The Social-Ethnography Tradition

• Published in: Modern American history (Cambridge.) Vol. 1; no. 1; pp. 67 - 70
• Main Author: Rodgers, Daniel T.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.03.2018
• Subjects: 19th century; American history; Collaboration; Ethnography; Graduate students; Historians; Marathons; Sociology; Teaching; Traditions; Work ethic; New York; United States > US; Chicago Illinois
• ISSN: 2515-0456; 2397-1851
• DOI: 10.1017/mah.2017.7

The point was not simply to describe but, still more, to ensure that one never saw a crowd of street corner men in the same way again—or textile workers making a rush for the exits at the end of their work day, or women pressing their lips to a favored shrine, or the ordered chaos of a dance floor, or the efforts of men and women to make themselves up as respectable in a society that systematically denied their social worth. A concern to make the study of human behavior quantitative and verifiable has, paradoxically, drawn more and more sociologists out of society and into the sociological laboratory, where small samples of persons respond to surveys, answer questions before and after stories are read to them, or submit to measurements of where their eyeballs dart when images are presented to them. Even had the 2016 election not turned in Donald Trump's favor, Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, the most haunting book of our political season, would remain a powerful record of the ways the world looked to those who felt society had left them behind—recorded with a combination of sensitivity and distance from her subjects that historians would give almost anything to be able to match.3 What moves me most in the social-ethnography tradition is not only its reminder of the radically diverse social landscapes of modernity but, still more, its record of people working with terrific seriousness to make sense of themselves and their experiences. See also Annie M. MacLean, “ Two Weeks in Department Stores,” American Journal of Sociology 4 (1899): 721 –41 10.1086/210852; Amy E. Tanner, “ Glimpses at the Mind of a Waitress,” American Journal of Sociology 13 (1907): 48–55 10.1086/211561; Jessie Davis, pseud., “ My Vacation in a Woolen Mill,” Survey 40 (1918): 538 –41; Cornelia S. Parker, Working with the Working Woman (New York, 1921); Walter A. Wyckoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, 2 vols.