Abstract
Back in the late 1960s, aspiring sociologists were urged to read Phillip Hammond’s Sociologists at Work. Careful reading of the book, we were told, would reveal to us the nuances and secrets—the real world—of being a practicing sociologist.
Now a new generation has its own behind-the-scenes book, and what a book it is! Sarah Fenstermaker and Nikki Jones’ Sociologists Backstage: Answers to 10 Questions About What They Do, is something that I want to press into the hands of every undergraduate sociology student—and their teachers and mentors as well. As the title implies, the book is a set of transcribed and edited interviews with seventeen working sociologists. Although the book is, by the authors’ design, tilted toward younger sociologists, qualitative sociologists, and, unless I miss my guess, entirely toward sociologists working in academia, it is a multicolored array of the kinds of questions and the research decisions working sociologists face every day.
What is bracing about the book is the level of honesty that these profiled sociologists bring to the table. Where an older generation of sociologists was taught to carefully conceal the “backstage” of our work (so we would look more like “real” scientists), the sociologists in Sociologists Backstage take for granted that they are socially-situated actors, and that the reader needs to know at least a little bit about who they are in order to understand the data they are sharing with us. Laced throughout the interviews are an astonishing number of the personal dilemmas, political commitments, and methodological quandaries that confront any working sociologist. (To my utter relief, there is absolutely no indulgence in the endless navel-gazing that some postmodernist sociologists sometimes feel compelled to engage in. Joke: What does the postmodern sociologist say to the person s/he’s studying? “Enough about you. Let’s talk about me.”)
The folks in this book are frank, funny and real about what it means to be a sociologist of a certain age, race/ethnicity, gender, and even sexual orientation as they go into the field. Valerie Jenness, for example, recalls studying transgendered inmates in a men’s prison when as the research team enters, the inmates call out, “We’ve got lesbians!” The team and Jenness freeze, feeling that they are being “othered,” only to find out that what the inmates want to convey is that there are transgendered inmates in relationships with other transgendered inmates, whom the locals call “lesbians.” As Jenness says ruefully, “it’s not always about me,” a lesson every sociologist should engrave on his/her laptop.
One of the single cleverest questions the authors ask, is “What was the worst (or most difficult, or most embarrassing) interview/encounter you have had?” Hung Thai, a Berkeley-trained Vietnamese American sociologist, recounts the story of interviewing a young low-wage waiter in a Los Angeles Vietnamese restaurant. The interviewee asks how often Thai has returned to Vietnam, and when Thai answers seven times in the last three years, the young man gets angry, storms away from the table and insists that Thai leave. Thai, who is himself a refugee, immigrant, transmigrant and, one assumes, reasonably affluent employed academic, speculates that envy about how often he was able to travel led to the flare-up—but you can tell that even now the memory of that night in the restaurant has seared his soul. Thai reports he has spent much time obsessing about what happened that night, and uses it to ask himself—and us—how much openness about oneself one should share with those whom we study.
Or take Karen Lacy, who studied middle-class African Americans in the Washington, DC area, some of whom chose to live in largely-black Prince George’s County, while others settled in mostly-white Fairfax County. Lacy details in her interview the nightmare of getting into a research setting when you do not have established contacts. Individuals were very kind to her once she actually got to interview them (in part because they saw getting a PhD from Harvard to be not only good for her, but good for the entire black community), but she cuts to the heart of the paradox of a good interviewer when she says, “…while I’m a nimble interviewer, I don’t want to reciprocate.” I’ve never seen another sociologist confess to this in public, but I think it is the single most difficult thing about interviews: I always tell students that those ten minutes at the end of the interview remind me of the morning after a one-night stand. The abrupt end of so much intimacy, especially when it is one-sided, creates gnawing social discomfort, and the astute sociologist has to find ways to manage that discomfort, both internally and with the other person.
The influence of many sociologists, and not just the authors, permeates this book. But if I had to choose a single avatar, it would be Howard Becker, whose generosity towards young sociologists and insistence that we not distance or pathologize those we study, hovers over many of the accounts in the book.
On this note, a number of the people profiled here cite Gloria Anzaldua’s “open-hearted listening,” which captures in three words what all good sociologists do. We go into a setting and to the best of our ability, bracket our neuroses, anxieties, socially-situated selves, and social discomforts, and listen. Or better yet, we listen and then go home and write memos not only about what we observed but what we felt.
Practicing sociologists, even those who do not teach introductory sociology or methods courses, should treat themselves to this book. On the one hand, we have become so specialized in our own little areas of expertise that it is invigorating to be introduced to the concerns of a broad swath of innovative sociologists. And on the other, the honesty—and sometimes pathos—of the research recounted here reminds us of what a deeply human enterprise doing research is. At the end of this book, most readers will feel like they have just come away from a party featuring some of the smartest, most interesting, and wittiest members of our profession—one of those parties that you wish would never end.