Abstract
I expected Kai Erikson’s new book to look back at his long life and career in sociology, to be a review of achievements and disappointments, the kind of wisdom that comes with years of experience, with a lot of successes and failures. That would have been a welcome addition to our understanding of the work we all do.
But I got more than I expected. I was surprised when, starting my reading, I found that it was in large part a distillation of what he had taught for many years in what must have been a stellar course that introduced Yale undergraduates to sociology: Professor Erikson’s Soc. 1 class. The replacement didn’t disappointment me, just jolted my expectations. It’s no small thing to hear familiar concepts and historical interpretations rendered in precise, elegant prose. We don’t get that very often. As a result, many chapters take up familiar, long-ago theoretically defined problem areas: urbanization, immigration, stratification, deviance, socialization. And newer ones sociology is still looking for a fruitful approach to: globalization, capitalism, social classes, social conflict. And perpetual moral and ethical problems we persist in hoping science will give us some help with, although work along those lines to date doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere much. We’re still waiting for the guidelines to more just solutions, ones that actually get the hoped-for results, to our persistent problems of class, race, and gender inequities.
Erikson approaches this large order from an unusually thoughtful, precise, and occasionally profound assessment of what “the literature” shows, both what usually goes under that abused heading as well as much that will surprise many teachers and students alike who “know” what an introductory course is “supposed to” cover. His discussions often include references to places—Catalonia and Rwanda, for instance—and times—prehistory and the seventeenth century—that seldom show up in the syllabi of a first course in our field. The literature he cites includes the usual Great Thinkers—Marx, Durkheim, and Weber certainly—but also such intellectual, though non-sociological, giants as Edmund Wilson and Marc Bloch (and even Groucho Marx). Any undergraduate who took this introductory course would get far better than the usual fare.
Of course, Erikson can’t help but rely, for examples, on his own rich and extensive experience in a somewhat offbeat sociological specialty: the study of natural and social disasters, and their consequences for communities of various sizes and those who belong to them. His second book, Everything in Its Path, dealt imaginatively, and at length, with a mining company-caused disaster that destroyed Buffalo Creek, a small West Virginia town, in all its horrifying and scandalous dimensions, and achieved a difficult, possibly unique, combination of a variety of methods of gathering serious and dependable research data in what’s usually called “field work”: interviews, being there, and writing it all down. From it he distilled the idea of “collective trauma,” about which the book is eventually quite precise, as he follows it through a series of later researches—a trauma found less in individuals than in the relations between them, the supporting fabric of collective communal activity underlying the activities of everyday experience: family life, neighboring, shopping, walking down the street, maybe going to church or the movies.
Perhaps most of the people who read this review, or the book itself, will have grasped the emotional dimension of the idea easily. But it’s less easy to see the varieties of damage to day-to-day life Erikson specifies as the visible signs, the citable and checkable evidence, of this trauma. It is certainly harder to get such ideas and the data that support them admitted as evidence in the legal proceedings that often follow such disasters, for which Erikson prepared himself through his fieldwork.
We often worry about the knotty problem of making sociology “relevant” to contemporary problems. How can we convince others that sociologists have something to contribute to arguments about “what to do about it,” whatever the “it,” the problem being considered? How can we avoid mouthing wooly abstractions rather than delivering workable procedures and arguments that will convince people who don’t want to be convinced that some real harm has been done? And will get them to take the efficacious activities that will do something useful about them? Erikson’s experiences and thinking about all of these questions, and many others described by other researchers in anthropology, sociology, and history, furnish the foundation for a specialty we would do well to consider when we approach such questions.
In his current thinking about what he saw and heard in Buffalo Creek and in all his work since, Erikson uses this well-conceptualized foundation of meticulously studied cases for the development of appropriate legal tactics and for sociological theorizing about such events simultaneously. This body of case materials provides the foundation for his later work in many states and countries. The list includes: Appalachian coal miners, Puritan settlers, Polish immigrants to America, Army recruits, migrant farm workers from Haiti camped at the edge of the Everglades in Florida, a neighborhood of families in the shadow of a failed nuclear reactor in Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, several communities in Colorado exposed to toxic leakages of varying kinds, Native villagers who lived in the path of an immense oil spill in Alaska, Serb and Croat neighbors caught up in the tides of a savage civil war in what had recently been Yugoslavia, and a group of islanders on one of the most remote atolls in the South Pacific who had lived for fifty years with a deep and lingering fear of having been exposed to radioactive fallout from a nuclear test. (p. 8)
Erikson ends with a lengthy description of his work in the former Yugoslavia that will stay in your mind long after the book has gone to its place of honor on your bookshelf. His descriptions of villages where a hundred years of ethnic peace had been wiped out by the turmoil that accompanied the dissolution of the central government make the meaning of such seemingly abstract ideas as “community” clearly visible and identifiable.
Erikson’s work will reach its full fruition when it’s used to study less dramatic situations—what happens to neighborhood life when the ups and downs of ordinary American politics start to fray (or even rupture) the common courtesies of everyday community life—as well as the more dramatic breakdowns exhibited in the extreme situations Erikson has studied so intensively. We might have gotten some clues about that had he given us some descriptions of how the Yale undergraduates who heard this material in their introductory course responded to it. But that’s more than an author should be asked to do, another job for another day.