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Up to higher level directory SOC 55 Introduction to Sociology Overview This is not your ordinary "SOC 101" course. We have no big, fat, expensive textbook. We won't recite the history of the field. We won't try to cram in a guided tour through every topic and subfield. We won't follow the litany of "there are three branches of sociology...." Instead, we will read some interesting sociology and focus on thinking and seeing sociologically and providing you with enough of a map of the territory of sociology that you will be ready for further explorations after this course. This course has two overarching goals. One is to introduce students to the field of sociology -- what sorts of things do we study and how do we do it. What kinds of courses can you take after this one? What kinds of things will you learn if you decide to pursue further studies in the field? The other is to introduce the student to some of the fruits of such labors, to teach her something about society. Some of what passes as sociological knowledge could be gathered under the heading "facts and findings" and we will cover our fair share of these. Much of what you'll encounter here, though -- and hopefully the bulk of what you will take away from the course -- is better called a perspective, a lens, an eye, a temperment. Here's a short version of this. It is customary to divide the world into two parts. One part is the objective world out there that just is (created by a god, evolved by history, what have you) which just is the way it is. These things are natural, they don't have an author, they cannot be changed. The other part of the world is subjective, the part that each of us is free to construct as we please. Everyone is entitled to her own opinion, as they say, can make up her own poetry, have her own dreams. This is the world every high school sophomore knows: some things are objective, others "merely" subjective. Sociology throws a wrench into both sides. We suggest that much of what is taken to be natural and objective is, in fact, the product of human activity and only appears as "objective" and "natural" because so many of us take it to be so. And we suggest that a good deal of what we take to be personal, arbitrary, and free is, constrained, guided, or even coerced, a consequence of our membership in various groups. To see these things, the discipline teaches us to look for patterns. We seek variation across time and social space to show that things are social rather than natural and we seek similarity across time, social space, and persons to show that things are social rather than personal. What is the "what" of sociology? What is our object? The short answer is a big one: everything from identity and the self in face-to-face interaction to the long term relationships among nation-states over centuries has come under the scrutiny of sociologists. We look at families, careers, workplaces, neighborhoods, communities, cities, regions. Sociologists have studied war, religion, suicide, art, business, crime, food, education, marriage, old-age, language, space, time, drinking and drugs, health and illness, sport, and on and on. We see the world stretched out along dimensions of race, class, gender, status, ethnicity, occupation, geography. |