Daniel Little
Indian economists V. K. Ramachandran and Madhura Swaminathan have edited a highly interesting volume, Telling the Truth, Taking Sides: Essays for N. Ram, that will be of interest to anyone concerned with the progress of India in recent years. The book is a set of essays dedicated to the impact and progressive legacy of N Ram, …
Continue reading "Development ethnography and the life of the poor"
A premise shared by all actor-centered versions of sociology is that individuals and their actions are the rock-bottom level of the social world. Every other social fact derives from facts at this level. Norbert Elias raises a strong and credible challenge to this ontological assumption in his work, offering a view of …
There is a range of approaches to the social sciences that fall under the umbrella of "actor-centered" theories (link). The chief fissure among these theories is that between "thin" and "thick" theories of the actor -- theories which provide less or more detail about the mental frameworks and beliefs of the actors being described. The …
Continue reading "Complementarity of thick and thin theories of the actor"
image: GIF from D. Witt (link) George Herbert Mead's approach to social psychology is an important contribution to the new pragmatism in sociology (link). Mead puts forward in Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist a conception of the self that is inherently social; the social environment is prior to the individual, …
People engage in their social worlds on the basis of a dense set of abilities and cognitive frameworks that permit them to make sense of the interactions they encounter, and to shape their behavior in ways that work for their purposes in the setting. People are creative, adaptive social actors, and this means that they engage …
Erving Goffman has had wide influence on American and French sociology, and I find his work highly interesting. But it is hard to characterize, because it doesn't fit easily into the standard categories of sociological research and theory. It studies individuals, but it is not individualist. And it is evidence-based, but it is not empiricist. …
Poverty is an important social fact in virtually every society. What is involved in knowing about poverty -- for the citizen, for the poor person, for the social scientist, the historian, and the novelist? To start, there is a set of descriptive and analytical features of poverty. How do we define the concept of being …
Understanding Society 