Answer the pair of questions in each essay set in 4-6 pages total. Use your personal experiences or observations as the basis of each essay; avoid events or experiences that happened to someone else or are in the news unless these have a direct connection to your life. Cite the readings (author's name and page number) to support your sociological claims. The essays will be graded on the originality and insight of your analysis, and the accuracy and depth with which they integrate course ideas.
The essays are due at the beginning of class for each due date. E-mail me your essays by pasting the text of your essays into the body of an e-mail and by attaching the computer file of your essays to the e-mail.
1. Explain a social problem that has touched you somehow through the lens of Durkheim's idea of anomie. Which group(s) does this problem affect most? What is the social cause (not to be confused with the historic orgins) of this problem? What does it reveal about the changing structure of society today. What could be done to ease or resolve this social problem?
2. How much did social class shape your childhood upbringing? (Be sure to identify your class.) Did your daily schedule, use of language, and interactions with professionals and bureaucracies reflect the class patterns described by Annette Lareau? At this stage in your life, to what degree do you believe the way you were raised has set you on the path toward reproducing your parents' socioeconomic status?
1. Max Weber writes, "In content, status honor is normally expressed by the fact that above all else a specific style of life is expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle" (pg. 156). Describe a status group and its characteristic lifestyle that you (or your family) belonged to prior to coming to college. How did the mechanisms of status hierarchy operate: a sense of collective membership and collective honor, restriction on social intercourse, monopolization of material goods and opportunities, and so on? If money was somehow involved in the maintenace of its lifestyle, how did the status group hinder "the free development of the market" (pg. 160) by opposing "the pretensions of sheer property" (pg. 156)?
2. Analyze a relationship, organization, or other social context that you recently joined. Who was the social self that you are in this setting? How was it different than your social self elsewhere? To what extent did you carefully manage impressions of yourself to other people in this setting? Conversely, to what extent did others' impressions of you emerge out of a collective definition of the situation that was out of your control? What was the outcome of these interpretations: an identity, shared ethics, a specialized skill or knowledge, etc.? (This essay will work best if you can discuss a very concrete sequence of interactions in some detail.)
1. Discuss how an abstract social category or process has concretely affected your life. Following Simmel's theory of the stranger, how has this abstraction facilitated your incorporation into a larger "group," perhaps offering a degree of freedom or mobility, while also distancing you from the group's shared outlooks and rewards?
2. Analyze a common value, belief, perspective, law, or concern that has influenced your life through Marx's concept of ideology. Does it promote a material interest of the ruling class? Does it obscure their power over society? (Who is the ruling class today, anyway?) How does your analysis suggest for Marx's dictum that the "ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas"?