Sociology “ABD” checking in. Never finished up. Was “outsider looking in” the whole time I was a grad student. I was not a Sociology major as an undergrad.
a) At any level less than seeking a PhD in the field, I think Sociology is pretty damn cool. Why do people behave as they do? Instead of exploring the question at the individual level, as psychology does, what if we explore it on the aggregate level, the ways in which people behave as they do as a consequence of the groups and social structures in which they are involved? Eye-opener material.
b) Sociology has a hard cold core. You’ll run across it incidentally if you take enough undergrad courses, but you’ll run headlong into it if you pursue it for an advanced degree: sociology considers the contents of your mind to be totally caused by your location in cultural time and space. The conclusions you’ve reached, the perspectives you’ve claimed as your own, are all consequences of large patterns governing group-membership and socialization and culture. You are not doing your own thinking, nor is anyone else.
c) Sociology is the antithesis of bio-essentialism. A traditional sociologist would say that every single bit of your personality and behavioral characteristics are caused by the matrix of what you have been exposed to. You are considered to have been born as a blank slate, tabula rasa, written upon by chronological events, best comprehended in the aggregate. You as your class. You as your race. You as your gender. You as your age-group. You as your profession.
d) Sociology has cool tools. Statistics can be fun. I say this as a total NON-math person.
e) There’s an old joke about the policeman who comes across a well-dressed drunk. The drunk has the wonderful received pronunciation of the English language and acts as a Lord, and explains that he has accidentally dropped his keys. Rather than bust him for DWI, the police officer helps him look for the keys. After a few unsuccessful moments, the police officer asks “'Are you sure you dropped them here?” The privileged drunken guy replies “No, I dropped them back in that dark alley, but there’s no use in looking for them there, it’s too dark to see anything there”. Sociology is very ossified in its notions of what it can examine and how it can examine it. Like the drunk looking for keys where they aren’t because it’s a location that can be searched, sociologists tend to gravitate towards studies they can actually do using the methods of the field, and either ignore or prevaricate about questions they cannot address using their methods of chocie.
f) Sociology, at least on most campuses, is more rooted in Marxist class analysis than any other academic field. That may sound radical. It’s not. Marx was from the late 1880s. More radical ideas have come down the pike, most notably radical feminism. Marxist analysis of social inequality as it occurs within sociology tends towards the presentation of the deplorable inevitable: class struggle is inevitable, losers who are oppressed by societal mechanisms, that’s inevitable, social unfairness due to the strong oppressing the weak as a class, and gradually creating social institutions that replicate their oppression while passing themselves off as neutral or inevitable, that’s, umm, inevitable. Gee it all sucks but not much we as sociologists can do. Except study various things using class as a variable. And saying “tsk tsk” a lot.
g) You can cross-study cultural anthropology. Which is not without its problems. But some cultural anthro classes both look good and also help critique some of what is taught in socio, and vice versa. Also take some psych and, if available, some social work courses, to get a rounded and 3-D perspective on the relevant subject matter.
