The Journey of Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak

This chapter tells the story of peasants from rural Poland who entered a migrant stream around the turn of the twentieth century that carried them, along with tens of millions of others, across a number of clearly marked national borderlines as well as a number of unmarked cultural ones. The peasants were a couple named Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak, and the words spoken by them as well as the events recalled here are based on the hundreds of letters and diaries gathered in the 1910s by two sociologists from the University of Chicago, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The chapter first describes the world into which Piotr and Kasia were born, focusing on family, village, and land. It then considers their journey, together with millions of other immigrants, and how they changed both the face of Europe and the face of the United States.

Disaster at Buffalo Creek

This chapter focuses on the Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia that occurred on February 26, 1972. Almost everyone along Buffalo Creek depended on coal mining for a living. The creek is formed by three narrow forks meeting at the top of the hollow. The middle of these forks, known as Middle Fork, had been for many years the site of an enormous bank of mine waste. The waste was there because it solved two important disposal problems for the Buffalo Mining Company. This chapter describes the events that led to the Buffalo Creek disaster and its aftermath. It also considers the individual and collective trauma caused by the flood. Finally, it presents the story of a survivor named “Wilbur.”

Becoming a Person

This chapter examines the process of socialization, of becoming a person—the way we become aware of the social world we are a part of and learn to participate in it. It first considers the lessons of early childhood and how a child learns a particular language before discussing George Herbert Mead's views on childhood learning. It then analyzes the processes that occur when people are removed from the larger social order and confined to total institutions and “becoming a person once again,” also known as “secondary socialization” or “resocialization.” It suggests that, whether one is speaking of “becoming a person” in the early years or repeating some part of that process later, members of a society live by an informal grammar.

Becoming a People

This chapter focuses on pseudospeciation, the process by which we come to view other persons who we know to be fellow human beings as if they were so unlike us in form or thought or spirit that they can be treated as though they are of a different order of being altogether. The chapter starts by considering the origins of war and fighting from a sociological perspective, with particular emphasis on feelings of difference and otherness—even of hostility and antipathy—that lie at the heart of what is generally meant by nationalism. It then examines how the process of becoming a people is linked to the idea of nations before explaining the concept of social speciation and how it differs from genetic speciation. It concludes by proposing a few minor changes to the notion of pseudospeciation, offering it as a contribution to sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.

Creating Divisions

This chapter focuses on “stratification” or “differentiation,” the process by which every society finds ways to divide itself into a vast tracery of classes, ranks, orders, estates, stations, and so on. History is testament to the ways in which we have learned to locate ourselves in a whole latticework of classes, estates, orders, and other differentials. These distinctions are of two quite different but overlapping kinds. The first is stratification, the way human beings arrange themselves into hierarchies and gradations based on rank. The second is differentiation, which has to do with the way human beings sort themselves into other divisions based on gender, occupation, lifestyle, race, and the like.

Coming to Terms with Social Life

This chapter examines how three masters of the sociological tradition—Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber—came to terms with social life. Two major themes run throughout Marx's work: the first has to do with the effects of the class struggle on the human spirit; the second has to do with the effects of class struggle on human thought and human institutions, a topic he dealt with under the general headings of class consciousness and ideology. The chapter also considers Durkheim's views on the nature of the social order and on the nature of sociology, and more specifically on questions such as those relating to division of labor, suicide, and religious life. Finally, it discusses Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as well as his thoughts on topics ranging from the nature of sociology to forms of political authority.

Discovering the Social

This chapter investigates the ways in which European thinkers came to recognize the importance of “the social.” It first considers the cultural temper of the medieval mind in more or less the same way that an anthropologist might study the ethos of a distant people in our own time. It then examines the onset of the Age of Reason, characterized by a revolution in both science and thought, that formed the foundation of a new way to comprehend not only the physical but the human social world. It shows that the Age of Reason spawned a vision of social life that came to dominate European thinking for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is still a prominent part of the intellectual climate in which we live now. Among the key figures in the development of that vision were Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Knowing the Place for the First Time

This chapter considers a third approach to the sociological perspective, which has to do with viewing a wholly familiar social reality in the way a newcomer, a stranger, might. It may be assumed that sociologists know more about the lay of their land than most others do. After all, they spend a significant amount of time investigating various corners of the social world, and to that extent they can be thought of as seasoned, knowing, and experienced about human life. At the same time, however, sociologists can be viewed as strangers to the lands they study, for it is one of their tasks to look at the social world almost as if they were seeing it for the first time. The chapter explains how sociologists may be newcomers to the locations they study and discusses the ways that they deal with deviant behavior.

The Individual and the Social

This chapter considers a second approach to the sociological perspective, which has to do with the effort to make clear that the social scene and the individual persons who compose it can be viewed as quite different entities. Sociologists know how to approach their subject matter as an assembly of parts. At the same time, they are cognizant of the fact that the social world, in essence, is a continuous field of force—a thing of drifts and tides and currents and flows. Human beings are all caught up in those drifts and flows, often without knowing that to be so. Autonomy is not a quality gained by asserting it to be so (“we believe in free will”). It is a quality to be gained by becoming aware of and coping with the social forces that make up the world in which we live.

View from the Fourteenth Floor

This chapter considers one approach to the sociological perspective that has to do with looking at social life as if from afar even when one is positioned at arm's length from it. It explains how sociologists look at social life from a point of vantage similar to that gained at a fourteenth floor. It suggests that sociologists who speak of the social tend to be speaking of tides, forces, currents, pulls—something in the nature of social life that induces people to behave in fairly predictable ways at least part of the time. Human life is subject to social forces that help give it form and pattern. Sociologists tend to regard those forces as things. The chapter also considers the conflict and disorder that characterize the social world.