sociology question
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PPT_Chapter8.pptChapter 8: Phenomenology
Learning Objectives
- To understand the tradition behind the subjective approaches deviancy
- To see phenomenology’s application in specific subjective situations, e.g., domestic violence
- To explore how phenomenology enhances our understanding of deviance in institutional settings
- To look at a current development in extending the tradition in new areas
Introduction
- Phenomenology came out of debates about certainty of knowledge, scientific inquiry
- Observations are constrained by our physical limitations and mental assumptions
- The desert is a phenomenon, interpreted differently by different groups (e.g., tourists, oil prospectors, Bedouins, etc.)
- Phenomenology draws attention to the limits of effective knowledge
- Asks how knowledge comes into being
Phenomenology: Some Premises
Society is not something apart from consciousness
Social phenomena are chiefly shaped by first order constructs
- First order constructs: everyday understandings of daily life
- Second order constructs: scientific analysis of life (e.g., sociology)
Social reality appears when people decipher and interpret their environment
Phenomenology is involved in discussing the manufacture and use of measures for understanding the subjective experience of others
While phenomenological analysis reflects the understanding of the sociologist, its authority rests on an appeal to plausibility and a community of experience
Phenomenology, Sociology, and Deviance
The Tradition
- Rules as an opportunity for empirical work
- Deep and surface rules
- Schutz and Garfinkel: understanding deviance by suspending the “natural attitude” or through “breaching experiments”
- Society is a conscious experience built on a framework of editing and categorization
- Deviance is symbolic refutation of organization, which then demands control and suppression
Phenomenology, Sociology, and Deviance, cont’d.
- Deviance from without can be dangerous, the magnitude of which is affected by the borders that are breached
- Defence of social order rests upon preservation of neat distinctions between the phenomena of society
- Deviance is sometimes a response by deviants to the disorderliness of everyday life
Deviance and Culture: AIDS
- Emergence of AIDS in the 1980s
- Dominant theme in the media was a plague-like disease spread by sexual predators to an innocent public
- In 1983, Canada’s media published 99 news stories on AIDS; 1985, 643 articles, up 474%
- Disproportionate coverage of AIDS in relation to actual deaths, especially when compared to other diseases
- AIDS portrayed as a disease of homosexuals, drug users, and prostitutes
- Biased media resulted in long-lasting stigma against AIDS patients, misinformation about AIDS among the general public
Phenomenology, Sociology, and Deviance, cont’d
The Other Tradition
- Phenomenological analysis of deviancy rates revealed these statistics to be biased and unreliable
- Categories of “juvenile delinquent,” “thief,” or “pervert” do not reflect the objective reality of crime or deviance
- Indexical: words and actions require context to have meaning
- Judicial statistics also record the practices of the justice system
- Phenomenologists investigate the processes by which persons come to be defined, classified, and recorded
Phenomenology, Sociology, and Deviance, cont’d
The Analysis of Conversation
- Look at members’ practices in actual situations, how discourse accomplishes work of school lessons, 911 calls, police dispatches, coroners’ inquests, and so on
- Maynard: Speaking shows how members conceptualize their world, reinforce boundaries, and resist outside attempts at social control
- If “labelling” and “societal reactions” define deviance, this depends on ordered activities of describing troubles and suggesting problems
- Perceptions of social problems are filtered through the news, and analysis shows these perceptions persuade people that problems are disruptive to social order
A Sociologist Looks At: Phenomenology and Domestic Violence
- Norman Denzin looked at husbands’ violence toward wives and children
- Emotionality and negative interaction at its core
- Family members locked in patterns of conflict and self-destruction
- Involve bad faith, denial, internalization
- Structure and content if discourse shifts the conception of who is the victim
Deviance Exploration:
Discursive Deviance in Class
- Analysis of disruptive classroom behaviour using the notion of “play”
- Studied youth conduct as a phenomenon in its own right, not as an approximation of adult conduct
- Play as distinct from “ordinary life”
- Analysis of disruptions in classroom conversation
- Not simply deviance or disruption
- The disruptions are asides within the context of the structured conversation
- “The playfulness of the aside provides respite from the adult controlled world in which not any response will do.”
Policy Matters:
The Case of Phenomenology
- Claims of scientific integrity preclude the use of sociological/scientific work for political ends
- Schutz: the definition of social problems should be sociological, not political
- The contribution of sociology is that it can help the members of a society pose their own dilemmas more acutely and clearly
- Distinction between citizens and scientists/sociologists and the implications of disseminating information
Policy Matters:
The Case of Phenomenology, cont’d.
- Barak: sociologists have studied media constructs of crime, but not how we can interpret and alter these constructs to get a more realistic understanding of crime
- “Newsmaking” criminology: the presentation of “newsworthy” reports on crime and justice
- Public sociology: public engagement on local issues
- Buroway: “Sociology should unite [its] four different branches in a critical engagement with public policy”
Phenomenology, Sociology, and Deviance, cont’d.
An Emerging Perspective: Cultural Studies of Deviance
- Cultural criminology: seeks to merge anomie, subculture, and resistance
- Five motifs of cultural deviance study:
Focus on the feelings of intensity throughout the process of crime and its depiction
Alternate spaces and opportunity for expression in urban spaces
The “transgressive subject” denotes those for whom poverty is perceived in consumer society as exclusion and humiliation
Reality is mediated in late modernity, and subcultures cannot be studied apart from their representation
To study deviance culturally is to engage in dangerous knowledge
Phenomenology, Sociology, and Deviance, cont’d
- Presdee:
- “[The] experience of domination produced is characterized by the process of domination through which they are formed. . . . [H]umans have the ability to twist, modify and impose meanings imposed by dominant rational groups. . . . [C]ultural activities, whether strategies of resistance or otherwise, represent clear attempts to find meaning in a life lived through rules prescribed by others and provided from above. . . . [Much deviance, but not all] is no more or less than the everyday life of the oppressed and the “excluded” . . . [and thus deviance] should be viewed as everyday responses to lives lived out within deprived, brutalized and often lonely social locations.”
Case Study: Edgework and the Elongation of Meaning
- Jeff Ferrell: cultural studies of deviance, e.g., edgework
- BASE-jumping: jumping from bridges, buildings, antennas, and cliffs
- BASE jumpers document jumps with body-mounted video cameras
- These videos convey their values to members and the public
- Jumping is legal on Bridge Day, event is covered by mainstream media
- Knowing they jump within a (media) culture, the jumpers’ (mediated) experience is triply expectant on, based in, and expressed through that culture, which is both external to them yet internalized
Case Study: Edgework and the Elongation of Meaning
- Affective experiences of participants elongated through subculture
- Deviance studies have typically been “logocentric”, looking only at the spoken and written word
- New direction: visual culture and self-produced images
- Typical media/deviance studies examines how the media reports fringe activities to the public
- New model looks at mediated nature of deviance; subculture mediates its own image
- Jumpers neither folk-devils nor folk-heroes, and not simply makers or consumers of culture—the reality is much more ambiguous
Criticism
- The phenomenologist wants to reproduce and represent the viewpoint of their subjects; however, analysis changes the object or event being described
- Phenomenology as marginal to “real” issues
- Phenomenologists accused of ignoring the settings of deviance
- Phenomenologists insist on understandings only within context, making generalizations impossible
- The phenomenological (and the symbolic interactionist) arguments have been reincarnated as constructionism
- The history has been forgotten
Chapter Summary
- Importation of phenomenology by Schutz unnoticed until picked up by interactionists Goffman and Cicourel
- Later turned to different use by ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel
- Adaptations resulted in work that challenged theoretical orthodoxy as phenomenology entered into “mainstream” sociology of deviance
- The phenomenological shift has since been reinterpreted
- As constructionism or post-modernism
- Has allowed for more critical approaches to develop beyond individualism and functionalism
- In particular, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis used philosophical concepts developed from phenomenology
Chapter Summary, cont’d.
