). Gender, culture, and power. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Anderson, J. (1977). Practical reasoning in action. In: J. Douglas & J. Johnson (Eds), Existential sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bascom, W. (1969). Creativity and style in African art. In: D. Buyback (Ed.), Tradition and creativity in Tribal Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Becker, H. (1982). Art worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London, UK: British Broadcasting Corp. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bowen, P. D. Mn. (1998). Expecting miracles. Sermon. Broude, N., & Garrard, M. (1982). Feminism and art history. New York: Harper & Row. Clark, C. (2002). Taming the ‘‘brute being’’: Sociology reckons with emotionality. In: J. Kotarba & J. Johnson (Eds), Postmodern existential sociology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Denzin, N. (1992). Symbolic interactionism and cultural studies. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Donovan, J. (1993). Everyday use and moments of being. In: H. Hein & C. Korsmeyer (Eds), Aesthetics in feminist perspective. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Douglas, J. (1980). Introduction to the sociologies of everyday life. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. During, S. (1993). The cultural studies reader. London, UK: Routledge. Fontana, A. (1980). Toward a complex universe: Existential sociology. In: J. Douglas (Ed.), Introduction to the sociologies of everyday life. Boston MA: Allyn & Bacon. Fontana, A., & Van de Water, R. (1977). The existential thought of Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In: J. Douglas & J. Johnson (Eds), Existential sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Forgacs, D. (1993). National-popular: Genealogy of a concept. In: S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader. New York: Routledge. Friedan, B. (1984 (1963)). The feminine mystique. New York: Laurel Books. Hall, E. C. (1907). Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Hall-Patton, C. (2004). Quilters between the revivals: The cultural context of quilting 1945–1974. Unpublished dissertation, University of Nevada Las Vegas. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. London, UK: Methuen Press. Herskovits, M. (1947). Man and his works. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hill-Collins, P. (1991). Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Hinson, D. (1970). Quilting manual. New York: Hearthside Press, Inc. Janson, H. W. (1970). History of art. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Johnson, A. (2004). Patriarchy. In: P. Rothenberg (Ed.), Race, class and gender in the United States. New York: Worth Publishers. Johnson, J. (1977). Beyond the rational appearances: Fusion of thinking and feeling in sociological research. In: J. Douglas & J. Johnson (Eds), Existential sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kotarba, J. (1984). A synthesis: The existential self in society. In: J. Kotarba & A. Fontana (Eds), The existential self in society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Laury, J. R. (1966). Applique stitchery. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation. Laury, J. R. (1970). Quilts and coverlets. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. Mainardi, P. (1982). Quilts: The great American art. In: N. Broude & M. Garrard (Eds), Feminism and art history: Questioning the litany. New York: Harper and Row. Parker, R. (1984). The subversive stitch. New York: Routledge. Scherman, T. (2001). When pop turned the world upside down. American heritage. New York: American Heritage Inc. 52(1), 68–79. Storey, J. (1993). An introductory guide to cultural theory and popular culture. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Zimmerman, D., & Pollner, M. (1970). The everyday world as a phenomenon. In: J. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding everyday life. Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Co.

DIALOGICS OF DISCOMFORT: RACE, ROLES, AND PERFORMANCE Rebecca Savage Bilbro ABSTRACT Performance ethnography is concerned with more than just the descriptive documentation of culture; it’s meant to elicit change by uncovering, critiquing, and – when successful – dislodging the personal and cultural assumptions that all too often go underinterrogated. It’s also a public, discursive practice that takes as foundational the notion that we are coparticipants in d/Discourse. But what happens once the performance is ‘‘over?’’ Or, put another way, is the performance ever really over? What are the aftereffects of calling on strangers to involve themselves in the rehashing of one’s most uncomfortable memories? What changes take place within the writer of the ethnography? What part or parts of the performance can be identiﬁed, in retrospect, as transformational? By reevaluating one performance ethnography and proposing two new terms, ‘‘live text’’ and ‘‘dialogic discomfort,’’ this paper attempts to explore the relationship between written texts, live performances, shared discomfort, and the discursive production of self.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 163–181 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31009-6

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INTRODUCTION This project began in the fall of 2006, in a course taught by Norm Denzin, which emphasized performance ethnography as an alternative and highly productive methodology for interpretive inquiry. As the ﬁnal project for the course, students were asked to produce and perform racial history narratives ‘‘based on epiphanic moments in the writers’ lives, moments that connect self-awareness with critical racial consciousness’’ (Denzin, 2003, p. 41). These autobiographical narratives must also incorporate the larger cultural– historic context, putting pressure on the so-called boundaries between personal memory and social past. As we wrote, we were encouraged to represent a multitude of voices – a heteroglossia, as Bakhtin styles it; thus the narratives, which for many began as very personal and individual racial epiphanies, gradually transformed through revision into self-consciously dialogic performance ethnographies. At the end of the semester, we were asked to cast our classmates to help us perform our narrative in front of the class. The performances, which happened in the last two weeks of the semester, were less about showcasing a polished piece of writing than they were an opportunity to invite fellow classmates into the dialogic space of one’s story. This, Denzin explains, troubles the distance between performers and audience members that is standard in traditional theater – or, as Shor (1996) argued, the space between ‘‘teacher’’ and ‘‘student’’ in the authoritative classroom – because these audience members are revealed as explicit ‘‘participants in a dialogic performance event’’ (Denzin, 2003, p. 41). This proved to be an extremely difﬁcult process for me. As a native to the ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition, or ‘‘Writing Studies,’’ my scholarship, teaching, and research all center on writing, but I am trained to write analytically, not creatively. And when I ﬁnally had managed to write a play based on an experience from my childhood, I agonized over how to ‘‘cast’’ my piece. As far as graduate-level humanities courses at Midwestern research universities go, it was a large class – about 20 people, students of all levels and from all disciplines. There was much dissensus over questions of methodology and epistemology, and the atmosphere of the classroom felt charged. But the most pervasive tensions were due to the broad racial, ethnic, and international representation of the group: The class was about 25% black, 25% Asian, 5% Hispanic, and 45% white. About 20% of the students were international, coming to the university from Pakistan, India, Korea, China, and Turkey. Half were female.

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When the semester came to an end and the performances of the last two weeks of class had come and gone, I continued to be discomﬁted by my piece, which, after much work, still did not feel complete or concluded – or even successful; thus, the project continued into the following spring semester, and I thought more about the notions of interpretive interactionism and performance ethnography and their relationship to discourse and social theory. Delving into unfamiliar works by Mead, Goffman, Perinbanayagam, and Wortham and working to reconcile these with theories more familiar to my home discipline – Bakhtin’s dialogism, Wittgenstein’s language games, among others – eventually brought some coherence to my experience and afforded me the opportunity to reconsider the writing, the casting, and particularly the live performance of my piece. While the sense of perspective that comes with the tools of analysis – not to mention the passage of time and the shift in discursive space – does contribute to clarity and critical awareness, it has in my case also raised new questions, such as how to use these theories in everyday life, and many of my initial concerns remain unresolved; I still have not found an appropriate way to ask questions about race without appearing inept or ignorant, and I know of no other means to improve racial awareness than making oneself vulnerable and uncomfortable. The process of writing, performing, and reconsidering this text has required me to develop a much more concrete sense of my socially constructed and culturally and historically embedded ‘‘self.’’ The production and efﬁcacy of a performance ethnography relies on this kind of view of self and identity; yet, as intuitive as this dialogic view may seem in theory, everyday spaces are still hard to navigate. As a writing researcher, I have come to think of texts as trajectories of numerous literate activities, both complex and mundane. Literate activities and practices, as Prior (2003) found, can involve things like ‘‘drinking coffee, eating snacks, smoking, [and] listening to music’’ (p. 171). In other words, these texts are embodied, and they certainly aren’t a product of a single person sitting alone in a room with a pen and paper. They are inﬂuenced by cultural and historic contexts and index a number of different voices. In his research on writing, Prior explains that investigating the origin and importance of a text ‘‘also means tracing the inner thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and motives of the writer(s) as well as tracing exchanges between people, exchanges in which the content and purposes of a text may be imagined and planned’’ (p. 167). Script-based plays and performances are unique kinds of discourse because they are both texts and, as Searle (1969) called them, speech acts. They are produced (written) in order to be performed (spoken and acted).

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They are premeditated and structured as well as improvised; they are not ‘‘natural’’ or spontaneous, but are frequently unpredictable. Thus, in a very real sense, they are also neither text nor speech. Analyzing these ‘‘live texts’’ can be tricky, particularly when they are autobiographical; as Wortham (2001) explained, ‘‘autobiographical narratives are not routine and predictable, so explanation for the interactional positioning that they accomplish [requires] an approach based on the concepts of dialogue, mediation, and emergence’’ (p. 46). By addressing a performance ethnography as a ‘‘live text,’’ my intention is not to suggest that other kinds of texts are inert or dull or ‘‘dead.’’ In fact, I do not mean to differentiate a particular kind of (spoken or performed) text from another (e.g., one that is written to be kept private). Instead, the term ‘‘live text’’ is meant to index the living, physical bodies that exist within and around a performance text-in-progress. In a continued spirit of candor, I preface my analysis with a synopsis of the performance text to provide the reader with some of the context I think is necessary for evaluating the ‘‘storytelling event’’ (Wortham, 2001, p. 19), the performance of this particular live text; later, I will do a close reading of one excerpt from the play, explain my original intentions as the ethnography writer, and recall the live performance of that excerpt. Throughout the paper, I try to re-create the peculiar setting of my ‘‘live text’’ and of the Interpretive Methods class, introducing the term ‘‘dialogic discomfort’’ to offer the reader a contextual understanding of the writing and performance of my ethnography. I will discuss the text and performance in terms of the relationship between social theories of knowledge, texts, and roles. Finally, I will reﬂect on performance ethnography as methodology and consider the ways in which public discomfort can be both problematic and truly generative. What follows is an abbreviated version of my racial epiphany. A full reproduction of the play can be found in the appendix.

A EULOGY FOR MYBUDDY The summer before I turned eight, my brother ripped the head off his MyBuddy doll. It all began when a family friend bought him a stuffed Hulk Hogan doll for his birthday. Luke began practicing wrestling moves on the doll, but soon grew frustrated with little Hulk and started engaging MyBuddy – a popular children’s toy at the time – in these staged ﬁghts. MyBuddy was produced by Hasbro, had brown hair and blue eyes, and wore overalls, a striped shirt, and a red cap. He was taller than other dolls,

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weighed more, and had longer arms and legs on which Luke could practice the half or full nelson. He also looked more like a real person, but I’m not sure if that made a difference. In any case, after one particularly rough brawl, Luke ﬁnally managed to behead MyBuddy. He was crushed, totally inconsolable. So in a rare moment of indulgence and consumerism (and most likely out of desperation), my parents agreed to buy Luke a new MyBuddy. But after spending a considerable amount of time in the toy store, we all left without a new doll; Luke and I didn’t understand what had gone wrong, and my parents didn’t explain. Some time later, though, I discovered that we hadn’t bought a new MyBuddy because the only ones in stock were black. The problem was not that my parents did not want me or my brother to own a black doll. The problem was that my parents knew very well what Luke had in mind for MyBuddy. What if, for instance, a neighbor or a family friend were to come over to our house, perhaps for a dinner party or to return a book, only to ﬁnd my six-year-old brother beating up an African-American efﬁgy? But how could my parents have explained this to me or to Luke? We simply didn’t understand race. When I look back on this moment, I realize that it was the ﬁrst time I really encountered race. I wish my parents had said something that day, had explained why we couldn’t get the doll Luke wanted so much. I have thought of dozens of ways they could have explained why brutalizing a black doll was unacceptable. On the other hand, it’s a little too easy to cast my parents in the role of culprit and to see my brother and myself as the innocent victims of their white, middle-class liberal discomfort with race. As they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty.

DIALOGIC DISCOMFORT As a product of my participation in the classroom-society’s practices, my text is less meaningful outside the context of that space. As Mead (1936) wrote, ‘‘This [individual] mental process y is one which has evolved in the social process of which it is a part’’ (as cited in Blount, 1974, p. 91). It would be implausible to evaluate my individual experience within the class without attending to the students, instructor, and assistant for the course. These people made up the microcosm society of our class and were thus instrumental in the composition as well as the performance of my ethnography.

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However, I am also inclined to refrain from representing these individuals. As my experiences have made me sensitive to the politics of representing others, I want to avoid reducing my colleagues to symbols or caricatures. What I will offer is a qualitative, subjective description of the group that played the largest role in my classroom experience. This group was comprised of the 10 people who were consistently present and most responsive in class, regularly relating course material to their own scholarship and experiences. The group consisted predominantly of American ethnic and racial minorities (African-American, Hispanic), and also included two dark-skinned international students and two Americaborn whites. The members of the group were very vocal, and even when silent, made their positions clear through gesture and demeanor. Because of the consistent and emphatic part they played in the class, I cast them in what I felt were the most signiﬁcant roles in my piece (i.e., playing the part of my brother; speaking for the MyBuddy doll). They were for me what Goffman (1973) called the ‘‘performance team’’: the ‘‘fundamental point of reference’’ for my practices throughout the course as well as during the ofﬁcial performances at the end of the semester (p. 79). Long before the composing process for our ethnographies began, this subgroup assumed much of the responsibility for the topics of discussion and the direction and timbre of class dialogues. As a whole, we made for a passionate, prickly, and confrontational – but also often oblique – speech community, and a clear sense of ideological friction or ‘‘dialogic discomfort’’ developed as the semester went on. An element of dialogic discomfort underlies Denzin’s deﬁnition of epiphanic moments as ones of pathos and pain: ‘‘epiphanies are ritually structured liminal experiences, connected to moments of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism’’ (2001, p. 39). Classrooms are very appropriate sites for performance ethnographies, for they, like epiphanies, are dialogic and frequently uncomfortable. Our classroom, as I’ve said, was often tense. We each brought with us assumptions and values from our own histories, communities, and disciplines, and so our classroom space can hardly be said to have been neutral, even at the start of the semester. Dialogic discomfort also directs attention to the reality of what Trimbur (1989) identiﬁed as ‘‘dissensus’’ in collaborative learning contexts. It is a reaction to Mead’s seemingly under-complicated sense of the discursive production of self – that identity ‘‘arises through its ability to take the attitude of the group to which he belongs’’ (as cited in Blount, 1974, p. 87). Yet discourse-in-practice is often much more agonistic. There is rarely, in my general experience as well as my particular experience in this class, a

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clear (or at least singular) sense of what this ‘‘attitude of the group’’ is. Individuals understand these attitudes differently and have varying levels of willingness to adopt what they perceive the attitudes to be. Moreover, their attempts to enculturate are contingent on the social context and on the group’s willingness to validate an individual’s membership. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism attributes meaning to conversation and negotiation (see Holquist, 1990), and we can see that meaning is not always a product of friendly and cooperative consensus. Conﬂict and tension are regular components of the real conversations and negotiations that lead to the production of meaning. In other words, dialogic discomfort is a symptom of the discursive character of language. Just as all we say, hear, read, and think is part of a larger sociohistoric dialogue (including inner speech), discord and embarrassment also aren’t attributable to a single person or subgroup. Dialogic discomfort, then, describes our mutually felt and mutually produced tension.

SHELTER FROM THE STORM On the ﬁrst day, the class agreed to be a ‘‘safe harbor.’’ As a class, we had to be able to use language to discuss, to think, and to learn about each other without worrying about making a mistake. We also needed to respect and listen to each other, for as Goffman explains, ‘‘When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them’’ (1973, p. 17). This preliminary step (i.e., declaring the class a safe space) was necessary to build what Goffman calls ‘‘team collusion’’ (pp. 176–177). For us, this meant having a space in which strangers would become collaborators and each member of the class would share with and learn from his or her peers. The idea of designating a safe space was not unfamiliar to me. Few social situations are homogenous, but classrooms (composition classes included) are unique because people with different histories, values, epistemologies, and amounts of power must share not only space but also scholastic obligations. Pratt (1991) calls this intersection of difference the ‘‘contact zone’’ and suggests a need for establishing ‘‘safe houses’’ in the classroom to facilitate fair and equal exchange of ideas. Yet our safe harbor pledge created some strain as we struggled to remain civil and supportive when problematic ‘‘big D’’ Discourses manifested in our ‘‘little d’’ discourse. A white student in the class represented a wellknown black artist with a monologue written in his voice and began it by

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saying ‘‘Yo, yo, yo,’’ an introduction that suggested a stereotypic and uncritical perception of African-American salutation. A student from Turkey repeatedly and forcefully claimed that race was not an issue in her home country and that racism was not a problem on our campus. Another student frequently invoked her marginalization as a woman, refusing to acknowledge her privilege as a white person. Many of the other members of the class remained quiet, likely feeling silenced and wanting to avoid confrontation. The dialogic discomfort grew more complex as the semester progressed, for our discussions of events within our campus community began to index utterances that had previously been made within the class, both forestalling and encouraging possible future utterances. As Wortham (2001) explained, ‘‘The speaker not only takes a position with respect to past speakers’ utterances on the topic, but also anticipates future speakers’ responses,’’ and through this process, ‘‘subsequent utterances can transform the implications of prior ones’’ (pp. 22, 40–41). A little more than a month into the semester, the Tri Delta sorority and Zeta Beta Tau fraternity held a party called ‘‘Tacos and Tequila,’’ inviting guests to wear sombreros and to dress up as gardeners, gang members, pregnant women, and bandits, embodying the prevailing stereotypes of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. The organizers of the party were caught and forced to apologize to the university community and to undergo racial sensitivity training. The university administration publicly scolded the participants, but cast the event as an aberration. Both the party and the responses from the university and the students became a hot topic in our class. Some agreed with the university that ‘‘Tacos and Tequila’’ was an aberration. Others disagreed, citing the previous year’s ‘‘Pimps and Hoes’’ party as further evidence of the frequency of stereotype-based events. Several pointed out that racial stereotyping was a systemic problem in our community, which had created and fought hard to preserve the dancing ‘‘Native American’’ mascot, who has since been retired. ‘‘Sometimes,’’ wrote Goffman (1973), ‘‘when we ask whether a fostered impression is true or false we really mean to ask whether or not the performer is authorized to give the performance in question, and are not primarily concerned with the actual performance itself ’’ (p. 59). Some of the class felt – perhaps rightfully – that whites were never authorized to represent racial minorities and that even well-intentioned representation amounted to modern blackface. However, as a class, we had agreed to be supportive of each other, and so could not critique each other’s racial representations and performances directly; the ‘‘Tacos and Tequila’’ party

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and racist mascot were safe topics, functioning as outlets for the discussions that could not happen directly for fear of criticizing or offending a fellow classmate. The politics of representing others remained an issue throughout the semester, and the mascot debate and ‘‘Tacos and Tequila’’ party were frequently cited as instances of white mimicry and parody of racial minorities – explicitly, as proof of racism on campus, and implicitly, as evidence of racism within our class.

CONSPICUOUS SILENCE Throughout the semester, I wanted to convey to my classmates, particularly the 10 men and women who made up the previously described ‘‘core’’ of the class, that I was sensitive to the unspoken tension and to their discomfort with our safe harbor agreement. Wanting to preempt the dialogic discomfort I felt was quickly becoming unwieldy, I did my best to broadcast my desire and openness to interrogate my whiteness, my privilege, and my cultural and disciplinary assumptions. I readily admitted my ignorance, appealed to my peers for explanation or dissent, and tried to diffuse tension with humor. Goffman (1973) told us that when we are in public, we have a tendency to exaggerate our performance of self in order to ensure that others understand us; ‘‘While in the presence of others, the individual typically infuses his activity with signs, which dramatically highlight and portray conﬁrmatory facts that might otherwise remain unapparent or obscure’’ (p. 30). This was the picture of my public face that semester. I saw the impending performance of my live text as the ﬁnal opportunity to showcase my understanding of the course concepts and my sensitivity to the attitudes of the group. It would be my last chance to convey my ‘‘self ’’ to my classmates. Goffman captured this sense of the urgency of performance very well: ‘‘For if the individual’s activity is to become signiﬁcant to others, he must mobilize his activity so that it will express during the interaction what he wishes to convey. In fact, the performer may be required not only to express his claimed capacities during the interaction but also to do so during a split second in the interaction’’ (p. 30, emphasis mine). I highlight Goffman’s words, ‘‘during a split second,’’ to underscore the intense pressure I felt on the last day of class, when it was time to present my text. In my live text, I read for the ‘‘narrator’’ role, which is meant to be a conﬂation of the voice of my childhood self and my voice now, but these two

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voices use very different registers. For instance, in the middle of the ﬁrst act, the narrator says: But Luke eventually grew frustrated with little Hulk (who was too small and too soft, and offered little resistance to Luke’s attacks), and started engaging MyBuddy (a Christmas present) in these staged ﬁghts. MyBuddy was a more worthy opponent. He was taller, weighed more, had longer arms and legs on which Luke could practice the half or full nelson.

It is clear from this line that the narrator is an observer; she is not physically present in the story at this time. She describes Luke and his behavior with the perspective of someone who sees this event in relation to the preceding and subsequent events in the story; in other words, she represents herself as omniscient. On the other hand, when the narrator describes entering a toy store during the second act, her register changes: Toys everywhere. Stacks. Piles. Heaps. Mountains. Aisles and aisles of toys. My parents went to ask the clerk where to ﬁnd MyBuddy while I gaped. I craned my neck.

As we can see from the use of the ﬁrst person pronoun in this line, the narrator places herself physically within the toy store, and thus, within the story; in this moment, she is less an observer, less the older, omniscient self, reﬂecting on the past. The narrator is there, amid the aisles of toys; she is a character within the story. In this way, the ﬁrst person pronoun indicates the childhood-self register. To further inﬂect the differences between the two registers, the childlike register is read in a high-pitched voice and the narrator assumes the body language and posture of a eight- or nine-year-old girl: exaggerated facial expressions – repeatedly raising the eyebrows and biting the lower lip – and hand gestures – pulling on the hem of the shirt – to indicate excitement, impatience, and caprice (i.e., youth). The omniscientobserver register is inﬂected with a lower pitch and a slower, more measured cadence, and is accompanied by more conservative, professorial bodily and facial gestures: body seated upright, back straightened, shoulders down, chin raised, and speech punctuated by the brandishing of the right index ﬁnger. However, despite the differences in the narrator’s two roles, both the childhood-self register and the omniscient-observer register function similarly within the live text; both serve to essentialize the subject of the story (me), and thus to distance themselves from the ‘‘real’’ (living, breathing) me, who must offer up a rather embarrassing memory to a dialogically discomﬁting group. Wortham (2001) describes the way in which autobiographical narrative ‘‘involves a doubling of roles for the narrator’s

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self – the narrator has at least one role in the represented content of the story and one role in the ongoing interaction between narrator and audience’’ (p. 13). Neither register coincides with my ‘‘real’’ register, and thus the ‘‘real’’ me is concealed and protected from judgment. This distance is intentionally augmented by the humorous tone with which the story is told. My live text is full of absurdity (talking Barbie dolls, tongue-in-cheek interjections from television personalities like Hulk Hogan and Roseanne Barr), and the ‘‘punchline’’ is supposed to come just after the revelation of why my parents didn’t buy the doll, in the following lines: The problem was that my mother and father knew very well what Luke had in mind for MyBuddy. [pauses] What if, for instance, a neighbor or family friend were to come over to our house, perhaps for a dinner party or to return a book, only to ﬁnd a six-year-old white boy beating the crap out of an African-American doll?

Both lines are said in the omniscient-observer register, and the ﬁrst is punctuated by a dramatic pause, during which the narrator intentionally leaves time for the audience to put the pieces together and realize what exactly it is that ‘‘Luke had in mind for MyBuddy.’’ The narrator then provides an embarrassing hypothetical moment in order to illustrate what the audience is supposed to have already discovered: Because Luke does not understand the concept of race, he will probably beat up the black doll just as he did with the white doll. Luke’s innocence about race (and by extension, mine) is supposed to be endearing, to show the audience that my brother and I had a very tolerant, open-minded childhood that did not teach us to differentiate black and white skin. I expected that the line spoken after the pause would elicit laughter or a murmur of chuckles or at least a few smiles from my classmates as they pictured my parents’ predicament. But no laughter came, and I felt very uncomfortable.

RELOCATING THE EPIPHANY I have thought a great deal about my performance and about this ‘‘punchline’’ moment in particular, when I was greeted with silence instead of laughter or any other physical or verbal acknowledgment. Instead, I was presented with the same nonreaction as were the racial performances done earlier on in the semester. The class was silent. After the performance, there was no feedback except the weak praise from one student, which sounded more like commiseration (she has since said that she ‘‘felt sorry’’ for me). I had wanted so fervently to display that I shared the attitudes of the group,

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that I understood the larger purpose of performance ethnography, and that I was sensitive to the discomfort that had remained tangible but unaddressed all semester. I felt on the last day of class that I had not succeeded in representing myself to my classmates and that as Eliot’s (1917) Prufrock piteously thought to himself, ‘‘That is not it at all/That is not what I meant, at all’’ (lines 109–110). In a moment, it was over, and there was no opportunity for reﬂection, no closure. Left with residual feelings of discomfort, I spent six months looking back on the d/Discourse of the piece and thinking about it in terms of the larger context of the semester (the school’s mascot, the ‘‘Tacos and Tequila’’ party, and the portentous racial performances and representations done in class), and as I did, I began to understand a bit better why my classmates did not laugh. Perinbanayagam (1991) explained that in ancient monarchies, courts entertained jesters as a means of allowing for humor and playful critique within the rigid communication structure (p. 95). The absence of modern jesters, he wrote, ‘‘is solved by a member of a group who on occasion takes the jester’s role y [enabling] communication to proceed without the hierarchical roles solidifying into oppressive and monological structures’’ (Perinbanayagam, 1991, p. 95). As I reﬂect, it seems I was trying to adopt the role of court jester in the class. I had wanted to highlight the comedy, the absurdity of the situation, because ‘‘the fool,’’ as Perinbanayagam explained, ‘‘has the privileges and responsibilities of speaking when others cannot and tell what others dare not’’ (p. 95). My mistake was in presuming that I knew what the rest of the class wanted to say – I erred in believing I could speak for their perceptions of the dialogic discomfort. The voices I included did not represent them. Given the circumstances, my piece, which I now see as glib and superﬁcial, probably did not merit laughter. It did, however, deserve criticism. But the ways in which we had come to understand our classroom as a safe harbor would not allow for it – rather than silence each other with criticism, we silenced ourselves. If our discursive space had allowed for the acknowledgment and discussion of taboo topics, would this have compromised the safety of our harbor? Perhaps. Our discourse might have been confrontational and even more dialogically uncomfortable if we had foregone the safe harbor agreement altogether? Probably. We might reasonably wonder if some compromise between ‘‘contact zone’’ and ‘‘safe house’’ can ever be achieved, especially when the individuals in the group are grappling not only with each other but also with personal, and often painful, epiphanic moments. But I would like to suggest that, rather than trying to forestall dialogic discomfort, we might see

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it as generative. For instance, while those in our class who were regularly positioned as minorities suggested an abundance of racially epiphanic moments, it is less common for a more or less sheltered white, suburban, middle-class American to be made to feel uncomfortable with his or her race. When asked to write about a racial epiphany, I did not have much trouble selecting from the few unpleasant moments in my store of routinely comfortable experiences. The discomfort I felt the day we didn’t buy a new doll and my subsequent reﬂections made me consider my parents’ conﬂicting desires: to keep us innocent and to make us socially aware. And my public discomfort in class on the day of my performance had forced me to tease out my own problematic desires: to present myself as naı¨ ve but also to be considered intelligent; to come across as unthreatening but also to assume the responsibility for representing others. Dialogic discomfort forced me to try to reconcile the contradictory roles I was taking, and the process of reconciliation gave me a chance to interrogate my motives, my preconceived notions, and my relationship to the group, particularly in terms of my power and my representation of the voices of others. These kinds of realizations are, after all, the goal of performance ethnography: By reenacting and interrogating our personal and cultural assumptions, we hope to make our audiences and ourselves open to reﬂection. Whatever discomfort we feel may indicate a weakness in our conceptual framework, an opportunity to reconsider a solidiﬁed notion or uncritical belief, meaning that the performance ethnography can become a kind of epiphany in and of itself.

REFERENCES Denzin, N. (2001). Interpretive interactionism: Applied social research methods (2nd ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Denzin, N. (2003). Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Eliot, T. S. (1998). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Originally published 1917). The Wasteland, Prufrock and other poems. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Goffman, E. (1973). The presentation of self in everyday life. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press. Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world. London: Routledge. Mead, G. H. (1974). The problem of society: How we become selves. In: B. G. Blount (Ed.), Language, culture, and society: A book of readings (2nd ed.). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.(Originally published 1936). Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1991). Discursive acts. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine Transaction. Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91, 33–40.

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Prior, P. A. (2003). Tracing processes: How texts come into being. In: C. Bazerman & P. A. Prior (Eds), What writing does and how it does it (pp. 167–200). London: Erlbaum. Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of Language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University. Shor, I. (1996). When students have power: Negotiating power in a critical pedagogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Trimbur, J. (1989). Consensus and difference in collaborative learning. College English, 51, 602–616. Wortham, S. (2001). Narratives in action: A strategy for research and analysis. New York: Teachers College Press.

APPENDIX A Eulogy for MyBuddy Act I: The Death of MyBuddy Narrator: The summer before I turned eight, my brother ripped the head off his MyBuddy doll. MyBuddy was a popular children’s toy at the time. He was produced by Hasbro. MyBuddy: Hi kids! My name is MyBuddy. I look just like you. I have brown hair and blue eyes and wear overalls, a striped shirt, and a red cap. I even come in AfricanAmerican! Let’s be friends! Narrator: He looked a hell of a lot like Chucky, the psychopathic, murderous doll from the horror movie ‘‘Child’s Play,’’ so I always found him creepy. Chucky: [in an evil voice] Close your eyes and count to seven. When you wake, you’ll be in heaven. Narrator: There was a little girls’ analog, called KidSister, who was either supposed to be MyBuddy’s sister or his cousin or his girlfriend. I don’t remember much about KidSister. KidSister: My blond hair and blue eyes are so pretty. How’s your self-esteem? Let’s play house and bake cookies! Narrator: I hated her. [pauses] So anyway, my brother and I were each allowed to watch one hour of TV per week. I would always divide my hour into two 30-minute slots, one of which would go toward Nova (to impress my dad the physicist). Nova: Here at Nova, we believe that science is neither sacred lore nor secret ritual, but rather curious people

Dialogics of Discomfort

Narrator: Roseanne:

Narrator: WWF:

Narrator:

Hulk Hogan: Narrator:

Luke: Narrator:

177 exploring interesting questions. Most importantly, Nova shows the human story behind the science story. Whether exploring a galaxy or an atom, the series delves into the personalities responsible for the discoveries, and the social consequences of events in the lab. And the other to Roseanne (I found dysfunctional families esthetic). [in a loud, whiny voice] Hey! Black people are just like us. They’re every bit as good as us and any people who don’t think so is just a bunch of banjo-picking, cousin-dating, barefoot embarrassments to respectable white-trash like us! Luke, my brother, had recently become fascinated with the World Wrestling Federation. Our formula is straightforward. We develop compelling storylines anchored by our superstars. This content drives television ratings, which, in turn, drive payper-view buys, live event attendance, and branded merchandise sales. Our strategy is to capitalize on the signiﬁcant operating leverage of our business model through the distribution of this intellectual property across existing media platforms, as well as new and emerging distribution platforms. Luke would sit in front of the television, enrapt, studying these wrestling matches whenever it was his turn to control the remote. When a family friend bought him a stuffed Hulk Hogan doll for his birthday, Luke began practicing wrestling moves on the doll: the step-over leg lock, the arm up the back, the swinging crotch hold. [growling] No one can beat me! Are you tuff enuff ? But Luke eventually grew frustrated with little Hulk (who was too small and too soft, and offered little resistance to Luke’s attacks), and started engaging MyBuddy (a Christmas present) in these staged ﬁghts. MyBuddy was a more worthy opponent. He was taller, weighed more, had longer arms and legs on which Luke could practice the half or full nelson. Keeeeeee-YAAAAAHHH! MyBuddy also had a hard (not stuffed) head and looked more like a real person, but I’m not sure if that made a difference to Luke or not. In any case,

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Luke: Narrator: Luke: Narrator: Luke: Narrator:

Act II: No New Doll Narrator:

Toys ‘‘R’’ Us: Narrator:

Luke: Narrator: Luke: Narrator:

REBECCA SAVAGE BILBRO after one particularly rough brawl, Luke ﬁnally managed to behead MyBuddy. [gasps] Luke was crushed. [shrieks] No! Inconsolable. [sobs loudly] So in a rare moment of indulgence and consumerism (and most likely out of desperation), my parents agreed to buy Luke a new doll. We piled into the family’s gray Plymouth Voyager minivan and drove to Toys ‘‘R’’ Us. Do you remember what Toys ‘‘R’’ Us looked like to you as a little kid? Beyond description! Even now it’s hard for me to ﬁnd the words to describe my ﬁrst trip to this store. Bringing happiness to every child y at a price mom and dad will love! Toys everywhere. Stacks. Piles. Heaps. Mountains. Aisles and aisles of toys. My parents went to ask the clerk where to ﬁnd MyBuddy while I gaped. I craned my neck. The toys went all the way up, and it was a very high ceiling. I turned to Luke and saw him looking exactly the way I felt. We had never seen so many things, let alone toys in one place before. It was intimidating! Mom and dad motioned to us to follow them, and we walked very, very slowly down one of the aisles. We passed Barbies, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Smurfs, Care Bears y.

Toys speak noisily and concurrently TMNT: Heroes in a half shell – Turtle power! Pick me! Pick me! Care Bear: I am wish bear, that’s what I do. And maybe I can help you make your dreams come true! So pick me! Pick me! Barbie: Hey, look over here; I’m so thin and beautiful! And I come with two different party dresses. Pick me! Pick me!

Dialogics of Discomfort Smurf: Toy noise dies down Narrator:

Clerk: Narrator: Luke: Narrator:

Luke:

Narrator:

179 You’d be in for a smurﬁn’ good time if you picked me! Pick me! We passed Transformers, My Little Ponies, Rainbow Brites, Teddy Ruxpins, puzzles, board games, and many other toys I had never seen or heard of before. Finally we reached MyBuddy. [awkwardly] This is where we usually keep the MyBuddies. Upon seeing his old friend, presumed dead, Luke’s eyes lit up. [shrieking] MyBuddy! My mother looked at my father. My father looked at the clerk. The clerk tried not to make eye contact with anyone, and then walked away briskly as though he had been called on the intercom. I started to speak – ‘‘But, but y’’ – abruptly, without a word, my parents lead us back down the rows and rows of toys. We walked through the automatic doors and into the blindingly bright parking lot. I wanted to ask – I knew something had gone wrong, but the way my parents were acting made me keep my mouth shut. At ﬁrst, Luke was too shocked to say anything. But as our parents loaded us into the Voyager y [whining] Why didn’t we buy it? Don’t we have enough money? I want MyBuddy! [becoming more shrill ] I want MyBuddyyyyyyyy! My parents looked uncomfortable.

Act III: My African-American Buddy Narrator: Some time later, I ﬁnally discovered why we hadn’t bought a new MyBuddy. Mom: It was because the only ones in stock were black. The problem was not that we didn’t want our children to have black dolls. Becky had a black Barbie. And we live in a very progressive town. Raleigh, NC: Welcome to the RTP! It’s the biggest research park in the whole world. The universities draw people and businesses from all over the world, which has made the RTP a cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, economic, culinary, linguistic, political, and ideological hodge-podge.

180 Mom:

Narrator:

Dad:

Louis Armstrong:

Dad: Narrator: Mom: Baltimore, MD:

Narrator: Mom:

Narrator:

Raleigh, NC: Narrator:

REBECCA SAVAGE BILBRO The problem was we knew very well what Luke had in mind for MyBuddy. What if, for instance, a neighbor or family friend were to come over to our house, perhaps for a dinner party or to return a book, only to ﬁnd my six-year-old son beating the crap out of an African-American doll? How could we have explained this to me or to Luke? We simply didn’t understand race. We didn’t know the history of violence toward blacks. I’m from New Orleans. My dad was a doctor and my mother was an elementary school teacher. I still remember segregated drinking fountains in the French Quarter. Won’t you come and go with me Down that Mississippi We’ll take a boat to the land of dreams Come along with me on down to New Orleans They’ll be huggin and akissin That’s what I been missin And all that music y. Lord, if you just listen New Orleans, I got them Basin Street blues. Our kids just didn’t have the memories we had of the Civil Rights movement. My ﬁrst crush in kindergarten was Josh, a black kid. I’m from Baltimore, Maryland. Our public schools were desegregated in 1955. The University of Maryland was the ﬁrst university below the Mason-Dixon line to admit blacks. Luke did not understand why a black MyBuddy was fundamentally different from a black Barbie. I grew up in a blue collar Catholic family. My father, Becky’s grandfather, was a plumber and my mother was a secretary. They were nervous when a black family moved in next door to their downtown Baltimore rowhouse. Poor white classmates, rich black neighbors, middleclass Hispanic boyfriends, gay republican teachers, and pregnant Muslim friends y these things were all normal to me. Raleigh; it’s the New York of the South, the Silicon Valley of the East. I wish my parents had said something that day, had explained why we couldn’t get the doll Luke wanted

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Mom: Narrator:

Hasbro:

Narrator:

Mom and dad: Luke: Narrator: Hasbro:

Narrator: Luke:

Narrator:

181 so much. I have thought of dozens of ways they could have explained why brutalizing a black doll was unacceptable. As they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty. When I look back on this moment, I realize that it was the ﬁrst time I really encountered race. I had never thought about gender roles, never questioned my class, didn’t know my parents’ income, was unaware of politics, of race, and of prejudice. Walk down the doll aisle in any toy store and you will see a wide range of almost-human features – they walk, talk, eat, drink, burp, and use the potty – but rarely will you ﬁnd one that appeals to little boys. In some sense, that awkward and embarrassing memory is a presence in our house even now, nearly two decades later. Sometimes we tell the story to each other. What would the neighbors have thought seeing Luke beating up on y? We y obviously couldn’t buy it. No. I suppose not. Interestingly enough, Hasbro eventually discontinued MyBuddy. Unfortunately, it seems that these parents take issue with the fact that the dolls’ clothes are removable. They’re worried that it promotes homosexual experimentation in their sons. Luke isn’t gay, but he does remember MyBuddy. I remember how awful I felt when the head came off. But it was nothing compared to how terrible I felt that day we left Toys ‘‘R’’ Us without MyBuddy. I miss the little guy. I do too.

JESUITS, INDIANS, AND THE LEGEND OF ONDESSONK Grant W. Shoffstall ABSTRACT This is an experimental text with a performative cast, the aim of which is to enact, excavate, chronicle, and interrogate the racialized experiences and spectacles endured, consumed, and performed by the author in the course of a two-week stay at a Native American themed catholic summer camp during his youth. Following Philip J. Deloria, it is argued that the camp’s history and appropriation of Native American culture eventuate in the formation of a highly racialized space where relatively well-off white children come to ‘‘play Indian,’’ a space that furthermore conspires in the construction and maintenance of ‘‘whiteness’’ as a cultural identity. The text is characterized by its multiple and rotating speaking parts and thus lends itself to both impromptu seminar readings as well as more elaborate forms of theatrical performance. Narrator: Several French Jesuit missionaries worked among the Huron Indians in Canada and upstate New York in the early 17th century as part of an effort to bring the Christian gospel to the ‘‘New World.’’ Eight of these missionaries were tortured and put to death by the Iroquois, the enemies of the Huron. Canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1930, these eight men are known collectively in the Roman Catholic Church as the North American Martyrs: St. Isaac Jogues (1607–1646), St. Jean de Brebeuf

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 183–196 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31010-2

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(1593–1649), St. Charles Garnier (1605–1649), St. Nˆel Chabanel (1613– 1649), St. Rene Goupil (1608–1642), St. Gabriel Lalemant (1610–1649), St. Antoine Daniel (1601–1648), and St. Jean de Lalande (?–1646) (Francois Roustang, 2006). In Midland, Ont., Canada, in 1926, a large church and shine were erected in their honor, ‘‘The Martyr’s Shrine.’’ A less-known fact is that in southern Illinois, in 1959, the Archdiocese of Bellville, IL, purchased 300 acres of land in the Illinois Ozarks, near the Shawnee National Forest, to be used as a summer camp for catholic children, which would honor the lives and memory of the North American Martyrs. Today, the camp has expanded to cover nearly 1,000 acres. The name of the camp is Ondessonk.

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SCENE ONE: CAMP ONDESSONK, OZARK, IL Narrator: No indoor plumbing, air-conditioning, electricity, televisions, or radios for two weeks – and best of all, no parents. Bob, my best friend, and I were excited to have ﬁnally arrived at Camp Ondessonk. When the priest came to talk to our small fourth-grade class about the summer camp some six months earlier, we knew immediately that we had to go. Bonﬁres every night, ghost stories, canoeing, ﬁshing, hiking, rock climbing, archery, riﬂery, and horses. Moreover, we knew instantly that our parents would allow us to attend – Ondessonk is a catholic summer camp, and Bob and I attended a catholic school. Our parents knew that Ondessonk would be a safe place – a place where catholic kids could go to meet other catholic kids from around the country; a place where the church would be in charge; a place where good kids could go to get closer to God and nature, to learn, and to grow. After having said goodbye to our parents, Bob and I were introduced to our counselor, Jack, and his assistant, Tony, both burly outdoorsmen. For the next two weeks, we would be living with Jack, Tony, and roughly 30 other campers in Garnier, a large treehouse unit on the northwest side of the camp. We were each given two green t-shirts, each bearing the symbol of Ondessonk, and a picture of a great wolf. Each unit, Jack explained, was denoted by a speciﬁc color and animal.

Jack rounded us up, marched us across lake Echon by way of the Amantacha swinging bridge, and led us to our treehouses. After we moved

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in and became acquainted with one another, we were instructed to change into one of our t-shirts and to prepare for orientation. As the sun set, Jack and Tony marched us back across the Amantacha bridge and led us to the grotto, where an enormous bonﬁre roared, and a black-robed Jesuit priest and the director of the camp and his staff awaited the arrival of the other units.

SCENE TWO: CAMP ONDESSONK, THE GROTTO Speaker One (Jesuit priest): Heepwah! Welcome, campers, to Ondessonk! Do you all know what ‘‘Heepwah’’ means? ‘‘Heepwah’’ is an American Indian expression meaning ‘‘everything good and wonderful!’’ Now, on the count of three, I want to hear you all scream, ‘‘Heepwah! Heepwah! Heepwah!’’ One, two, three . . . Speaker Two (all campers, read as me´lange): Heepwah! Heepwah! Heepwah! Speaker One (all campers, read as me´lange): Heepwah! Heepwah! Heepwah! Narrator: We said Heepwah all the time; it became the universal and collective response to any given question or assertion, so much so that the utterance was effectively emptied of any meaning it was assumed to carry. Campers, are you having fun? (Heepwah!) Campers, are you ready to go hiking? (Heepwah!) Campers, are you ready to eat? (Heepwah!) Campers, do you love Ondessonk? (Heepwah!) The natural acoustics of the grotto ampliﬁed the voices of some 300 children screaming ‘‘Heepwah’’ at the top of their lungs that night, eliciting echoes in the distance, across lake Echon. In light of the mood this created among the awestruck and impressionable young campers, the priest ﬁrst led us in prayer and then proceeded, solemnly, to tell us his version of the history of Ondessonk. Speaker Two (Jesuit priest): ‘‘Camp Ondessonk is dedicated to the memory of St. Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit missionary of the late 17th century who labored for the cause of Christ in Canada and the present state of New York. His work was primarily with the Huron and Iroquois Indians. At one time, taken prisoner by the native Iroquois, he was renamed by them ‘‘Ondessonk,’’ or ‘‘Bird of Prey,’’ because of his black robe. For 13 months, Fr. Jogues remained a slave of the Iroquois, who treated him as a captive. When his death was apparent, he escaped, eventually making his way back

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to his native France to recover from his tortures. He then volunteered to return, this time to his death at the hands of the Iroquois. He was the ﬁrst priest to set foot on Manhattan Island and the ﬁrst priest to shed his blood in the United States. Fr. Jogues and seven other Jesuit priests, the North American Martyrs, gave their lives to the Native Americans, to the ultimate ending of torture of martyrdom. In the symbol of the camp, the circle and cross represent ‘‘O’’ for Ondessonk as well as the world dedicated to the cross of Christ, and the seven stars represent the seven other Jesuit martyrs of North America.’’1 These saints are remembered and honored at Camp Ondessonk: the camp units, lakes, and major land formations are named after the North American Martyrs – Garnier, Lalande, Goupil, Chabanel, Lalemant, Daniel, Brebeuf – and their Indian Converts – Amantacha and Tekakwitha.

Narrator: Enchanted, there Bob and I sat, around a raging bonﬁre, in a very large grotto, wearing our green Garnier t-shirts, somewhere near the Shawnee national forest, screaming ‘‘Heepwah,’’ with 300 other white kids from relativity well-off catholic families, eager to begin our two-week trek as campers of Ondessonk. We knew we had found a special place, and we didn’t sleep much at all that night.

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SCENE THREE: CAMP ONDESSONK, GARNIER TREEHOUSES Narrator: I can’t sleep! Speaker One (Bob): Neither can I! Speakers Two and One (other campers, read as me´lange): Me either! Uh-uh, me either! Me either! No way, me either! Narrator: I remember that the six of us sat up late into the night, with our ﬂashlights out, discussing all we would do together in the coming weeks: We would camp out in the forest with horses, climb dangerous rocks, swim under waterfalls, shoot bows and arrows, and go canoeing. Fun gave way to seriousness, however, when Brendan, a second-year camper, began telling us about ‘‘the night game,’’ an all-night event in which unit is pitted against unit in a series of difﬁcult tasks – a combination of a camp-wide scavenger hunt and obstacle course. The night game, he explained, is like a ﬁnal test of sorts, to determine which campers in each unit are the most mature, the most in-line with the spirit of Ondessonk. Those who excel in the weeks’ activities, and who exhibit the qualities of leadership in the night game, will be inducted into ‘‘Lodge.’’ Utter Silence Speaker Two (Bob): What’s Lodge? Speaker One (Brendan): No one who hasn’t been inducted knows for sure what it is, but this is what happens. They pick the two best campers from each unit, and then they take them away for a whole day! When the campers come back, they have to wear a black headband and black face paint under their eyes, and they’re not allowed to talk to anyone for another whole day! And then, everyone goes to a secret place, and that’s when the real Lodge ceremony begins! Everyone gets to see it start, but then we all have to leave once it begins. Narrator: I felt my stomach turn as Brendan told us about ‘‘Lodge.’’ It scared me, and I almost started crying. I didn’t want anyone to take me or Bob away. And I didn’t understand why anyone would. I didn’t want to be inducted into Lodge. What would they do to me? What would they do to Bob? And who are ‘‘they?’’ Speaker One (Bob, feigned excitement): Wow! Lodge sounds really cool!

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Speakers One and Two (other campers, read as me´lange): Dude, that is so cool! Man, I hope I can get into Lodge! Me too! Me too! Yeah, I want to be in Lodge! Narrator: We agreed to get some rest, as the week’s activities had just acquired a much more profound level of signiﬁcance. I turned off my ﬂashlight, and in relative silence, cried myself to sleep.

SCENE FOUR: CAMP ONDESSONK, GARNIER TREEHOUSES, ‘‘THE NIGHT GAME’’ Narrator: The ﬁrst week of activities was behind us as we embarked upon the ‘‘night game’’ Brendan had told us about. Jack and Tony had instructed us to dress in our darkest clothing – no shorts, and we were to wear long sleeves if we had them. We gathered around the Garnier campﬁre pit, awaiting Jack’s instructions. Speaker One (Jack): Alright campers, are you ready for the night game? Speakers One and Two (all campers, read as me´lange): Heepwah!!! Speaker One (Jack): Alright! Here’s what’s going to happen. Half of you will come with me, and half of you will go with Tony. No ﬂashlights are allowed. Each of Garnier’s two groups has a number of tasks to perform before midnight, and we have to negotiate them as silently and as stealthily as possible. Heepwah? Speakers One and Two (all Garnier campers, read as me´lange): Heepwah!!! Narrator: Bob, Brendan, and I ended up together, with Tony. Before telling us what lay ahead, Tony wanted our group to have a special name: He dubbed us ‘‘The Savage Sioux.’’ He would be our chief, ‘‘Chief Tony,’’ and we would be his warriors. Speaker One (Chief Tony): Savage Sioux, are you motivated?! Speaker Two (Savage Sioux, read as me´lange): Heepwah! Heepwah! Heepwah! Speaker One (Chief Tony): Savage Sioux, are you ready to do your part to help Garnier win the night game?! Speaker Two (Savage Sioux, read as me´lange): Heepwah! Heepwah! Heepwah!

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Narrator: Chief Tony told us what lay ahead, what would be expected of us, and then he revealed a special surprise: mirrors and war paint – black, green, and brown. Speakers One and Two (Savage Sioux jumping and screaming, read as me´lange): Heepwah!!! Heepwah!!! Heepwah!!! Narrator: We painted each others’ faces, in highly stereotyped Native American fashion, with the same war paint used by the U.S. military. It easily could have been mistaken for a scene from Lord of the Flies – privileged white kids whooping and dancing around, preparing to do battle with one another for no apparent reason. Speakers One and Two (various campers, read as me´lange): I want green stripes under my eyes with . . . . Can you make lines on my face going this way and then . . . Ah, man, that looks . . . . Can I paint my face all green and then have black and brown stripes . . . . How’s this? Would more stripes here make me look mean? What about my lips? Should I paint half my face black and the other half . . . . Will you draw a cross on my . . . . I want a lightning bolt on my . . . . Speaker One (Chief Tony): Listen up, Savage Sioux! Do whatever you want; just make sure that it’s dark, that your faces, ears, necks, and hands are totally covered.

INTERLUDE Narrator: Of course, it’s all apparent now; we were playing Indian that night, and we had been playing Indian, for the entire week prior to this moment – everyone had been, from the moment our parents dropped us off. Indeed, we were all anticipating it, at least at a tacit level. So what was going on? Why were a bunch of relatively privileged white kids dressing up to play Indian at a catholic summer camp, one dedicated, at that, to preserving the memory of Jesuit priests who had been tortured and killed by the Iroquois in the 17th century? Speaker Two (Philip J. Deloria, paraphrased): First, consider why your parents allowed you to attend this camp, and even encouraged you to do so. Narrator: Well, I guess they thought it would be good for me to ‘‘get back to nature’’ and that the experiences and challenges Camp Ondessonk would

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force me to negotiate would help me grow, would help me mature in terms of character. Speaker One (Philip J. Deloria, paraphrased): Right. You have to understand that the demise of ‘‘the American frontier’’ in the 19th century carried with it widespread worries about character development: ‘‘How would the nation fare if its future leaders lacked the fortitude of those shaped authentically by America’s powerful natural environment?’’ (Deloria, 1998). In the wake of industrialism, moreover, nature gradually came to be conceptualized as something ‘‘out there,’’ something we were removed from, and thus had to ‘‘get back to.’’ Scouting, wilderness, and nature study became, in effect, surrogates for the frontier, surrogates in which the modern-day summer camp has its institutional roots (Deloria, 1998, p. 101). Narrator: Ok, that makes sense, Camp Ondessonk and others like it are surrogate architects of character in the absence of a ‘‘frontier,’’ but how do white catholic kids playing Indian ﬁt into all of this? Speaker Two (Philip J. Deloria, paraphrased): Right. Well, historically, you have to understand that ‘‘whenever white Americans have confronted crises of identity, some of them have inevitably turned to Indians’’ (Deloria, 1998, p. 156). This is so because, ﬁrst of all, white Americans [have always had] an awkward tendency [of deﬁning themselves] in terms of what they [are] not. They [have] failed to produce a positive identity that [stands] on its own’’ (Deloria, 1998, p. 3). American whiteness, in this sense, necessitates a racialized Other, without which whiteness as an ideal, as a cultural norm, would implode (Deloria, 1998, pp. 3–5). Now consider this ﬁrst in relation to the aforementioned, in relation to the worries that accompanied industrialism and the demise of the frontier and its tribulations as an architect of American character, and second, in relation to the Ondessonk mythos narrated to you by the Jesuit priest and others. There are two ways to imagine the American Indian as Other: Other as a kind of us or Other as a them. ‘‘By imagining Indian Others as a kind of us rather than a them, one [can] more easily gain access to [certain American Indian qualities] and make them one’s own’’ (Deloria, 1998, p. 103), that is, to appropriate them as American, or in your case, catholic qualities that Camp Ondessonk purports to instill and develop in its campers (e.g., ‘‘Heepwah,’’ character, outdoorsmanship, and so forth). This is complicated, however, and is even seemingly contradicted, by the fact that the construction of a white American identity also required (and requires) ‘‘aggressive exterior Indian Others who justify the violent acquisition of Indian land’’ (Deloria, 1998, p. 101). This is the Indian Other as a them. Do you see how both the Indian Other as an ‘‘us’’ and as a ‘‘them’’ are working together in the Ondessonk Mythos?

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Narrator: I think so. In the Ondessonk mythos the Huron, and especially Amantacha and St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the most famous of the Jesuits’ converts, are Others as a kind of us, whereas the Iroquois, who tortured and killed the North American Martyrs, are Others as a them. Moreover, given that this myth is institutionalized, that is, made concrete and lived out in sociohistorical space – Camp Ondessonk – a great deal more is at work here. Speaker One (Philip J. Deloria, paraphrased): Right. When you put on the war paint for the night game, you and your fellow campers essentially and explicitly set this mythos into practice, and thus translated it into physical reality, rendering it concrete. You became, in effect, Fr. Garnier’s Indians. Narrator: Right. And in so doing, I also entered a performative space that made me aware of what is believed to be the ‘‘real me’’ underneath the disguise (Deloria, 1998, p. 7), the war paint, which is in keeping with the notion that in order for me to understand who I am as a white American male, I must have an idea of who I am not. In a sense, this is what Camp Ondessonk accomplishes on a much grander scale: a periodic rejuvenation of the white modern identity by way of bringing white children into a decidedly nonmodern space, a highly racialized space in which white catholic children ‘‘get back to nature,’’ perform Native American activities sanctioned and appropriated by the catholic church, and in the end – with the Lodge ceremony subsequent to the ‘‘night game’’ – are ultimately judged to be ‘‘good’’ catholic children based on how well they play Indian. The Native American Other as a ‘‘them’’ is present only indirectly in that the units or color-coded ‘‘tribes’’ bear the names of the Jesuit martyrs, who on the t-shirts are signiﬁed indirectly and in totemic fashion by animals, which serve as constant, non-semantic reminders of what kind of Indian one is not to be. The larger cultural context of identity crisis in which all of this takes place, which necessitates the insertion of white children into the racialized space that is Camp Ondessonk, is the postmodern crisis in knowledge and meaning (Deloria, 1998, pp. 156–157) – ‘‘who am I, really?’’ – thus, the seeming contradiction of ‘‘playing Indian’’ at a catholic youth camp that purportedly honors the memory of Jesuit priests tortured and killed by Indians (the Iroquois ‘‘them’’).

SCENE FIVE: CAMP ONDESSONK, THE LODGE CEREMONY Narrator: It happened just as Brendan said it would. After night game, two Garnier campers disappeared for an entire day, only to return the following morning wearing a black headband and black war paint; they were

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forbidden to speak. Neither Bob nor I had been chosen to be inducted into Lodge. Brendan, however, had been. When Brendan returned after having been taken, he was covered in dirt, and now, I realize, looked like he hadn’t slept. For a day he ate meals with us and for a night he slept in his bunk in our treehouse, but neither did he speak to us nor looked us in the eye. He had changed, seemingly, and it bothered, even frightened, me and Bob. Not long after, Brendan disappeared again and Jack rounded us up to tell us that at sunset we would begin marching to a secret place for the Lodge ceremony. We were to wear one of our Garnier t-shirts, and no ﬂashlights were allowed. As we neared our unknown destination, we heard drums beating in the distance. Narrator: This is really weird. Speaker Two (Bob): I know. What do you think they’re doing to them? Narrator: I don’t know, but it’s going to be . . . . Speaker One (man’s voice, from off the trail): Quiet! Shut up and keep your eyes forward! Narrator: Utterly terriﬁed, Bob and I looked at each other in disbelief and did as we were told. As we came to a clearing at the end of the trail, we saw men, women, and children, dressed from head to toe in Native American regalia. Some were standing and holding torches, lining the entrance of this seemingly sacred space, and others were sitting around an enormous bonﬁre, playing drums in Native American fashion. The drums stopped once all the units had arrived, and then there was silence.

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A man wearing Native American regalia and heavy face paint brought the Lodge inductees out of the woods and into the clearing. And then we saw Brendan, carrying what must have been a four-foot-long spear, his face heavily painted, and a red hand printed on his bare chest; he was wearing nothing but a loincloth and moccasins. The other inductees were dressed the same.

I don’t remember what happened sequentially; I just remember being scared. Scared for Brendan. I do remember that the white men dressed up as Indians made the inductees swear an oath before the rest of the campers, that they would be loyal for life to the Lodge of Ondessonk.2 They were then made to drink out of a very large wooden bowl – the liquid was thick, red, and steaming. The Lodge inductees were then taken back into the woods, and the rest of us were ushered away, unit by unit, in absolute silence.

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Narrator: At breakfast the following morning, after we had all gone to church, the lodge inductees returned to their respective units. They were met with a barrage of ‘‘Heepwahs.’’ Brendan was clean and seemingly well rested, wearing with great pride across his chest a red sash bearing the symbol of Ondessonk, denoting that he was now a lifelong member of the Lodge of Ondessonk. While he was allowed once again to speak freely, he was strictly forbidden to reveal to anyone outside of the Lodge the details of the initiation ceremony. Three days subsequent to the preceding, Bob and I departed from Ondessonk, and while we would never return, the mystery of the ‘‘Lodge’’ of Ondessonk would continue to haunt us both, through junior high, high school, college, and graduate school. Brendan had played Indian the right way, in a manner sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. In so doing, he was rewarded, and his Camp Ondessonk experience was ‘‘authenticated.’’ He was a good Indian, a good catholic boy. For the rest of us, for the majority, the camp had done what it was supposed to do. Bob and I and nearly 300 others returned to ‘‘civilization,’’ with a very clear understanding of who and what we were not.

CONCLUDING REMARKS It is perhaps evident now that Camp Ondessonk is something of a ‘‘sacred place,’’ a key feature of which is the camp’s institutional provision of various performative spaces; spaces in which race is enacted and consumed as spectacle, for and by an audience of predominantly white children. Ondessonk is of course by no means an exceptional space in this regard. Countless others in contemporary American society, ranging from the relatively simple theater stages on which kindergarten children enact whitewashed encounters between Indians and pilgrims at thanksgiving, to the football ﬁelds and basketball courts on which the much more elaborate half-time performances of racialized college mascots – like those of the University of Illinois’s ‘‘Chief Illiniwek’’ – are carried out for hysterical sports fans, as well as constitute institutionally sanctioned performative spaces – spaces in which it is safe for white people to ‘‘play Indian,’’ to construct, perform, and consume race as spectacle (see King & Springwood, 2001; Denzin, 2003). The practices and performances I have endeavored to excavate and interrogate in this text, those for which Camp Ondessonk is the institutional

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home, are thus part of a much broader cultural process characterized by the ‘‘freezing’’ of Native Americans, that is, the reduction of Native Americans, by way of ‘‘playing Indian,’’ to ‘‘rigid, ﬂat renderings of their diverse cultures and histories’’ (King & Springwood, 2001, p. 43). Insofar as Ondessonk is a performative space in which these reductionist renderings have been appropriated by the catholic church, and are furthermore deployed and enacted by relatively privileged white children, the summer camp conspires in the creation and maintenance of highly racialized ways of understanding and ‘‘seeing’’ Native Americans and their worlds (King & Springwood, 2001, p. 157). This text is to be understood as an attempt to cast critical light upon such compromised ways of understanding and seeing, and to call attention to the place of Camp Ondessonk, and other seemingly innocent youth camps like it, in keeping them alive.

NOTES 1. So reads a memorial plaque at the entrance to Camp Ondessonk. Full text accessible at www.ondessonk.com 2. There are actually two lodges: the Lodge of Ondessonk, which is for ‘‘boy’’ campers, and the Lodge of Tekakwitha, which is for ‘‘girl’’ campers. I have restricted my remarks, however, to the Lodge of Ondessonk, as I was not privy to the rites of initiation to the Lodge of Tekakwitha.

REFERENCES Deloria, P. J. (1998). Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press. Denzin, N. K. (2003). Redskins and chiefs. In: Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture (pp. 184–212). London: Sage. Francois Roustang, S. J. (2006). The Jesuit missionaries to North America: Spiritual writings and biographical sketches. Fort Collins, CO: Ignatius Press. King, C. R., & Springwood, C. F. (2001). Beyond the cheers: Race as spectacle in college sport. New York: The State University of New York Press.

ARTISTIC PERFORMANCES AND SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH Giuseppe Toscano INTRODUCTION The controversy about performance ethnography and other new modes of sociological reporting in the US tends to be highly partisan and often uninformed. Toscano, one of a handful of symbolic interactionists in Italy, places new modes of reporting, which he calls ‘‘artistic performances,’’ in the proper historical and contextual perspective. He points out that the boundaries between art and everyday life and art and science are changing and can no longer be viewed as dichotomous and it is time to redeﬁne the ﬂuid relation between these different realms. Toscano identiﬁes C. Wright Mills as the ﬁrst sociologist to stress the relationship between the arts and sociology to the point of referring to his work as a ‘‘sociological poem.’’ Not coincidentally Norman Denzin and other supporters of new mode of sociological reporting invoke a return to C. Wright Mills, not only for his poetics of expression but for his quest and passion to help the downtrodden. Toscano analyzes the artistic productions of Goffman, Denzin, and others, focusing on the production of new sociologies that are no longer mere ‘‘texts’’ but become ‘‘performances.’’ He realizes that performance can only partially communicate the emotional struggle of those we study. Yet with its pathos and its passion performance can begin to melt the crystal palace of modernistic meta-theoretical sociology. Andrea Fontana; University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Howard Becker deﬁnes Art World as ‘‘the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for’’ (Becker, 1982, p. x). The implication of the previous deﬁnition is that, in order to be Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 199–206 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31011-4

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identiﬁed as Art, a social practice has to take place in a deﬁnite context and cannot be considered a mere expression of individual creativity. On the contrary it must be inscribed into a frame of speciﬁc models of activity whose absence would make its realization impossible. Nevertheless the development of the most radical expressions of the artistic innovation introduced by Avant-garde movements leads to discuss about the possibility of a unique and clearly deﬁned concept of ‘‘Art World.’’ The work of art becomes a tool used in order to create a new conceptual dimension in opposition to dominant aesthetics, and it often assumes violent and aggressive forms. In particular, starting from the Seventies and the Eighties, artists begin to carry out Performances, Happening, Conceptual Art, Mixed-media Art. All kinds of art and theater, which consist in the exhibition of the artist’s body and in the actions he/she performs. So the artist acts at the borderline of what is explainable and his/ her artistic practices point out the need of overwhelming frontiers between traditional genres, mixing them up or forsaking them (see Dal Lago & Giordano, 2006). When Art does not reproduce reality any more but it creates it, when it rebukes the idea of masterpiece as a manufacture and raises the question to overcome artistic genres, the consequences are the growing ‘‘hybridization’’ of either separate disciplines or separate realities. The boundary between art and everyday life becomes more and more ﬂuid: art becomes a part of everyday life and everyday life presents itself as art form. In interactive representations the curtain between ‘‘stage’’ and ‘‘backstage’’ tends to vanish: audience does not simply attend artistic performances: acting and interacting either with authors or with artifacts, it becomes part of the artistic creation, and during this interaction it symbolically negotiates new meanings which deﬁne every time the sense of the performance in a different way. The dichotomy between art and science, particularly between art and sociological research, starts to be redeﬁned too. The realization of this artistic practices has at the same time the effects of breaking traumatically the given for granted order, as well as to create emotional involvement and innovation. Performances give the chance to develop destruens and costruens mechanisms which are at the base of cognitive processes, they help the removal of conceptual categories which cannot grasp any more a changed reality and make the formulation of new perspectives of observation easier. These introductory considerations induce several reﬂections on relationships between artistic practices and sociological research practices. I am going to refer to a concept of performance in a wide sense which includes

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every artistic practice which gives relevance to the performing dimension of creative acts and which tends to overcome differences among artistic genres, between art and everyday life, between art and those research approaches in which acting and learning are tightly linked.1

FROM THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION BY C. WRIGHT MILLS TO THE DRAMATURGICAL APPROACH BY ERVING GOFFMAN It is not unusual that sociologists show a strong artistic sensibility. This kind of sensibility is revealed by the great number of literary images that they employ in their essays in order to show in an explicit way what analytic dissertations are not able to communicate (Dal Lago, 1994). This mixture of sociological and artistic languages is particularly evident in those works by scholars who belong to the sociological schools aroused at the University of Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century2 and carried on by the new American sociology of the Sixties, and whose more extreme and argued forms have recently been discussed within the development of the so-called Cultural Studies by Norman Denzin and the postmodern turn in symbolic interactionism. Social scientists’ choice to mix their work with Art is quite often limited to the literary style of their works, nevertheless sometime a deeper ‘‘hybridization’’ between sociological and literary imagination is performed. This process is particularly evident when sociologists and artists focus on the same subject. Perhaps it is not just a chance that at the beginning of the ‘900 characters appear in novels and dramas that are not monolithic anymore but complex ﬁgures with contradictory features. At the same time William James, Charles Horton Cooley, George Hebert Mead would develop theories which focused on identity as a result of a social process in which individuals are in touch with ‘‘the other’’ in everyday life or with the wider social structure. While sociological theorists would study the mechanism of identity in the process of role taking of the social actor toward his signiﬁcant others trying to guess their role expectations (Blumer, 1969) novelists and playwrights such as Marcel Proust and Luigi Pirandello would depict characters who become aware to wear ‘‘a hundred thousand’’ masks being at the same time deeply conscious to be only ‘‘one’’ person (Perrotta, 1988). C. Wright Mills is probably the ﬁrst who gives a new conscious reading key of artistic dimensions related to sociology. Mills used to quote Balzac as

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his mentor and he considered his work as if it were a sort of ‘‘sociological poem.’’3 Such passion manifested in his books for concreteness, details, and criticism pulls him to quote novels, ﬁlms, romances, and to develop a writing style which is never used for itself but against the structural–functionalist ‘‘great theorists,’’ who are attacked for their abstract way of exposing theories based on the production of concepts by means of other concepts. This argument in The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959) leads him to an ironical ‘‘translation’’ of Talcott Parsons’ farraginous and abstract language in order to make it clearer. This is the reason why Mills can be considered the anticipator of a methodological turn that took place in the United States in the sixties and seventies: a period when a new attitude of observing social phenomena develops, and sociologists start expressing their interest in the subjectivity of social actors and their concern for subcultures. The idea that a sociologist should be, or should appear, as an element of the context he is going to study, making his descriptions more realistic is expressed among others by Howard S. Becker. Becker has many times expressed the need to mix borderlines between Science and Art. He often quotes some basic texts by Italo Calvino and George Perec for their keen social analysis and in order to explain his way of carrying out qualitative research he refers also to his own experience as jazz pianist, showing analogies between improvised music and social research.4 He assumes that preliminary analytical models should be ﬂexible enough just to show a route to the researcher who is always free to improvise. Doing that, a sociologist becomes similar to a jazzman during a jam session who can improvise and interplay with other musicians always referring to same shared patterns but without being tied to rigidly codiﬁed melodic structures. Theatrical performance in Erving Goffman’s approach becomes a key to analyze everyday interactions. It is known how the Canadian sociologist in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1959) used to subdivide the environment in which social actors perform into stage and backstage: the ﬁrst is the place where people are exposed to the others and have to modify their demeanor in order to be able to face the expectations made up around their personal presentation in public and semipublic places. The second is the place where one can throw away his/her mask but just to play a new private role in a potentially endless regression, because every backstage is just the stage of a hierarchical system of stages and backstages. Artistic performance, speciﬁcally theater, becomes a tool for investigation. In addition the research style by Goffman consists in using different genres and it could be deﬁned postmodern: in his works he uses extract from news, passages from novels, direct observations, scripts, handbooks of etiquette,

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autobiographies; he quotes Mellville, Sartre, Orwell, Kafka, even Peanuts by Schultz. In Asylums (1961), for instance, he gets his data either from his empirical observation or from memorial and narrative literature: White Jacket by Melville and The Mint by Lawrence, describing the experiences of the two authors in the US Navy and in the British Aviation, are used as if they were real empirical data. Here the choice is not only stylistic and descriptive but methodological as well (see Toscano, 2004).

POSTMODERN PERFORMANCES AND CULTURAL STUDIES BY NORMAN DENZIN Symbolic interactionists more inclined to heterodoxy have recently emphasized the use of performances in social research. The adoption of such new techniques shows the need to develop alternative ways of writing and a renewed urge for radical experimentations which, according to Andrea Fontana (2005), are a reaction to unsatisfactory sociological metalanguage. Cryptic style by traditional sociologists deeply reduces the audience’s extension and does not allow to express life and empathetic involvement during the research. This is the reason why many interactionists started performing experimental techniques that Norman Denzin considers to be within the wider context of Cultural Studies. With the expression ‘‘performance’’ these scholars refer to different kinds of artistic forms which vary from poetry to short novels, from conversations to photo reportages and personal narrations, from dramas and etnodramas to played and improvised readings, from personal exhibitions to multimedia visualizations. Among these several forms, autoethnographical performance represents for Norman Denzin one of the most recent and effective developments among interactionist techniques. Applying autoethnography the researcher devotes his/her focus to himself or herself and talks about his own experience interacting with the studied subjects. A good example of autoethnography is offered by Carolyn Ellis who analyzes her brother’s death in a plane crash focusing on her own emotions and giving a narrative version of the event (Ellis, 1995). The idea that all these scholars share is that typical sociological objects of study as cultural and social phenomena are dynamic processes, which cannot be studied in a direct way. The possible thing to do is to catch and analyze their performing representation. Which means that social reality is

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‘‘performance’’ not ‘‘text,’’ thus necessitating a ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ model which is based on performance, and a new deﬁnition of relations between performances and cultural processes, performances and ethnographic techniques, performances and writing practices. A closed written text is opposite to an open improvised performance which in turn has the advantage of being in the middle between live experiences and told stories, driving from character of authenticity and imitation. Denzin, who can be considered as the major promoter of this turning process, states that the dramaturgical approach by Erving Goffman is a way to conceive performance as a mimesis or imitation of reality (Denzin, 2003). Nevertheless nowadays symbolic interactionism has to face a new challenge which requires new deﬁnitions of performance-based research and the dramaturgical approach by Goffman can be considered just as one of the ways to mean ‘‘performance’’ which can also take the shape of poiesis and kinesis.5 While performance as poiesis has to be understood as a creative reconstruction of live experience, performance as kinesis becomes a tool to change social reality. Taking inspiration from African-American theater which is used as a weapon against racism and white privileges (see Du Bois, 1926; Baraka, 1979), Denzin supports a kind of performance which emphasizes praxis actions and underlines the political implications of the researcher’s act, who cannot just observe but has to deeply inﬂuence social reality, causing radical changes (see also Denzin, 2000). It cannot to be denied that traditional research techniques are only partially able to grasp and to communicate to readers the emotional capital acquired during ﬁeld work, but this kind of radical use of performances can raise the objection that this is a questionable invasion of sociologists inside the art world. This is sociology, Fontana (2005) states , as long as behind the ﬁction of novels and dramas there is a reality of human beings and facts. Performance can be an innovative technique when it satisﬁes the need to introduce emotions in a too rational sociology, nevertheless it has to remain just complementary to theoretical reﬂection and it must always be joined to a clarifying explanation.

NOTES 1. In this paper it will not be considered the use of performance in organizational studies whose main references belong to a sociological approach which analyses organizational phenomena focusing and amplifying the aesthetic dimension of organizational action (Strati, 2007).

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2. The analytic style by scholars from University of Chicago was marked by the direct use of empirical materials and by the prevailing of descriptions on interpretations and theorizations and their writing style was deeply inﬂuenced not only by journalism but by literature as well. The ‘‘sociological journalism’’ by Robert Park shared many elements with the ‘‘literary journalism’’ by Jack London. London’s autobiographical book The Road could also be compared to the study by Nels Anderson The Hobo, either for biographical similarities or for the subject: tramps, who were object of study for sociologists from Chicago but also fundamental ﬁgures in American literature and folk music. 3. Mills, 1948. 4. Becker does not only quote with satisfying Everett Huges among his masters beside anthropologist, but the pianist Lennie Tristano as well; moreover, not only is he a jazz pianist and a photographer himself, but he did several performances too: in Art Worlds for example he quotes the Tactile Group, a workshop lead together with Philip Brickman, in which he tried to realize simulations of art sociology (see Becker, 1982, pp. 71–72). 5. ‘‘The interactionist moves from a view of performance as imitation, or dramaturgical staging to an emphasis on performance as liminality and construction to a view of performance as struggle, as an intervention, as breaking and remaking, as kinesis, as a sociopolitical act’’ (Denzin, 2003, pp. 187–188).

REFERENCES Baraka A. [Le Roy Jones] (1979). The Revolutionary Theatre. In Selected plays and prose of AmiriBaraka/Le Roy Jones. New York: William Morrow, pp. 131–136. Becker, H. S. (1982). Art worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Dal Lago, A. (1994). La sociologia come genere di scrittura. Lo scambio tra scienze sociali e letteratura. Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 35(2), 163–187. Dal Lago, A., & Giordano, S. (2006). Mercanti d’aura. Logiche dell’arte contemporanea. Bologna: il Mulino. Denzin, N. K. (2000). Aesthetics and the practices of qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 6, 256–265. Denzin, N. K. (2003). The call to performance. Symbolic Interaction, 26(1), 187–207. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1926). Krigwa players little negro theatre: The story of a little theatre movement. Crisis, 32(July), 134–136. Ellis, C. (1995). Speaking of dying: An ethnographic short story. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 73–81. Fontana, A. (2005). Postmodern turn in interactionism. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 28, 239–254. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life (1956). Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. Essay on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Doubleday. Mills, C. W. (1948). Let us now praise famous men. Politics, 2.

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Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Perrotta, R. (1988). Pensiero sociologico e immagini della realta`. Interazionismo simbolico, Proust e Pirandello, Catania, Edizioni del Prisma. Strati, A. (2007). Frammenti del discorso estetico sull’organizzazione. Sviluppo & Organizzazione, 1. Toscano, G. (2004). Interazione simbolica e Cinema. Se´ riﬂesso e rituali. Formazione e Societa`, 35(1), 135–169.

SPARTAN SUPERHUNKS AND PERSIAN MONSTERS: RESPONDING TO TRUTH AND IDENTITY AS DETERMINED BY HOLLYWOOD Christopher Darius Stonebanks ABSTRACT This article examines the prevalence of Hollywood blockbuster ﬁlms, speciﬁcally 300, as popular ethnographies that contribute greatly to North American society’s perspectives on ‘‘truth.’’ Within this article it is argued that ﬁlms like 300 have become signiﬁcant forms of pedagogical persuasion in North America and have contributed greatly to the discrimination and miseducation regarding people of the Middle-East. The overt dehumanization and viliﬁcation of ancient Persia in 300 and the movie’s not so subtle comparisons to current political contexts are considered in regard to not only the West’s view of the Other, but the sense of Self of those of Middle-Eastern origin. This paper speaks of the failings of qualitative methodologies and studies in responding to and promoting multicultural and ‘‘just society’’ concepts in North America and notes that in comparison to the mediums we use in our classrooms to counter its production of the ‘‘true’’ master narrative everything else has fallen short. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 31, 207–221 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31012-6

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Most Americans remember only angry Iranians chanting anti-American slogans in the streets of Tehran, a crazed Ayatollah preaching martyrdom and hostages torn away from their families. (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997, p. 242)

I have known my wife since we were teenagers in high school. She is White, comes from a Protestant, upper-middle class background, is a lecturer of Education at a prominent university and a fantastic teacher. We have been married for 13 years and have three kind and gentle children together. To this day, if you ask her to close her eyes and tell you what plays out in her mind if you say the word ‘‘Iran,’’ she will say something akin to, ‘‘angry, chanting, violent men in a threatening mob.’’ I am a Professor of Education of half Iranian descent and grew up in Canada. We have known each other for the majority of our lives, yet the ﬁrst image she thinks of, is not me, or her mother-in-law, or her children, but, in great part, Kincheloe and Steinberg’s (1997) description of the ‘‘dominant memory’’ of most North Americans of Iran. Now, you may secretly wonder if images of Iran are warranted based on personal experience. For instance, when my wife asks if I put gas in her car, do I respond with a threat to take her children away to Iran so that she may never see them again? Or, if she asks her children to clean up after their toys, do they threaten to take hostages? Or, if she asks my mother to share her recipe for ash-e reshteh, does her motherin-law respond, ‘‘Death to America!?’’ Perhaps, surprisingly to some, this is not the case. This is an activity I like to do with undergraduate students and ask them not to share their vision, because I would rather they be reﬂective about what they are bringing into their future classrooms instead of giving an answer they feel should mirror a somewhat superﬁcial sensitivity based on the limited exposure they receive in formal multiculturalism courses. Despite asking them not to share, most, to their credit do share and their images and sounds usually contain similar stereotypes. I usually do this before I ask them to watch Majidi (1999) Children of Heaven and ask, if they want to forward, what they imagine this Iranian ﬁlm is about. Answers of martyrdom and suicide bombing usually ensue. (You will have to watch the ﬁlm to see if their predictions are right.) What elicits such negative responses for Iran and the Middle-East is, and has been for quite some time, the prevalent narrative of Western Europe/North America. Could it have been the turbaned, pointy shoed, swarthy skinned scimitar waving evildoers while reading Lewis’ ‘‘Chronicles of Narnia’’ in elementary school? Did you miss that? Was it the dark-skinned monsters and the brown skinned men of the East that are set against destroying humanity in Jackson’s ‘‘The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’’ (c2003) and ‘‘Return of

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the King’’ (c2004) inspired by Tolkien’s work? Did you perhaps not get the subtle nuances of these ﬁlms either? If any of those examples, amongst the many (Shaheen, c1984, 1991, 2001), did not trigger a harmful image and stories of the ‘‘Orient’’ (Said, c1985) in your mind, not to worry, ‘‘300’’ (Snyder, 2007), proudly based on and true to Frank Miller’s graphic novel (Miller, c1998) of the same name, will clarify all. This is a piece of work that makes no attempt to cover bigotry in possible, however improbable, differing ‘‘artistic’’ perspectives or interpretations of the ‘‘heroic’’ tale. 300 is a product that clearly states for that minority of North American viewers and readers who may have not understood the prior lessons of a century of Hollywood ﬁlm: People of the East are evil; people of the East are monsters. Literally, evil monsters. In this context, Cooley’s (1927) example with regard to looking glass self between Alice and Angela and how she looks in her hat takes on a different meaning as we consider how a modern day ‘‘Mansour’’ or ‘‘Ali’’ negotiates a sense of self with his non Middle-Eastern descent North American peers. In the 300 context, nothing is left to second guessing in regard to self and others and amazingly it is being perceived as ‘‘truth.’’ But it is also true to histories preserved by Herodotus and other ancients, a story of free men, fortiﬁed by discipline and fear of shame, determined to die free rather than live as slaves, a story of men who said, ‘‘No.’’ (y) They reminded me that those who said no to Xerxes were the ancestors of those who said no to Mussolini and Hitler at the outset of World War II. (Kass, 2007)

Common in reviews of 300 is the fairly straightforward comparison to Xerxes as a Mussolini or Hitler. Contrast the ‘‘Xerces as Hitler’’ truth with knowledge that may be a part of a young Iranian’s accounting of this historic ﬁgure. For example, this young person may be taught that Xerxes was the grandson of Cyrus; Cyrus the Great who when in a position of great power to actually elicit change, gave to the world the ﬁrst written laws on universal human rights. Or that Xerxes was a faithful Zoroastrian whose religion taught respect for others. Or perhaps that Xerxes married a Jewish queen Esther and used his strength to protect his wife’s people within his empire. Do these interpretations of the Persian king connect in any way to the now widespread 300 portrayal of Xerxes as a monstrous creature of the East that is placed in purposeful contrast to the surprisingly humane and sensitive Spartan king Leonidas of the West? How does this ‘‘truth’’ of ‘‘Xerxes as Hitler,’’ Persians/Iranians as monsters become part of the Western collective narrative? Carlos Cortes described the steady indoctrination of North American society to this kind of racism through ﬁlm as a ‘‘drip torture,’’ a nonstop ‘‘drip, drip, drip’’

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(Stephenson, 2005) process. However, it must be noted that Miller’s 300 does not drip. Its method resounds more like a ‘‘bang, Bang, BANG!’’ and apparently our North American society is lapping it up. In its ﬁrst weekend the ﬁlm 300 took in over 70 million dollars in ticket sales and leaves me wondering how to explain its popularity and acceptable overt racism. In many ways, this paper speaks of the failings of qualitative methodologies and studies in responding to and promoting multicultural and ‘‘just society’’ concepts in North America. Without falling into the debate of what constitutes the ‘‘mixed forest’’ of qualitative research (Lancy, c1993), within this paper the focus will be on the one ethnographic medium, with its intention to describe social phenomenon, that contributes the most to the narratives and voice that deﬁnes the ‘‘truth’’ about cultures, both internal and external, in North American society; ‘‘the Hollywood blockbuster movie.’’ This variety of popular culture is one of the most powerful forms of pedagogical persuasion in North America and has contributed greatly to the negative perceptions of people of the Middle-East (Steinberg, 2004). Whereas in many papers, deﬁnitions of what possible meaning can come from keywords within the text, the Hollywood blockbuster movie does not need explanation in the North American context; this in itself demonstrates its wide inﬂuence and immediate comprehension. In comparison to the texts and other qualitative methodology mediums we use in our teacher education classes to counter its production of the true master narrative of, amongst other things, ethnicity and religion, everything else falls short. Films like 300 are the medium for people to develop, and reinforce mainstream attitudes about race, ethnicity, history, and religion through the popular ethnographic lens. I do not use the term ethnography to suggest that all ﬁlmmakers go through the same self and external consideration academics go through. However, popular media vehicles, like ﬁlm or television, that relay some way a conviction that they explain human behavior, or, in some cases, the belief of revealing who people are have often been used as ethnographic examples. Whereas Denzin (1991) noted that ‘‘Do the Right Thing is an ethnography of lived experiences y’’ (p. 126), many students that I have shown Children of Heaven to, when asked if they have ever seen a ﬁlm about Iran, say that they have seen the ﬁlm version of Not Without my Daughter (1991, c2001) in either a social studies, anthropology or sociology class as some sort of teachable and/or informative source. The narrative of such ﬁlms resonates strongly in the West, so much so that even prior to the release of the ﬁlm, I vividly recall my teacher, in the late 1980s, using a Betty Mahmoody (not her birth surname) like narrative, either by

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name or by ‘‘story’’ to describe the problematic nature of women marrying someone from the Middle-East. At the time only the book Not Without my Daughter (1987) and the marketing of the story were available, but these types of stories, derived from and supported by various mass-media sources, of the wild-eyed, misogynistic, violent middle-eastern man reach larger audiences through the seductive lens of ﬁlm. Although not to suggest that Mahmoody’s narrative be denied, it should be noted that her account through Hollywood, intentionally or not, has become a well-accepted lesson on race, ethnicity, history, and religion. The story, and the well-received ﬁlm, nurtures many of the stereotypes the West holds to the East. I want to use the voyeur’s cinematic text as a backdrop for reading current (and historical) interpretive practices in the social studies, especially the practices of ethnography and cultural studies. (Denzin, 1995, p. 9)

Connecting Hollywood movies to North America’s narrative, their ‘‘knowing’’ of culture and methodologies is, as is evident by Denzin’s extensive working, nothing new. Neither is connecting the informal, and often more effective, education our society receives from ﬁlm (Steinberg, 2004, p. 173). However, this is an area that has not been widely studied, or perhaps I should say has not been properly supported in academia. Much more research is needed to uncover how the development of the master narratives (Lyotard, c1984) and dominant memories (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997) that derive from popular movies inﬂuence North American understandings about the ‘‘truths’’ of representation for some minoritized groups, like people of the Middle-East and of Middle-Eastern decent. This is a group that, despite the contributions and citations of Edward Said, still have not had an inﬂuence in controlling their own ‘‘voices’’ in any qualitative medium, either academic (Akhavan, Bashi, Kia, & Shakhsari, 2007; Stanley, 2007) or popular (Shaheen, c1984, 1999, 2001). Documentary ﬁlmmaker, Kar (2007), describes the impact of 300 by stating, ‘‘What is so distressing about this movie is the realization of the tremendous power Hollywood wields in determining a people’s identity. It is the same nightmare Native Americans endured during the whole ‘cowboy-movie’ genre.’’ In many ways, this paper is a challenge to my colleagues in the ﬁeld of Education who utilize qualitative sources to assist in the development of the accountable, reﬂective, and professional future teachers in regard to perceptions of ethnicity and religion. In my three and a half decades of attending schools, two decades of working in schools and one decade of preparing students to work as teachers in schools, I have not come across

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any ‘‘scholarly’’ piece of qualitative research that has moved an educator to deﬁne (or redeﬁne) their notions of the familiar or the ‘‘Other’’ (Said, c1985) as much as ﬁlm. Hollywood does not represent ethnics and minorities; it creates them and provides its audience with an experience of them. It evokes them, as the postmodern ethnographer Stephen Tyler might say. Rather than an investigation of mimetic relationships, then, what a critical reading of Hollywood’s ethnographic discourse (a meta-ethnography) requires is the analysis of the historical-political construction of self other relationsy (Lopez, 1991, p. 405)

As Lopez discusses, my intention is not to state that the Hollywood ﬁlm is, although in some cases it has been, a collaborative enterprise between the observer and the observed. Rather, in great part, from a Middle-Eastern perspective, the Hollywood ﬁlm could easily fall into the category of the many social and humanistic sciences, with their ‘‘objectivity’’ and ‘‘scientiﬁc impartiality,’’ that were utilized to cover their ‘‘deep seated’’ prejudices about Islam, Muslims, and Middle-Eastern people (Said, c1998). In the same manner that the cinematic lens has painted a picture of the MiddleEast in a false manner, so have the qualitative sciences. Said ﬁrmly asserts that since the eras of European (and North American) colonialism and Imperialism, when tensions grew between the West and their Islam, ‘‘(i)n such a context both science and direct violence end up by being forms of aggression against Islam’’ (c1998). Qualitative science is not exempt from the same ‘‘y historical-political construction of self other relations y’’ (Lopez, 1991, p. 405) that the Hollywood lens employs. From a Middle-Eastern perspective, to ask the question that Lopez forwards, ‘‘(w)hat does it mean to say that Hollywood has served as an ethnographer of American culture?’’ (p. 404), we would ﬁrst have to agree that qualitative methodologies, like ethnography within academic settings, have indeed had a history of, at the very least, fairness, worth to those being studied, and accountability to perspective. Never mind the lofty goals of ‘‘objectivity,’’ ‘‘truth,’’ and ‘‘scientiﬁc impartiality’’ that Said notes have rarely been met. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. (Said, c1985, p. 10)

A victim of viliﬁcation through the media himself (Media Matters, 2005), Kar echoes Said’s stance of subjectivity of the researcher by noting the New York Times’ Science writer’s assessment of the ‘‘Persian Wars’’ in a

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piece regarding the archeological investigation of the ﬂeets used during that ancient era. y artifacts and material remains have emerged to shed light on how the ancient Greeks defeated the Asian Invaders and saved Europe in what scholars call one of the ﬁrst great victories of freedom over tyranny. (y) The victorious Greeks y saw the series of battles as a deﬁning moment: the defeat of ruthless state that had enslaved much of the known world y (Broad, 2004, p. F1)

It is difﬁcult to make the case that Broad’s choice of describing the Persians is anything else but negative and his sweeping statement of ‘‘scholars’’ agreeing with his assessment leaves the majority of his readers with little choice but to assume this is ‘‘truth.’’ Although I have never read the book, it seems somewhat sadly humorous to me that Broad is also the coauthor of a book, titled, Betrayers of the Truth (Broad & Nicholas, 1983), but I digress. Broad’s scientiﬁc assessment of history begins with the contextual premise of ‘‘good versus evil,’’ can we expect that his ﬁndings are not made bias by this presupposition? History is no longer written by the victors, it is written by ﬁlmmakers. Most minority groups in America have come to realize this fact and are quick to bankroll ﬁlms that communicate their stories to the rest of the world. Perhaps the movie ‘300’ was a necessary wake-up call for the Iranian/Persian community to support responsible ﬁlmmakers, who report history with honesty and integrity. (Kar, 2007)

Whereas, to some degree, academia may have come to the postmodern realization that ‘‘y all knowledge is socially constructed. Writing is not simply a ‘‘true’’ representation of an objective ‘‘reality’’; instead, language creates a particular view of reality’’ (Richardson, 1995, p. 199), I would argue that the mainstream consumers of media do not necessarily hold the same considerations. This is not to say that moviegoers are completely passive viewers, not capable of critical assessment. It is a stretch, but in some ways, it could be argued that there could be a Freirian reciprocal dialog between the Hollywood blockbuster and the viewer where ‘‘there are only people who are attempting together, to learn more than they now know’’ (Freire, c2005, p. 90); the ﬁlm industry has learned in the past that its stereotypes were not acceptable and made changes. Although, the argument could also be made that changes made from the Hollywood industry may not necessarily be a change of consciousness, rather a change elicited from economic fear. So, given the popularity of movies, like 300, that viliﬁes and demonizes people of the Middle-East, the reciprocal economic conversation is that this is an acceptable ‘‘truth.’’ Sadly, in regard to the production and

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perception of the ‘‘Orient,’’ more often viewers are learning more from ﬁlms than the reverse. y Orientalism should not be the only tool we should be using while explaining how the West sees the East. But as for the movie ‘‘300,’’ it seems to be a perfect ﬁt. (Akyol, 2007)

300 drips with examples of the bigotry Said has been speaking out about for the past three decades. Moreover, despite the use of Said’s deﬁning of the ‘‘Other’’ in so much Middle-Eastern and non-Middle-Eastern postcolonial and decolonizing discourse, racist portrayal of people of the ‘‘Orient’’ can still unabashedly be touted as justiﬁable and deserved. A quick and informal search for newspapers’ online reviews demonstrates a considerable number of negative critiques for the ﬁlm, but if you type in keywords like, ‘‘racism,’’ ‘‘racist,’’ or ‘‘xenophobic,’’ the number of mainstream reviews drop considerably. Yes, there are still many negative reviews, but imagine the viliﬁed, dehumanized targets of this ﬁlm were called anything else but Persian, (read Iranian), would protests be so passive? It would seem that few ﬁlm critics want to consider that in the past 30 years of ﬁlm, the majority of Middle-Eastern characters on ﬁlm have been designed for death. Whether it is the Chuck Norris, Indiana Jones, or the Spartan hero; Muslims, MiddleEasterners, or the generalized image of the ‘‘Oriental’’ must be the counterpart villain that, ultimately, must die. 300 does not stand alone amongst negative portrayals of the Middle-East in ﬁlm, (Shaheen’s work demonstrates that), but it does signal a new development in the portrayal of the Middle-East that dehumanizes at a completely different level. Within this paper, I will not argue the many historical inaccuracies of this ﬁlm, which there are many. For that argument I suggest reading Dr. Kaveh Farrokh’s (2007), ‘‘The 300 Movie: Separating Fact from Fiction’’1 and Professor Ephraim Lytle’s, ‘‘Sparta? No. This is madness’’2 analysis. Rather, I will focus on the purposeful elements in the ﬁlm that dehumanize for ideological purposes. I write ‘‘purposeful’’ because there is an element to the process of 300, the ‘‘bluescreen’’ computergenerated process that is more ‘‘controllable’’ than classic ﬁlming. ‘‘y no matter how we stage the text, we – the authors – are doing the staging. As we speak about people we study, we also speak for them. As we inscribe their lives, we bestow upon them meaning and promulgate values.’’ (Richardson, 1992, p. 131)

Despite some critics that claim, ‘‘ythe movie’s just too darned silly to withstand any ideological theorizing’’ (Seymour, 2007), they are not giving enough credit to the artistic and textual process of the creators. Nothing, not

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a computer-generated bird in the background sky, not a costume designers’ choice for Xerxes costume, not a single line that is spoken by an actor, not a single piece of theatrical makeup meant to distort the actor’s face is carried out by anything else but a human hand and mind. There is purpose behind all of these actions and should be analyzed as such. Absent from the analysis is the author, Frank Miller’s, own ideologies. In NPR’s (National Public Radio) ‘‘This I Believe’’ series, Miller was very clear about his ideas of an ‘‘existential menace’’ faced by the West: Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbors were ruthlessly incinerated – reduced to ash. Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys. Imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbors. In my city. In my country. Breathing in that awful, chalky crap that ﬁlled up the lungs of every New Yorker, then coughing it right out, not knowing what I was coughing up. For the ﬁrst time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years. (Miller, 2006)

Continuing to deﬁne the ‘‘existential foe’’ on another NPR show, this time being interviewed by Neal Conan (2007), Miller sees predominant education philosophies of being a source for the possible collapse of his (US) ‘‘empire’’ of ‘‘mighty culture’’; ‘‘Well, I think part of it is y that is the way people, likey the way we’re educated. We’re constantly told all cultures are equal, and every belief system is as good as the next.’’ Clearly, Miller believes that America’s enemies are inferior compared to his culture. Miller: Well, okay, then let’s ﬁnally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built. (Conan, 2007)

Certainly, Miller’s abhorrence to genital mutilation and beheadings are understandable, however, it has to be noted that he tackles the many negatives of his heroic Sparta in a completely different manner: infanticide practices in Sparta are portrayed as a noble practice, historical facts, such as Sparta’s reliance on slavery are omitted. An open supporter of the propaganda medium, Miller discusses his upcoming ‘‘Holy Terror Batman!’’ stating, ‘‘It is, not to put too ﬁne a point on it, a piece of propagandaBatman kicks al-Qa’eda’s ass’’ (Mount, 2006). The endorsement for propaganda, mixing comic art and ﬁlm with ideology, leads Miller to

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connect anything from that ‘‘other worldly East’’ (Stonebanks, 2004) as part of his existential war between ‘‘good and evil.’’ Iraq, Iran anything becomes part of that group of villains that brought down the Twin Towers. For Miller, anything remotely similar, to those people who could not produce a microphone become part of their ‘‘Middle-East,’’ part of terrorism. Frank Miller: Mostly I hear people say, ‘Well, why did we attack Iraq?’ for instance. Well, we’re taking on an idea. Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we’re doing the same thing now. NPR: Well, they did declare war on us, buty FM: Yeah, but, what I mean is y (laughs) Well, so did Iraq! (Conan, 2007)

300 is propaganda. There are obvious connections to the ﬁlm and US involvement in the Middle-East; in this ﬁlm the Spartans yell out ‘‘AaaahOooooh!,’’ in their ﬁlms Marines yell out ‘‘HoooAhhhhh.’’ ‘‘It probably comes as no surprise that Marines would like the ﬁlm.’’ Perry and Welkos (2007) write in their American Press review. Given the opinions voiced by Miller in regard to thoughts and propaganda, I can not help but make the comparison between his actions and, reputedly, Leo Strauss’ ideology and a movie that shares similar hallmarks to 300, Strauss’ favorite ﬁlm, Zulu (c1964). Straussians adore their teachers. They talk about them the way young girls talk about horses and boy bands, but they listen to them. They tell stories about what movies their teacher liked – Strauss’s favorite was said to be Zulu – and other trivialities. (Norton, 2004, p. 28)

For anyone who has seen the ﬁlm Zulu with a critical perspective to colonialism and imperialism, it is not a triviality that Strauss liked this ﬁlm; it is a perfect match between an ideology and their ethnographic representation of an event. In Zulu, the enemies of the British Empire died in countless, faceless droves. The emotion to be elicited in the ﬁlm is of the sympathy for the British soldiers. Miller ignores the historical context of the so called ‘‘Persian Wars,’’ as he is more interested in making a point in advocacy of saving his empire. The Spartans represent the victimized West, the noble, the ultimately powerful yet restrained by the very academics they protect, the free, the strong yet sensitive, the rational, the White. Persians, on the other hand, as the movie likes to repeat, represent ‘‘mysticism and tyranny,’’ the oppressive East, they are irrational, slavers, child killers, cowards, effeminized yet misogynistic, monsters, the Black, Yellow, and Brown.

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Of note is the use of Black and Asian actors (in the popular North American ethnic deﬁnition) to portray Persians (who are, of course, from Asia). I have read some criticism of the use of these Orientalist images of Persia; but, quite honestly, it is not Iranians that should be concerned by this. We Iranians should be ﬂattered with the imagery that our ancient civilization encompassed so many ethnicities, beliefs, and cultures. Although, within the scope of this paper, it is not possible to go into the use of Black and Asian actors as a cinematic choice in 300, it should be considered why these actors were included. Was it to drive the point home that this is a movie about the White West versus everybody else? Was it because the ﬁlm’s directors, co-writers and Miller felt that adding this extra ethnic dimension would play upon old cinematic stereotypes that are still present (in that case I wonder why they did not try to bring in Queen Esther into the parade of stereotypes). Or, when we see the Black/Persian general being beheaded by a Persian-creature with sword-axes for arms in front of Xerxes, what is the message? Is it a warning to America’s Black population to choose their sides carefully? And the attention given to the Spartan warrior ‘‘bodies as spectacle’’ makes this point clear at least, the choice of whose bodies are presented as ‘‘villain’’ are anything but coincidence. If nothing else, the choice of an Asian, Brown, Black body to represent the enemy, as juxtaposed against the White militarized rows of muscled warriors is another part of the short-hand vocabulary and storytelling technique. None of these choices, when money is to be made, are made lightly. They make their choices based on the acceptance of their product to their market and the low opinions their target audience have on minorities in North America. This has been the history of cinema in North America (Canada and the US). D. W. Grifﬁth’s classic Birth of a Nation (1915) demonstrated the low opinion of blacks held by many whites in the World War 1 era. (y) Birth of a Nation does not just reﬂect the vision of D. W. Grifﬁth, who grew up in the south, or of Thomas Dixon, on whose novel, The Clansman, it was based. The movie also tells us much about the way whites viewed blacks during the period y(Toplin, 1993, p. xi)

Miller’s images are accepted images, his texts are accepted texts, his truths are accepted truths, and his bigotry is accepted bigotry. Persians as monsters are truths in North America and backed up by an academic community that is complacent in this projection of the Middle-East and is, in great part, supportive of popular narratives that serve to dehumanize (Stonebanks, 2008). Akhavan et al. (2007) take the widely promoted and fashionable memoir books that depict the ‘‘Third-world woman’’ awaiting salvation

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from her Western male counterpart, in some kind of North American military ‘‘rescue fantasy’’ as a ‘‘genre in the service of empire.’’ In a time of pending war against Iran y a particularly lucrative industry of Iranian and Muslim women’s memoirs has mushroomed in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities. These women’s memoirs have assumed center-stage in appropriating the legitimate cause of women’s rights and placing it squarely in the service of Empire building projects, disguised under the rhetoric of the ‘‘war on terror.’’ (Akhavan et al., 2007)

They note the production of the ‘‘victimized’’ Middle-Eastern woman and the ‘‘misogynistic Middle-Eastern man’’ are a part of the accepted norms perpetuated by, amongst others, the ‘‘industries of knowledge production.’’ 300 receives acceptance, in great part, due to the many industries of knowledge production that validate its message and portrayal. In this atmosphere, the salvation of the Middle-East can be justiﬁed through military force; movies like 300 teach this lesson. Movies like 300 teach ‘‘truths’’ against the lessons of cultural equality that Miller feels threatens his West. Imagine, as I often ask my undergraduate students to do, would these depictions be acceptable if we replaced them with any other cultures? Often, the answer is ‘‘no’’ and sometimes, sadly, the answer is still, ‘‘yes.’’ If, despite the ‘‘R’’ rating, 300 is, as CNN anchor Costello remarks, ‘‘y a movie meant to attract 14-year-old boys’’ (CNN, 2007) imagine what a ﬁlm like this means to a young Iranian, Middle-Eastern or ‘‘Other.’’ What does he think of himself when he watches this ﬁlm? Imagine again, given the popularity of the ﬁlm, what target audience it is positively appealing to? I’ve seen pictures and videos of Miller and he’s no super-Euro-White-hunkSpartan of his imagination. It’s been said that ﬁlm directors hire leading actors as an extension of who they want to be (consider Tim Burton and Johnny Depp) and it begs the comparison to Miller and his leading men (both in comic book and ﬁlm). Are these Spartan characters his fantasy of self and am I supposed to see a reﬂection of myself in his monsters of Persia/ Iran? Cyrus, Xerxes, Darius, and more are important ﬁgures in Iranian history. Contrary to Miller’s interpretation of Herodotus, or Herodotus’ interpretation for that matter, they are not remembered as ‘‘super villains.’’ My middle name is Darius. Contrary to the popular narrative of North America, as the youngest of three in my family with my European father not allowing his ﬁrst two children to have Persian names, my mother, in a small act of marital resistance, gave me that name to make her own ailing father happy. In fact, as far as my Aghajoon (grandfather) was concerned, he

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thought my name was Darius. With the knowledge that my children’s Iranian heritage would be ‘‘thinner’’ than my own, my wife, Melanie, supported giving our children Persian/Iranian/Middle-Eastern names so that they would remember and be proud of their heritage. Farah-Roxanne was ﬁrst, Cyrus Darian was second, and if our third child was a boy, we were to name him Xerxes. As fate would have it, the baby was a girl and was given the name, Yasmina Soraya. Imagine the images of self that the baby would have had to live with had it been a boy. On the surface, these kinds of movies, or even the similar comic books and television shows should be and should have been dismissed as a production of purposeful racism and propaganda. However, their continued success demands a serious investigation into the current and continued acceptance of racism, the production of these false ‘‘truths’’ and the failing of our multicultural education and the methodologies it depends on to bring awareness to their implications. This is our challenge.

NOTES 1. http://www.ghandchi.com/iranscope/Anthology/KavehFarrokh/300/index.htm 2. http://www.thestar.com/article/190493

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