PART II—
DOING IT THEIR OWN WAY

Chapter Five—
The Crooked Lines of God

Andrew M. Greeley

My life is not unique in that I am or think I am marginal. My impression, on the basis of a nonrandom sample of colleagues, is that virtually all sociologists think of themselves as marginal—a phenomenon that ought to be interesting to any psychiatrists specializing in treating sociologists. Nor is my sociological career unusual in that I am studying the phenomenon by which my marginality has emerged: the latter stages of the acculturation process of the Catholic immigrant group. Lots of us sociologists do that, though we do not always admit it.

If there is anything at all distinctive about my sociological efforts, it is that I write novels about that which I have studied sociologically. Moreover, the novels began as a test of a hypothesis in the sociology of religion: religion is fundamentally a matter of experiences, images, and stories, not of the acceptance of doctrinal propositions or the performance of ritual devotions or the honoring of ethical norms. Kenneth L. Prewitt, formerly director of the National Opinion Research Center and now president of the Social Science Research Council, summed it up with his usual flair for the epigram when he told me, "I'm not going to read any more of your monographs; all your sociology is in the fiction, which is far more palatable."

In May 1954 I was ordained a Catholic priest, something I had wanted to be since second grade, and I was sent two months later to one of the first college-educated Catholic parishes on the fringes of the city of Chicago. The theory in which we were trained in the seminary (if I can dignify with that term the assumptions around which the seminary

experience was structured) implied that it was the role of the priest and the church to protect the religious faith of the uneducated Catholic immigrant working class. Until 1930, or even 1940, such a theory might have been valid. In the prosperity after the end of World War II the earlier Catholic immigrant groups (e.g., Irish) regained the beginnings of affluence they had lost in the Great Depression, and the later immigrant groups (Poles and Italians), benefiting from the GI bill (apparently the only groups in the society to benefit disproportionately from that legislation), also struggled to the borders of the upper middle class. The immigrant era for American Catholicism was over, though of course Catholic Hispanic immigrants would continue, and still continue, to keep alive the tradition. (How relevant the Hispanic immigrants are to the institutional church may be judged from the fact that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles does not count the more than one million local Hispanic Catholics among its members.)

The embourgeoisement of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the immigrants was well under way. In the years between the end of the war and my ordination swarms of French clerical "religious sociologists" descended on Chicago and announced confidently, sometimes after only a week or two in the city, that with the breakup of the old national (foreign language–speaking) parishes and the movement of the offspring of the immigrants into the suburbs and into the middle class, American Catholicism would experience the same decline in religious observance that affected Catholicism on the European continent. For the "religious sociologists" it was not a matter that required empirical evidence. It was something obvious, inevitable, and fated.

However, at Christ the King Parish in the Beverly Hills district of Chicago, in the late 1950s, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly disconfirmed the French hypothesis. The new upper middle-class Catholicism was, if anything, more devout, more intense, and more eager than the Catholicism of the old neighborhoods. I was fascinated by what I was witnessing, and well aware that nothing I had learned in the seminary would equip me to understand these college-educated Catholics—especially the young people. The pastor did not trust me with the older laity of the parish, of whom he was very jealous, and he assigned me to work with the youth, doubtless figuring that I could do less harm there than anywhere else, especially because he did not mind losing them to me. So I began to devour the sociology books, pop and serious, concerned with social class, the affluent society, and the emergence of middle-class

suburbs. One of the writers who most influenced me at that time was David Riesman, who years later became a close friend. Jim Carey, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago and now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, persuaded me to come over to the University of Chicago (an hour-and-twenty-minute streetcar ride—young priests were not permitted to own automobiles in those days—and several cultural eons away from Beverly) to meet with Professor Everett C. Hughes. Hughes listened eagerly to my description of Christ the King Parish and then pleaded with me to keep a record of my experiences. "Everything," he said, "has happened in and through the Catholic church, and as it becomes the church of the American middle class, everything is likely to happen to it and in it again." Although Hughes did not realize it, he had just prophesied the Second Vatican Council.

I began to write memos to myself on the implications for the Catholic church of this sudden and dramatic upward mobility of its laity, a movement that, more than a quarter of a century later, the leadership of the institutional church has yet to fully comprehend. Donald Thorman, a Catholic editor, heard me give a lecture on the subject and asked me to write an article for a Catholic magazine. Phillip Sharper, the senior editor of the Catholic publishing firm Sheed and Ward, read the article and asked me to write a book. Thus, with more courage than common sense, I violated the ecclesiastical taboo against priests, particularly young priests, setting word on paper and published my first book, The Church in the Suburbs , in 1958 at the infantile age, for a Catholic priest, of twenty-nine. The next year Alfred Gregory Meyer came to Chicago as archbishop, having been warned by priests in Milwaukee that one of the first things he should do in Chicago was to silence me, not necessarily because of what I had said but rather because I had the audacity to say it, or say anything. To this demand Meyer had replied characteristically, "No, I won't do that. It wouldn't be fair. I value what he does. I will encourage him."

Encourage me he did, and in the summer of 1960 he agreed to send me to graduate school in sociology at the University of Chicago while I continued as a full-time assistant pastor at Christ the King (to the chagrin and dismay of the pastor, who, being an obedient priest come what may, nonetheless went along with the cardinal's wishes). There could not have been a better time to appear on the campus of the University of Chicago if one were a Catholic priest. John F. Kennedy was running for the presidency, John XXIII was pope, and the Second Vatican Council had been convened: the winds of change were in the air. Meyer asked

me whether I could stay in the parish and study at a local Catholic university, such as Loyola. I was delighted to stay in the parish, intractable pastor or no, because Christ the King was and is my first love as a priest. I responded, "Loyola or the University of Chicago."

"Oh, yes, that's right," Meyer said. "Chicago is closer, isn't it?"

And thus the long taboo against diocesan priests from Chicago attending the University of Chicago was smashed in the name of geographical convenience!

If I had gone to Loyola I suspect I might still be a graduate student there. But Phillip Hauser at the University of Chicago accepted me on the spot, and in the final week of September, during the fierce Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign, I began my work as a graduate student in sociology, destined, I thought, to be a sociologist in service of the archdiocese and the church. My first course, open to both undergraduates and graduates, was in social psychology taught by James A. Davis and Elihu Katz at 8:30 in the morning to some hundred students. I was utterly at sea: six years out of the seminary, no experience of a secular university, or indeed of any university, wearing a Roman collar, and daunted by the apparent brilliance of the questions of the younger students with whom I was surrounded. How could I possibly survive, I wondered, in such brilliant competition?

The midterm examination required that we analyze Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in terms of the social psychology we had learned in the class. I took Friar Lawrence as my principal concern and explained in considerable detail how he acted as a "dissonance reducer" in the story. (I thought I understood what Jim and Elihu were saying; it was the students who scared me.) When the tests came back, I noticed with enormous relief that I had received an A. They are easy markers around here, I thought. Then Jim Davis put the distribution of grades on the blackboard: there were six A's. Ah ha, I thought, this place isn't going to be so bad after all.

After the class Jim offered me a job at the National Opinion Research Center. The diocese was paying for my graduate education, and as I already had a job, I declined. A few months later, urged on by Harrison White to finish my work as quickly as possible, I wandered over to NORC (in those days housed in a brick two-flat on Woodlawn Avenue) and asked Davis if he had any data from which I might write a dissertation. He did. There was a study in process of the career decisions of the June 1961 college graduates: would I be interested in analyzing the impact of religion on their career choice? In June 1961 I found myself at

a tiny desk in the "bullpen" of NORC research assistants and started to work on my dissertation. Twenty-four years later my "temporary" and unpaid beginning at NORC continues.

When I asked Bill McManus, then superintendent of schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago and now bishop of Fort Wayne and South Bend, Indiana, if there was anything in which he thought I should be particularly interested in the project, he said, "Find out, for the love of heaven, why our kids don't go to graduate school!" At that time there was great concern among Catholics about the failures of "American Catholic intellectualism." Our young people, we were told, were very successful in the business world perhaps, but they were not becoming scientists or scholars. They were not pursuing arts and science academic careers or graduate-school education in preparation for such careers. None of the authors who wrote on the subject—Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, Professor Thomas O'Dea, and Professor John Donovan—seemed to think that it was unrealistic to expect immigrants who had been peasant farmers to immediately become scholars and scientists. Indeed the immigration factor was rarely, if ever, alluded to in their books. I expected to find confirmation of their hypotheses but also thought that among the young people whose families had been in the United States for several generations I would observe a tendency to go on to graduate school and pursue academic careers.

One Saturday morning that summer I stopped by NORC to collect the output from our project's IBM 101 counter-sorter (it actually printed raw frequencies). I did not even have to glance at the numbers on the sheet to realize that all the hypotheses explaining the lower graduate-school attendance of Catholics had collapsed: Jim Davis had written across the top of the paper, "It looks like Notre Dame beats Southern Methodist this year!"

Whatever had been true in the past was no longer the case. Catholics were indeed going to graduate school, and they were deciding on academic careers. I learned a lot from that experience:

1. Never trust a broad assertion that is not backed by empirical evidence.

2. Never expect cocktail-party liberals to abandon their conventional wisdom merely because you have empirical evidence to the contrary.

3. Never expect anti-Catholicism to yield easily to empirical evidence.

For over twenty years I fought this battle, first with Gerhard Lenski and James Trent and then with a host of other people, including Zena Blau. I think I have finally won the argument, though Commonweal , a Catholic magazine and one of my most bitter enemies, never really had the grace to admit I was right and they were wrong: there is no incompatibility between Catholicism—even and especially Catholic school attendance—and an academic career, academic productivity, academic excellence, and academic eminence.

Foolishly uncertain about how much time Meyer would give me to pursue my graduate work, I raced through the program at breakneck speed, holding what I still think may be the record for obtaining a doctorate from scratch at the University of Chicago—twenty months. Pete Rossi, the director of NORC, invited me to stay at NORC for two more years to work on a projected study of the effects of Catholic education, which would be the first national-sample study of American Catholics. (Later I learned that Rossi had attempted to obtain for me an appointment as an assistant professor in the sociology department of the university. He abandoned the attempt because of strong opposition. "I would no more permit that man in our department," a distinguished demographer said, "than I would a card-carrying Communist, and for the same reason." I do not think the man has changed his mind.)

Meyer at that time was busy with the Second Vatican Council and was not yet prepared to have me move into his house and teach him social science over the supper table, so he welcomed Rossi's idea and wrote a letter appointing me to NORC, a canonical appointment I still technically hold. In 1965, when Meyer died at the age of sixty-two and John Cody came to Chicago as archbishop, I suddenly found myself a marginal outcast. Archbishop Cody had no need for a sociologist, or indeed anyone else, to advise him, and he bitterly resented me for gaining attention in the newspapers and not depending on him for salary. (At the beginning of the parochial-school study Rossi insisted that I had to be paid so they could collect overhead from my salary. When I offered to give the money to the diocese, Meyer said, "Oh no, Father. I have enough responsibilities worrying about the money of the archdiocese. You should worry about the money you were paid.")

When I brought the galley sheets of The Education of Catholic Americans to Cody, by then a cardinal, he was totally uninterested in them. Who had sent me to graduate school? Who had given me permission to write? Who censored my books? How much money did I make? Did I still hear confessions? Did I realize that people said I wrote too much?

The same sort of people who had pleaded with Meyer to silence me had also pleaded with Cody. Meyer dismissed their envy; Cody accepted it. I was now an outsider in the diocese and the church, not because anything had changed in me, but because I had a different archbishop. I would later find out that most priests also resented someone with quality professional training in the social sciences, for such training violated the rules of amateurism and mediocrity—the notion that any priest can do anything—at the core of clerical culture. Morris Janowitz's joke that I was the company sociologist of the Catholic church could not have been more inaccurate. The Catholic church, as far as my archbishop and most of my fellow priests were concerned, did not want or need or approve of a company sociologist. Not only were my professional skills useless, but they were in fact dangerous as well—not because sociology was under suspicion but because a priest on the staff of the University of Chicago with an independent income was by definition suspicious in a clerical culture where the reward structure is extremely limited.

Thus my temporary assignment at NORC became permanent, and my dream of being a priest-sociologist in service of the church proved to be an illusion. I became, willy-nilly, a professional sociological scholar. In the twenty years since the fateful meeting with Cardinal Cody I have had three main sociological interests. First, the four studies my colleagues and I have done of Catholic education have provided solid time-series data on changes in the American Catholic church and the American Catholic population in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Second, in the seventies, principally working with William McCready and inspired by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer's Beyond the Melting Pot , I launched the first series of empirical studies of the survival of diverse ethnic subcultures in the United States. Third, through the years I have tried to reformulate some of the major questions in the sociology of religion, using the theoretical perspective originating in the work of Clifford Geertz on religion as a cultural system. My work in this area began with a study funded by the Henry Luce Foundation in 1972; it continued with a project funded by the Knights of Columbus in 1979 and finally with research funded from the illgotten royalties on my novels in the 1980s. Through this research I have fashioned a new theory of the sociology of religion, doing most of the work on that theory—which I think is my principal contribution to sociology—after I joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1979. In the process I have also done research on the sociology of the

country club, the sociology of the paranormal (mystical and psychic experiences), and the sociology of papal elections.

One need only look over that list of interests and add to it the fact that I am, as one of my opponents at the University of Chicago remarked, "nothing but a loudmouthed Irish priest" (to which I replied, "And may they carve it on my gravestone!") to understand why my life has been colorful and interesting, filled with conflict and controversy and doomed almost from the beginning to marginality. Small wonder that in my native Chicago neither the church nor the university wanted me, or wants me.

Worse luck for them, says I.

I think my colleagues and I have established the academic excellence of Catholic schools, their importance to the work of the church (particularly in times of great religious change), and their enormous impact on minority students and disadvantaged students of every sort. American Catholicism, I have been able to document, has survived the traumas of the post—Vatican Council era remarkably well. In 1960, 15 percent of those who were born Catholic were no longer Catholics. By the middle 1980s that proportion had risen only to 18 percent. In the early 1960s approximately 68 percent of Catholics attended church weekly. Beginning in 1969—the year after the encyclical on birth control—church attendance fell precipitously, to 50 percent by 1975. (Protestant church attendance has remained unchanged in the United States since the late 1930s: 40 percent of Protestants attend every week.)

This decline stopped in 1975 as abruptly as it had started, and it seems to have been the result not of the Vatican Council but of anger at ecclesiastical authority because of the birth control encyclical. American Catholics, on the contrary, seem to have enthusiastically welcomed the changes of the Second Vatican Council. The most notable result of the council is that American Catholics now stay in the church on their own terms, making their own rules and following their own judgment as to when they will listen to their leadership. Thus, they reject the official teaching on birth control, premarital sex, abortion, and other related matters, although they oppose homosexuality, extramarital sex, and abortion on demand, in about the same proportions as do white American Protestants. Still they were notably affected by the letter of the American bishops on nuclear weapons in 1983. Before the letter 32 percent of Americans, Protestants and Catholics alike, thought that too much money was being spent on armaments. A year later, after the pastoral letter, the proportion of Catholics thinking that too much

money was spent on arms rose to 54 percent. This finding is a classic example of what has come to be called do-it-yourself Catholicism. If Catholics happen to think that something the church leadership says is correct, then they enthusiastically accept it. If they happen to think that the leadership does not know what it is talking about, then they rather easily and cheerfully reject it.

Though the church did not pay for our research, and despite the fact that Catholic reviewers have routinely patronized it, there is little reason to doubt that there is more data on Catholics in the United States than on Catholics anywhere else in the world and that since no one has been able to refute or even dispute the NORC studies on Catholics and Catholic schools, they have become accepted as valid social knowledge in the United States. The Catholic leadership has never been able to forgive me for proving that the Catholic laity rejected the birth control decision (though Archbishop Bernardin, before he became the archbishop of Chicago, told me off the record that he could not sleep at night because of what "that goddamned encyclical is doing in my diocese"). And at the University of Chicago my fellow sociologists dismissed this work as uninteresting and unimportant and hence not worth considering when the issue was whether I belonged as a full-fledged member of the university community.

There is no point in this essay in rehearsing the story of my conflicts with the sociology department of the University of Chicago in any great detail. Briefly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of other units in the university had recommended me for a regular faculty appointment. (I had been a professor with tenure at the University of Illinois at Chicago for two years and resigned to resume full-time work at NORC because I felt so much more comfortable there.) In each case certain members of the sociology department intrigued against the appointment at higher levels of the administration and defeated it. It is, as any reader of this essay knows, easier in the academy to prevent something than to accomplish it. I was convinced then, and am convinced now, that the reason for the opposition had nothing to do with the quality or quantity of my work but with the fact that I was a Catholic priest. I accuse the responsible people of anti-Catholic bigotry, and I accuse the university administration of cowardly caving in to such bigotry. Moreover, I accuse myself of gross stupidity for getting into the conflict in the first place. I should have been intelligent enough to stay out of it, knowing that there was no way to win.

Incidentally, my funding a chair at the University of Chicago in Catho-

lic studies from the royalty income on my novels was not an attempt to get even with the university. As I said at the time the chair was announced, my only intention was to provide some kind of scholarly bridge between the academy and the church. If one wanted to do that in the city of Chicago, obviously the University of Chicago was the place to do it. I must say that the university's reaction to my funding the chair was singularly graceless. They accepted the money all right, rudely and churlishly, though they did not, like Cardinal Bernardin when he accepted a parallel grant to the seminary at Mundelein, act as though they were doing me a great favor. Once you are on the margins, you stay there.

In our research on ethnicity, my colleagues and I established that ethnic subcultures, distinctive styles of family behavior, religious belief, political activity, attitudes toward death, and especially drinking behavior persist from generation to generation despite education, the number of generations in America, the collapse of ethnic neighborhoods, and even ethnic intermarriage. (One Irish parent is enough to guarantee the survival of the Irish drinking subculture, for example.) Some people, most notably Orlando Patterson, have thought there was something chauvinistic and fascist about studying white ethnics (but not, oddly enough, black or Jewish ethnics). Scholarly research on ethnic diversity in the United States is now solidly established. The paradigms that McCready and I developed remain untouched. Patterson may think it is somehow uncivilized or irrational to be concerned about ethnic diversity, but those scholars and practitioners dealing with alcohol use and abuse are far more realistic. There are distinctive drinking subcultures with enormous durability that are passed on from generation to generation powerfully and unself-consciously. You do not have to think of yourself as Irish or participate in Irish ethnic customs or keep an Irish tricolor in your office to absorb the Irish drinking subculture, the Irish political subculture, the Irish family structure, or the Irish religious value system (a mixture of fatalism and hope).

In the process of studying ethnic subcultures we also established that the American Catholic groups had caught up with, and indeed in some cases passed, other groups in the society in income, education, and occupation. The Irish, for example, are now the best educated, the most affluent, and the most occupationally successful of the gentile ethnic groups in America, and the Italians are not far behind them. This finding, like my other findings about Catholics and the intellectual life, the rejection of the birth control encyclical, the acceptance of the Second

Vatican Council, the persistence of ethnic diversity, and the prevalence of incidents of psychic and mystical experiences in the United States (about a third of Americans have had intense ecstatic experiences of the sort described by William James, and these experiences correlate positively with psychological well-being; about two-thirds of Americans have had some kind of psychic experience) are widely unaccepted because they are profoundly unacceptable, either in the church or the academy or both. I started graduate school in 1960 believing, quite irrationally, that the Catholic church as an institution had a monopoly on both envy and dogmatism. I now realize that though envy is worse in the church than it is in the professoriat, it is still pretty bad in the professoriat, and that dogmatism, strong in the church, is equally powerful in the academy.

But the most important work, at least for my own life, that I have done as a sociologist has been on the religious imagination. This work has influenced my personal religious behavior, my philosophical and theological reflections, and my turning to poetry and fiction, thereby adding to roles I already had as priest, journalist, and sociologist another more controversial and extremely enjoyable role as storyteller.

The sociology of religion is one of the backwater subdisciplines in great part because religion has so little power as a predictor variable. It is acceptable to study religion as a dependent variable: how many people go to church, how many people believe in life after death, how many people believe the Bible is divinely inspired, and so on. But having obtained that information, the understanding of other social attitudes, institutions, and behaviors is not notably enhanced. Thus, in the mid-1980s analysis I have done of material in the NORC's General Social Survey correlating twelve social and political dependent variables (including attitudes toward government help for the poor, the death penalty, racial justice, and nuclear armament) shows that neither church attendance, nor intensity of religious affiliation, nor frequency of prayer, nor confidence in religious leadership correlate with political and social attitudes and behaviors. The founders of sociology, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, were interested in religion. Religion is also something in which most Americans, if not most sociologists, are involved, but it does not seem to be of much sociological use.

Moreover, I have wondered through the years whether the reason for its lack of usefulness is that most sociologists of religion have been interested in the so-called secularization hypothesis—that is to say, in demonstrating that religion is no longer important and that religious

involvement is declining. In a book called Unsecular Man (1972) I could find no support for the secularization hypothesis, and in Religious Change in America (1989), a book on religious social indicators published by Harvard University Press, I again could find no evidence for secularization. Sociologists have chosen as their units of measurement the kinds of religous behavior (such as church attendance) that might be expected to decline or fluctuate over time. Though many sociologists of religion would probably accept some form of Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a culture system, value system, meaning system, and set of symbols that provide ultimate explanations of what life is about and patterns of behavior for living, they have rarely tried to measure such symbol systems in their research. Might it not be, I have asked myself, that if we could get adequate measures of religion as a culture system, as a system of symbols of ultimate meaning, we would have a more powerful predictor variable and win more respectability for religion as a sociological phenomenon?

While I was analyzing the data from my 1972 Henry Luce Foundation study, I was also recasting my own paradigms for religion, under the influence of the theological writings of David Tracy and John Shea, and working out this reformulation in a book called The Mary Myth, in which I approached the Catholic devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, from a sociological perspective. It was clear to me that Mary's function in Catholic Christianity had always been to represent the womanliness of God, the life-giving, nurturing, tender affection of God. Our theologians never quite said as much, but there was little doubt that the poetry, art, and music of Mary were designed to use her as a sacrament (manifestation) of God's womanly love. Many medieval Catholic theologians (most notably Saint Bernard and Saint Anselm), mystics, and spiritual writers were at ease with the image of God as mother (even a nursing mother). This ease seemed to me to be clearly linked to devotion to Mary. Later, in our study of young adults for the Knights of Columbus, we discovered that despite neglect from an ecumenically minded clerical elite the Mary image was strong, powerful, and benign among young Catholics—correlating well, for example, with sexual fulfillment in marriage and, as was not surprising by now, with the image of God as mother.

From these exercises in reflection and restructuring I developed a theory of the sociology of religion (articulated in Religion: A Secular Theory ) that saw religion as the result of experiences of hope-renewal. These experiences are encoded in images that provide a template for

life and hence are symbols, shared with others through stories, especially stories told in a storytelling community (church) of persons who share the same repertoire of images. Influenced in this theory formation by Shea and Tracy, by Geertz, Parsons, and Weber, and by Mircea Eliade, Rudolph Otto, and William James, I decided that religion was fundamentally and primarily an exercise of the creative imagination, the preconscious, the poetic faculty, the creative intuition, the agent intellect—call it what you will. Obviously, since we are reflecting creatures, it is necessary to reflect on religion and articulate it propositionally, philosophically, theologically, and catechetically; but such intellectual reflection, however essential, becomes arid and irrelevant when it is divorced from an awareness that the origins and raw power of religion lie in another dimension of the personality.

That conclusion was not particularly acceptable to most of my Catholic priest colleagues. It certainly could not be rejected as heretical, especially since I insisted that I was approaching religion purely from the sociological perspective and saying nothing about theological truth. But if it was not heretical, neither was it relevant, and in the years after the Second Vatican Council many Catholic clerics, especially the more influential ones, had pretty much abandoned religion in the sense I was using it and substituted for it social activism. I had no objection to social activism, but I thought of it as a consequence of religion and not as a substitute for it, as a result of religious faith instead of as a result of loss of nerve about the possibility of religious faith.

For such clergy nothing worthwhile could have happened in the history of Catholicism before 1963 and nothing could be more irrelevant, and hence useless, than to talk about the religious imagination. I had become an offense to them, not merely because I was drawing a professor's salary and had professional skills (through which I found that the laity were very critical of the quality of Sunday preaching); I was now a pariah all over again because I was talking nonsense. Of what possible use, as a Jesuit would ask in a book review in the 1980s, can the image of a Madonna's smile have in an era when the church has to be concerned about such life issues as abortion or nuclear warfare? I could demonstrate easily that those who were likely to have an image of God as mother were more concerned about nuclear war than those who did not have such an image; but for this particular Jesuit, as for most priests, I fear, empirical evidence mattered not in the slightest.

At the time I was developing this theory, I was influenced strongly by a major intellectual breakthrough in social research—the interactive

data analysis techniques developed by my friend Norman Nie in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (Conversational Program: SCSS) package. Analyzing data with SCSS was like writing poetry: you could become locked in an affective relationship with the data and follow hunches and intuitions with ease. More important than the speed of SCSS was the instant turnaround that enabled the creative intuition to work in the analytic process.

Rossi and Davis had taught me that the purpose of data analysis was to tell a story. With SCSS the same creative dimensions of the personality used in writing fiction were unleashed in the struggle to find patterns of meaning in the data. Ever since I had read Michael Polanyi in graduate school, I was convinced that the distinction between art and science was deceptive and irrelevant. Data analysis was as much a craft as a science. With SCSS the craft could become art. Fiction and data analysis are both modes of storytelling, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with plot, conflict, and resolution. Analyzing data prepared me to write fiction; writing fiction made me a more skilled data analyst.

As a result of my sociological reflection on Geertz, my theological reflection on Tracy and Shea, my work on The Mary Myth, and my preparation to write Religion: A Secular Theory, I came to two implicit, even preconscious, conclusions. The first was that I wanted to concentrate on my research on the religious imagination; the second was that I was going to try my hand at writing fiction. A lot of folks were talking about religion as story, but virtually no one was writing religious stories. If the theories were right, however, stories were the best way to communicate about religion, and the novel (and the screenplay) were the functional equivalents of the stained-glass window in our era. In January 1979, with one novel, The Magic Cup, about to be published (and disappear), I joined the faculty of the University of Arizona, and free from the burden of having to raise funds for our ethnic research center at NORC (where I continued to spend one semester a year), I had time to reflect on the issue of the religious imagination. With the success of my novels, beginning with The Cardinal Sins, I had funds from royalties to put into research on this subject. In a curious circle, my reflection on the religious imagination led to novel writing, and the novel writing in turn funded research on the religious imagination.

Thus far all of my novels have been situated in Chicago among the Irish Catholics of the community, continuing, I like to think, the work that James T. Farrell left off in his final book, The Death of Nora Ryan (which brings Farrell/Danny O'Neill/Ed Ryan to the mid-1940s). The

novels, as I have said repeatedly, are theological tales, stories of God—comedies of grace focusing especially on the womanly tenderness of God. As Professor Ingrid Shafer has suggested in her research on my novels, each of them, in one way or another, is like The Magic Cup, a story of a quest for a holy grail, for the womanly affection of God as revealed through human lovers. They are also, however, portraits of the Chicago Irish in transition from the upper working class and lower middle class into the upper middle and lower upper class, and of the turbulence and traumas, the excitements, the disappointments, the enthusiasms, and the despairs of that transition, particularly since the Second Vatican Council. Hence Ken Pruitt's dictum that all my sociology is in my fiction.

In three different ways, then, my sociology has shaped my fiction. The context is the same as the context for my study of American Catholism. The subject matter is the result of my reflection and work on the religious imagination—the womanliness of God. And the impulse, finally, to set about storytelling grew out of my sociological theorizing about the nature of religion. Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously—whereas my colleagues in the priesthood have been furious at me for writing novels and even more furious at me for succeeding at it, my colleagues in sociology have seemed to be amused and even rather proud that one of theirs is able to tell stories and at the same time continue to teach and do research on sociological issues. They are even prepared to believe what my clerical colleagues will never believe, that it was my work in the sociology of religion that induced me to write stories of God.

I started out life wanting to be a priest. I continued my life in the priesthood wanting to be a sociologist to serve the church. I discovered the church did not need or want a sociologist and became a professional sociologist who was also a priest. Then my sociology persuaded me that the best way I could be a priest was by writing theological novels set in the same context and about the same subjects as my sociological research. Though this pilgrimage has scarcely won me any acceptance in the priesthood or from my own archdiocese, it has nonetheless made me a more effective priest for the vast number of readers (half of whom do not go to church regularly) who now constitute my parish and my congregation. As Pete Rossi would have said, there are many ironies in the fire.

In March 1984, the night before celebrating the publication of my most popular novel, Lord of the Dance, and my thirtieth anniversary in

the priesthood, a functionary from Cardinal Bernardin's office came to visit me. If I wanted to be accepted back into the diocese (I was of course a priest in good standing, but he meant acknowledged as part of the diocese and not treated as a pariah who it is pretended does not exist), I would have to do public penance for all the harm caused by my novels. I protested that the research I had done on the readers of my novels indicated that they were by no means harmful. The functionary dismissed the research. The problem was not people who read my novels and benefited from them, he said; the problem was the "simple ordinary faithful" who had not read them but were shocked that I wrote them. (The "simple ordinary laity" are hard to find in any of the empirical research data but are a useful projection of the fears, anxieties, and worries of ecclesiastical bureaucrats.) If I apologized to them and promised them I would be sensitive to their needs in the future, then I would be welcomed back into the diocese and treated with honor, respect, and affection. "You have to crawl a little bit, Andy," he said.

As might well be imagined, I turned him down flat. Since they had not read my books, what earthly reason was there to think they would read my apology either? Besides, I was not going to abandon millions of people who, if the research evidence was to be believed, found religious benefit in my books, to placate a few people who had written nasty letters to the cardinal. I have been asked repeatedly whether I really think that Joseph Bernardin expected me to succumb to such ridiculous terms. Of course not. I think he knew full well I would not accept his terms, but he sent them to me so that he would be able to say to other bishops, the Vatican, the pronuncio, and the complaining priests and laity, I tried to reason with Andy and he wouldn't listen. The ability to give such a response was what Bernardin was really seeking. In fact, I think he would have been appalled if I had accepted his terms because then he would have had no idea what to do with me. Is this a coward's way out, or only an ecclesiastical diplomat's? Readers will have to judge for themselves.

The appointment to the University of Arizona was a complete surprise to me. I had often said that there were only four schools in the country that could lure me away from Chicago: the City University of New York, Harvard, Stanford, and Arizona—CUNY because of its distinguished chairs, Harvard because it is probably the best university in the world, and Stanford and Arizona because I loved the areas and because they both had become distinguished universities. However, when Philip Hammond, the chairman of Arizona's recruiting committee, and Stanley

Lieberson, the head of the sociology department, approached me, I did not think they were serious. The traumas in Chicago, both at the university and in the archdiocese, had through the years sufficiently eroded my self-esteem so that I did not think that a distinguished department like Arizona's could be interested in me. Moreover, I had heard that they were looking at three people for the vacant professorship and assumed, again I suppose as a result of my experience with sociologists at Chicago, that I was third on the list. But a trip to Arizona in January was always a pleasant experience, so I flew to Tucson and from the members of the department discovered that Stan Lieberson had been an ally through all my University of Chicago troubles, and we ate dinner at El Charro restaurant, which may be the best Mexican/American restaurant in all the world. There was indeed an offer. Lieberson and Paul Rosenblatt, then dean of arts and sciences at Arizona (and one of the best deans in America), were aware that my Chicago roots and my connection with the NORC would make it difficult for me to move to Tucson, so during Easter week in 1978, when I was taking my annual week off in Scottsdale, Lieberson called and proposed that we work out an offer on the phone. "No way," I told him. "I'm an Irish Catholic ethnic from Chicago. You and Paul are Jewish ethnics from Brooklyn. I'm going to come down and we're going to have tea and coffee and sweet rolls, we're going to work it all out and then shake hands." So we did, and I moved to Arizona for half the year and returned to the classroom. There I found to my astonishment that I was not merely a respected sociologist but, as far as the Arizona sociology department was concerned, a superstar. I am not prepared to place myself in that category, but having been treated like a pariah for a long, long time, I was perfectly prepared to accept the acclaim and attention, if not the title. Moreover, my new colleagues, especially Richard Curtis, Albert Bergesen, and Michael Hout, made me feel that however marginal I may be elsewhere, I am not in fact a marginal sociologist.

Adding the classroom experience in Tucson and the results of the Knights of Columbus study of young adults to my previous reflections on the religious imagination, I was finally ready to test my theories seriously against the empirical evidence. I devoted some of the money from my first sizable royalty check to paying for questions on the religious imagination in the NORC General Social Survey. After one year I was able to refine the questions so that a simple, easy to administer, four-item scale (four forced choices on a seven-point range: God is Father-Mother, Judge-Lover, Master-Spouse, or King-Friend) finally provided an effective measure of the religious imagination, which corre-

lated significantly with political attitudes and behaviors, even when other measures were used to take into account the political, economic, social, religious, and life-style liberalism. People who scored high on measures of God as mother, lover, spouse, and friend, for example, were 15 percentage points more likely to vote against Ronald Reagan in the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984. Your story of God, in other words, is a paradigm of the story of your life.

My next scheme was to try to do research on the readers of my novels to learn whether the stories did affect their religious imaginations. I also hoped to gather evidence to refute the claim inside the Catholic community that the stories were pornographic and trashy, a threat to the church and the priesthood. Of the readers of Ascent into Hell, 68 percent said that the book enhanced their respect for the priesthood because it revealed the humanity of the priest, whereas only 6 percent said that it lowered their respect for the priesthood (the story was about a man who left the priesthood to marry a nun whom he had impregnated); only 11 percent thought that the novels were trashy or steamy, whereas 80 percent thought the sexual scenes were handled with delicacy and taste. There also emerged from this research (narcissism begins at home, as Stan Lieberson would have said!) the observation that the attraction of the books for readers seemed to be based on the intersection of three factors: the books made them think seriously about religious questions; they helped them to understand God's love; and they improved their understanding of the relationship between religion and sex. Therefore, I wondered, could reading one of my novels have an effect on the religious imagination of such readers. In fact, in five of eight indicators there were statistically significant differences indicating greater likelihood of thinking of God as mother, lover, spouse, or friend among readers who said the books helped them to understand the relationship between religion and sex and appreciate God's love for them.

Obviously, there were two possible explanations: one, the novel did indeed affect the religious imagination of readers; and two, those who had religious imaginations picturing a more intimate relationship with God were more likely after reading my books to say that they understood God's love better and also comprehended better the relationship between religion and sex. Either result was satisfactory to me from the viewpoint both of a sociological theorist and of a priest storyteller.

Finally, did the much publicized sexual interludes in the novels (which Cardinal Bernardin himself had admitted to me were tame compared to most modern novels) have an effect on the linkage between the

story and the religious imagination? The correlation between, on the one hand, greater understanding of God's love and of religion and sex and, on the other, gracious images of God was specified in my final analytic exercise as existing entirely among those respondents who said they found the sexual interludes in the books compelling or sensitive. Far from being a scandal to the simple faithful, as my fellow priest contended, or trashy and steamy, as some of the hostile secular critics (mostly alienated Catholics) averred, the novels, including the sexual episodes in them, were just what I intended them to be—stories of grace appealing to the religious imagination of the readers and helping them to understand better the relationship between religion and sex and the depths of God's love. Based on the research, and on the thousands of letters I have received, I am confident that I have never done anything more priestly in my life than write those novels, which is precisely what my sociological theory has led me, with fingers crossed, to anticipate.

What next? More of the same, God She being willing.

I intend to continue to teach sociology and do sociological research, as well as to write stories and perhaps, again God She being willing, screenplays. And of course I continue to be a priest, wanted by the ecclesiastical institution or not. Mark Harris, in a cover profile of me for the New York Times Magazine, concludes by saying that after reading the letters I have received from readers, he does indeed believe that I am a priest and a parish priest. "His parish," he writes, "is in his mailbox."

As my friend from New York, Jim Miller, put it on the phone the other night, "Those so-and-sos at Chicago did you a favor. If they hadn't kicked you around, you never would be writing novels and you never would have the money to fund your own research or their chair." He meant the so-and-sos at the university, but the same thing could be said of the so-and-sos in the archdiocese. God, a French proverb tells us, draws straight with crooked lines. It is not a proposition that admits of empirical verification. (God thus far has not been at home to persistent NORC interviewers.) At this stage in my career, as a priest who is also a sociologist, journalist, and storyteller, I am no longer of any mind to question the crooked lines of God.

Chapter Six—
Looking for the Interstices

Bennett M. Berger

In the spring of 1982 I was invited to give a talk at the University of California, Los Angeles. When I asked (as I often do on such occasions), Why me? I was told that the students there were curious about how I had survived, flourished, and even prospered as a sociologist doing (in that old phrase) my own thing, relatively unconstrained by any one of the several schools of thought that compete for dominance in contemporary sociology. So I began to think about that.

Surprisingly, the thinking turned autobiographical—in the sense that C. Wright Mills meant when he spoke of the intersections of biography and history shaping the course of lives. I say "surprisingly" because the dominant norms of sociological practice discourage autobiographical thinking. In sociology, autobiography is usually regarded as risky, embarrassing, and tasteless for all sorts of familiar reasons (narcissism, subjectivity, and so on). We sociologists are taught to flee from the first-person singular, both for methodological reasons and as good scientific manners: "Art is I; science is we," says Claude Bernard. Yet, oddly, it is also a truism of the sociology of knowledge, as well as elementary sociology, that ideas are existentially based. It seems, therefore, to be sound sociological practice—even good academic manners—to try to put one's audiences in an optimally skeptical frame of mind by giving them all the evidence one can muster to distrust the ideas one is about to convey, instead of (or in addition to) laying out in advance all the methodological reasons they should be predisposed to trust the benignity of one's prudence, rigor, balance, integrity, and scholarly scrupu-

lousness. With respect to the choice and formulation of theoretical questions, I see giving all the evidence one can muster as a conceptual (or prehypothetical) approximation of the empiricist's injunction that hypotheses be falsifiable.

Please regard the above as a bit of ideological spadework in defense of autobiography. But there are other, more familiar bits of ideology in its behalf. Even the conventional wisdom now asserts that knowing something about who a speaker (or writer) is contextualizes a discourse or a text and hence adds to it dimensions of meaning otherwise obscure or hidden. A printed page, for example, usually tells readers only what its author thinks he or she wants them to know, unless they are skilled at reading between the lines, which usually takes years of experience. Oral delivery adds dimensions of meaning, some of them unintentional, through the physical presence of the speaker and his or her accent, intonation, and body language. Autobiography adds a different dimension by equipping readers to make inferences from, and interpret, what a writer says; and it implicitly invites them to do so in a way that perhaps discounts what the writer says in terms of what the readers have learned about who he or she is. Nevertheless, even the most candid autobiographer projects distorted images, usually providing only selective information chosen to induce readers to make the inferences and interpretations he or she wants them to make. It is indeed a risky business. Still, I find it surprising that social scientists who chatter on abstractly about the importance of context (or who in fact do take the trouble to specify objective contexts) do not more frequently provide their audiences with specific autobiographical data, thereby enabling us to make more intelligent contextual inferences—as if we were all stupid enough not to make those inferences in any case.

I will practice what I preach and provide you with some data. I was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, in an immigrant Jewish family low enough in the lower middle class that its respectability was far from secure. Actually, we must have been pretty poor. I can remember the electricity being turned off in our apartment for nonpayment of bills, and I recall going to the grocery store when I was about ten and paying for my corn flakes with Depression relief stamps and feeling humiliated by the experience. It was not one of those Jewish families rich in Talmudic tradition and teeming with Tevyes or Workmen's Circle intellectuals. Although my mother, born here, managed to get herself an American high school education, my father's education ended before he was twelve, when he came to this country. I don't think he ever had a

friend of his own—that is, someone who was not the husband of one of my mother's friends. He was a very primitive man, interested only in money because he never had enough of it, and was recurrently insulted and humiliated by those who had more. I observed some of these humiliations during a few of my teenage summers when I would help him carry some of the samples of fur trimmings for women's coats from his employer's factory in the fur district of Manhattan to the garment center ten blocks north where he would try to sell them to coat manufacturers. He liked to use big words (usually mispronounced) where little ones would do, and he particularly admired people who had reached "the pinochle of success." My sister-in-law once said to me, in awe rather than with malice, "you know, Bennett, your father has no redeeming virtues."

There were almost no books in our home. One of the few I remember was a Winston dictionary with several thumb-tabbed appendices from which I memorized such things as the twenty largest cities in the United States, the capitals of all the then forty-eight states, and the twenty longest rivers in the world. My brothers and I were typed early. My older brother was the smart one, I was the sensitive one, and my younger brother was the practical one with a good head for business. My older brother was in fact smart enough to graduate from high school before he was thirteen, but I was the first member of my family to get through college—although no one would have predicted it from my adolescence. My reading was limited to such books as The Hardy Boys series and The Circus Comes to Town, until I was around seventeen. I was barely a C student in high school, perhaps in part because I stuttered badly and rather than having to face the terror and humiliation of reciting in class, I frequently feigned ignorance. I did not begin to deal successfully with the stuttering until I was into my twenties, had left the parental household, and had a regular sex life. In the film version of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest there is a fragile young stutterer among the inmates of the mental hospital who spends a night in bed with a woman squirreled into the hospital exactly for that purpose. In the morning he emerges from the room beaming, and although the point was not telegraphed in any of the familiar Hollywood ways, I anticipated, when he opened his mouth to speak, that he would not stutter.

I do not mean to suggest it was a terrible adolescence; it was not. I had lots of friends, and I almost always had a good-looking girlfriend. I was a good dancer, and a fine athlete, often elected captain of my teams. The summer I was fifteen I hit a ninth-inning inside-the-park home run,

with the bases loaded, in front of maybe a hundred people, including my mother, father, and girlfriend. Students of youth culture know that things like that are far more important to a kid than doing well in school.

Near the end of World War II, at eighteen, I was a private in the Marine Corps stationed on the island of Guam. When the fighting was over my company commander assigned me to administer an official Navy library that had just arrived by ship from San Francisco in several enormous wooden crates, which I can remember unpacking with a crowbar. (I do not know why I was so assigned; it could not have been my intelligence: this Jewish boy endured the shame of scoring higher on the Marine Corps' mechanical-aptitude test than on its general-intelligence test.) They gave me a rectangular frame building with double screen doors and shelves along the walls, and I spent much of the next year as a librarian. There was not much patronage at that jungle library, and I had nothing to do but sit there day after day, week after week, and read books, I who had hardly read any before. I read voraciously, without taste or system, anything that for any reason got my attention—classics, recent fiction, plays, history, current affairs. Doors leading out of the provinciality of my experience began to open, and that started me dreaming about getting educated when I became a civilian again. One more thing about that tropical library: they assigned me an associate, a black Marine from Harlem (we were both New Yorkers among the rednecks) who was a trumpet player, and before long we organized a band (I was a pop singer—it is common knowledge that stutterers do not stutter when they sing) that played in officers' clubs all over the island.

My first political experience came the summer before I went into the Marine Corps, when I got a job as a singing busboy at a resort hotel in the borscht belt owned by the grandmother of my girlfriend. About two weeks into the summer my fellow busboys delegated me to ask the old lady for a small raise in our wages. She fired me on the spot, calling me a communist and, worse than that, a traitor to her and her granddaughter. It had a happy ending, though, because I hitchhiked into the nearby Catskill mountain town where small theatrical agents from New York moved their offices in the summer, auditioned for a job as a singer at a better hotel, and got the job. I made more money and I did not have to bus tables.

My real introduction to politics came when I started Hunter College in the spring semester of 1947. A campus pol came up to me one day in the cafeteria and asked if I would like to be on the student council.

Sure, I said. Next thing I knew I was on their slate, and without lifting a finger I was elected. I thought it was fun, so in the fall I ran for reelection, this time campaigning hard. I lost by a fairly wide margin. I supposed I was a radical because most of my friends were, although at that time I was not certain what that meant. Some in my peer group were reputed to be "members of the party"; but my closest friends regarded them as mostly silly doctrinaires, and therefore I did too—especially when, after a literally sophomoric discussion of love, one of them told me he knew he was in love when he met a girl he "wanted to buck the system with."

I was reading a lot to compensate for the neglects of my athletic adolescence and to catch up with my friends, most of whom, it seemed to me, had been intellectuals at least since puberty. I denounced my college president as a cultured anti-Semite (I still think he was: in one of his books he had said that it was not difficult for him to understand why, for aesthetic reasons, a gentile would not want to marry one of the "daughters of Sarah") and participated in Henry Wallace's campaign for president in 1948, oblivious to charges that it was dominated by communists. I was still only vaguely cognizant of the differences between Stalinists and other parts of the left; I would have been more worldly had my literacy come only two or three years earlier.

My girlfriends contributed a lot to my education. They were always English majors (I was in political science), highly literary women who tended to mother me, seeing in me a diamond in the rough who could profit from the nurturance of their greater sophistication. I began to read poetry, and in my senior year I published my first real article, on W. H. Auden, in the college literary magazine.

The summer after my junior year in college I hitchhiked from New York to Berkeley to see a childhood friend (keeping a journal as I went). Berkeley was beautiful and summer-cool, and I had no wish to see a goodlier place. So I came back to become a graduate student, knowing absolutely nothing of what the University of California had to offer. It was as far from the Bronx and from home as I could get, and I had the instinct to sense that if I stayed, I would be sucked into the vortex of the family, not yet having the strength or vision to know what I wanted and hence ill equipped to resist what my parents wanted for me. Besides, I liked going to school, and I had become reasonably good at it. Since there was nothing else I wanted to do, I thought I would stick with it, although I do not remember considering an academic career then. I thought I was interested in studying political behavior, but at that time

Berkeley's rather traditional political-science department did not teach political behavior, and an adviser there sent me to the Department of Sociology and Social Institutions, as the sociology department was then called.

I sort of grew up with the Berkeley sociology department. (Some years ago when a magazine editor asked me for one of those brief bios that accompany an article I said that I was born and raised in New York City but grew up in California, to which I remained grateful.) When I arrived, the department had maybe a half-dozen sociologists, but they included Reinhard Bendix and Robert Nisbet, who encouraged me and from whom I learned a lot. During the years I was a graduate student there the faculty added Phillip Selznick, Herbert Blumer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Kingsley Davis, Leo Lowenthal, William Kornhauser, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Feuer, and, in my last year, young Erving Goffman and Neil Smelser. Others joined, too, and I could have lunch with these guys or drop in and chat without having to make an appointment three weeks in advance. For many of them their eminence was still ahead, so I was not intimidated by their not yet formidable names. There were several schools of thought, and a little bit of several of them rubbed off on my eclecticism.

During the six or seven years I was a graduate student at Berkeley, the university commanded only a part of my attention. The rest of it went to the demimonde of San Francisco and the bay area that came to be known as the "beat generation," through which I got to know people like Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Mike McClure, and the late Max Scherr, founder, editor, and publisher of the Berkeley Barb . I was a marginal part of that crowd, with one foot in the academy and one in bohemia. The sexual anarchy of my bohemian life scared me, I think, and in 1956 I got married (probably to escape from sex); in 1958 I got a Ph.D., and after a year of lecturing at Berkeley I went off to my first real job, an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where I spent four happy and productive years learning the professor business.

But perhaps the happiest stroke of my continuing historical luck (the library on Guam, falling in with intellectuals at college, falling into Berkeley sociology at the start of its rise to eminence—that Millsian intersection of biography and history) was that I entered the job market at a very good time; even mediocre Ph.D.'s were getting good jobs. In retrospect it seems an unimaginable blessing that I never suffered a single day of assistant-professor anxiety. My senior colleagues at Ur-

bana and the graduate students there quickly made it plain that they were glad to have this young turk from the newly eminent Berkeley department. My first book was well received; I published some articles and review essays, and after three years at Urbana I was promoted to tenure without even knowing that I was being considered for it. When I think of the recurrent ritual humiliations to which assistant professors are now periodically subjected in the system of faculty review at the University of California, I wonder why any intellectual of independent mind would seek an academic career; it is hard for me to imagine anyone getting through it without lasting wounds, deep bitterness, and a taste for revenge.

Despite the successful years at the University of Illinois, when the opportunity came to go back to northern California I grabbed it. I became chairman of the growing sociology department at the University of California, Davis, just as the free-speech movement and the student revolution were beginning down the road at Berkeley. But I was already in my mid-thirties by then, a married man with two small daughters and lots of grown-up responsibilities. In the privacy of my mind, though, I was still the perennial student, the perpetual kid, someone who had hardly done anything but go to school as a marginal outsider. Suddenly at Davis I was a boy imposter, recruiting faculty, playing the politics of FTEs (full-time equivalents), conferring with deans on weighty matters of medical schools and law schools, sitting on important committees judging the incompetence of research institute directors old enough to be my father. Few sociologists have anything good to say about chairing a department, but for me it was an important growing-up experience to be in administration, managing an academic unit and bearing responsibility for its operation and welfare.

Well, there are several pages' worth of autobiographical bits. What is it they contribute to a contextual understanding of my work and the way I go about it? Here is what I make of them: the fact that my family was poor and New York–provincial gave me my persistent identification with have-nots and my distrust and discomfort with men of power. But the humiliation I remember at the grocery store suggests I had aspirations toward middle-class respectability. That was my mother's influence, I think. She was the only woman of her generation in our extended kin group who spoke English without a Yiddish accent. That, along with the fact that she wrote a fine English script, gave her high prestige in our extended family, which compensated somewhat for the

fact that her husband was never able to support her in the style she thought she deserved. She repeatedly would advise me to be cautious and discreet for the sake of my future, to wait until I was somebody before I opened my mouth too wide or too loud.

The stuttering, of course, was a continually painful embarrassment, and it was probably the beginning of my feelings of isolation and marginality. But it also gave me valuable early experience in coping with isolation and accommodating to it. Moreover, it made me hypersensitive to the rhythms of language. To evade blocking I had to rehearse silently and carefully what I wanted to say, choosing words and rhythmic structures that enabled me to get through a sentence without facing a crisis. To this day, when proofreading a manuscript back from a typist, I can immediately detect even the most minor error (for example, a misplaced comma) because the rhythms are not right.

That I was well coordinated and good at sports had, I think, two important consequences. It gave me confidence in my body, in my physical presence, which I consider valuable. Even more important, it gave me a sense of competence that is hard to fake. On the field and in the game, athletic competition is beautiful and moving because it provides one of the too few models where the criteria of performance are clearly central to the tasks at hand. It surely contrasts with intellectual life in that respect, and I think it helped give me my critical eye for sociological performance. I also learned a good bit about jazz phrasing from my friend the black trumpet player in the Marine Corps, and I think those rhythms are in my prose. Instead of using an outline, I hear chord progressions when I am writing well, as if I were soloing with rhythm support. Singing in public also gave me a sense of performance and some experience in overcoming fear.

That I almost certainly would never have gone to college had it not been for that library in the jungle made me sensitive to historical accident and skeptical of the determinisms claimed for macrohistorical variables unless I could see the way they operated in relatively intimate, close-up interaction. My experience in campus politics gave me a sense for the discrepancy between effort and reward and insulated me to some extent against the pieties of the Protestant ethic and the unfelt clichés of political speech—even political speech I agreed with—which are inauthentic because they are political, that is, uttered to win applause or other approval rather than communicate truth or feeling. (Almost all speech is to some extent political, of course, the present instance not excepted.)

The fact that I had a very late literacy made me feel that I had a lot of catching up to do. For many years my peers always seemed smarter, better educated, more sophisticated than I was. That I had to fake a lot under those conditions to maintain my face made me sensitive to the ways in which other people faked a lot to maintain theirs. I still feel more comfortable questioning the authority of authors and lecturers than I do authoring and lecturing myself.

Women have been very important in my life, and I have learned a great deal from them. I was part of a class of six hundred men fresh from World War II to enter a previously all-women's college with eight thousand female students and a heavily female faculty. In a sense I experienced being a member of a sexual minority. Some of the female faculty were hostile to us on the grounds that opportunities for female academics depended on the existence of women's colleges, which our presence threatened. I had my first sociology course from a woman; its subject was mainly women as a minority group. The women students, though, were happy to receive us men, two to four years older than they, battle-scarred and worldly-wise. I began to have a rewarding sex life. That I was athletic, intelligent, and eager, but unlettered, unsophisticated, and "rough," was looked on, I think, as romantic, even sexy, and I think that I was deeply strengthened, in obscure ways I still do not fully understand, to discover that attractive women frequently seemed to prefer me to other men whom I regarded as far more attractive than I was. I mention these matters for two reasons. First, when feminism came on strong around 1970, it was not a new experience for me; I had been significantly exposed to it more than twenty years earlier. Second, my favorable predisposition to feminism was strengthened by my gratitude to women not only for having played an important part in my education but also for having provided me with a good bit of security and ego support at a time when I needed both, to compensate for my amateurishness at intellectual life and help overcome the stuttering.

At Berkeley I finally got the education I was seeking. But unlike many graduate students, I was never anybody's boy or protégé. Reinhard Bendix was my main mentor, and I learned much from him, but unlike many of his other students I was never his research assistant, and I did not work in his style; hence I never had to get used to deferring to him. I learned a lot from Phil Selznick too, but he threw me out of his class once for sassing him, and I was not rehired as an assistant on one of his research projects after spending a year with it, doing my usual carping. Bill Kornhauser helped me with my dissertation, but we tangled over

matters of form. Bill was a very formal assistant professor in the fifties (eventually liberated by the sixties) and I had to go over his head to Reinhard to get approval for my using the first-person singular. My dissertation itself did not arise out of the interests of any of the sociology faculty. It was another historical accident. I was looking for a job, and a business administration professor with a grant to study the Ford Motor Company was looking for a sociology graduate student to study the families of its workers. I got help from my committee with questionnaires and criticism of drafts of chapters, and financial support from the Institute of Industrial Relations, but I had almost no direct supervision in the research. I had to find the problem by myself, and the conception and execution of Working-Class Suburb were largely my own.

I do not mean to suggest that I was a deliberately recalcitrant or rebellious student, vain about my "independence" from influences. I was no more rebellious than the average anti-Parsonian in the fifties, and that was the mode at Berkeley then. Besides, I was in fact dependent on all sorts of things, like the goodwill of my teachers, assistantships, and (failing those) little jobs in bookstores on Telegraph Avenue and auditing courses for a commercial note-taking firm, which helped me learn to write concisely (as well as pick up a little economics and psychology) while putting bread on my table.

I was consistently ambivalent, with no milieu to which I wished to commit myself wholly. After a time I developed defenses against seeing that lack of thorough commitment as a vice or flaw (which armed me against those who later, in the sixties, continually urged "commitment" as if it were some unambiguously transcendent virtue). There was a lot about sociology that was intellectually timid and crushingly boring, but I stuck with it; there was a lot about bohemia I did not like, but I stuck with that too; there was a lot about New York intellectual life I wanted to distance myself from, but when invitations came to write for Commentary, Dissent, The Public Interest, The Nation , and the New York Times , the thousands of miles between them and me made it seem safe to do for a while. And there was a lot about marriage I did not like, but I was a scrupulously dutiful husband for what seemed like a millennium.

In fact, I actively sought discrepant, even contradictory, reference groups, eventually needing the contradictory reinforcements to counter or neutralize the claims that groups (occupation groups, families, ethnic groups, political parties, friendship networks) increasingly make on one's loyalty and identity. It was not the individualism of isolation or detachment I sought; conservative theories of mass society had per-

suaded me early that the unaffiliated person was not an individual but a cipher, all the more vulnerable to manipulation by centralized power. What I looked for was something closer to Georg Simmel's conception of the individual, who exists at the intersection of his or her group affiliations and (something Simmel did not emphasize) at a historically located biographical intersection.

The stuttering, I think, was the beginning of my search for the interstices. Being a Jew in the Marine Corps helped too; I had my first taste of anti-Semitism there. My late literacy made me feel like an imposter among intellectuals for a long time, which perhaps helps account for my greater respect for physical and sensual grace than intellectual sophistication. That I had been a jazz and pop singer and an athlete (and enjoyed both) made me marginal to those of my colleagues who would have thought it quaint in an academic. But having been an athlete and a singer also gave me my firm connection to, and taste for, popular culture and developed my ear for cliché: when watching television and bad movies I can often anticipate dialogue, annoying my family and friends by reciting a line before the character on the screen does.

The marginality and the historical out-of-jointness continued. I was an occasionally noisy radical in the silent, conservative fifties, but by the time the sixties rolled around I was already a successful young academic, too old to be a student radical but too young to be avuncular (which struck me then—and still does—as bad taste). By 1965 I wore orange jeans, began to let my hair grow long, and helped design the first (so far as I know) psychedelic poster to recruit graduate students to a university department. But I was also writing prudent and circumspect essays. The chancellor at Davis called me his hippie sociologist—and promoted me to full professor. There was something unsavory in that. By the mid-1970s, when the New Left had factioned away its communal solidarity, when the counterculture had declined into open and honest therapies, when men's barbers had become hairdressers, and when almost everybody agreed that the country was taking a sharp turn to the right, I was rereading Marx, discovering the neo-Marxists, and trying to find what was interesting in ethnomethodology and be seriously theoretical about the empirical study of culture and ideas. I began to conceive culture as a kind of communicable disease, carried on the backs of live bodies as they staggered through time—a disease I could not begin to understand unless I could identify the groups of sufferers that carried particular strains of it.

In retrospect, I think that my work has frequently defined itself

against the dominant wisdom in my reference groups of intellectuals at particular times, thus reflecting my sense of marginality to them or, more accurately, my tendency to alternate between approach and withdrawal, involvement and detachment. In the fifties, when intellectuals were inveighing against the power of suburbia to transform its residents into mindless conformists, I showed that automobile assembly line workers liked suburban living and that it did not change them much, although, like my peers, I did not like suburbia. In the sixties, when there was a lot of concern with youth culture and the solidarity of generations, I tried to show that subcultures and countercultures were only tenuously connected with chronological age, a variable whose impact was often confounded by more powerful structural factors like ethnicity and class. I tried too to show that the concept of generations had a largely elite referent and that the rhetoric of generations was an ideological device deployable in the struggle to capture "the spirit of the age." In the seventies, when the conventional wisdom had it that the counterculture was dead, and communes passé, I spent several years, on and off, doing field research to discover how the counterculture survived in rural communes by adapting its ideology to the circumstances in which it had to live, thus maintaining the long adversary tradition for yet another generation to inherit. Throughout, my tendency toward involvement is represented by my attraction to topics of current cultural interest; but my tendency toward detachment is apparent in my always being less interested in the events or facts themselves (about suburban living; about youth, age, and cohort solidarity; about communes and countercultures) than in the ideas espoused about them and the cultural ambience in which the espousers moved.

Now that I have provided a selective answer to some of the relations between my life and my work, I want to turn right around and warn you to take nothing of what I have said at face value. Please do not misunderstand me; I have not told you any lies, at least not intentionally. But the account has been severely selective. I have not told you, for example, that along with the marginality goes a certain alienation, to which I am now fairly well accommodated. Still, I regret that expressions of ritual solidarity embarrass me and that I can hardly ever feel like a full participant in them. I am not a good conductor of ceremonies, which means that I am not good at domestic life. I think I would find it easier to be the head of a large corporation than the head of a family.

The facts are all true; the events recounted are not fictious. But I have also imputed values and meanings to those facts and events, and in doing

so I have done a job of ideological work, which is (far more often than not) adaptive or group-serving for collectivities and self-congratulatory for individuals. Not without some justice you could regard these pages as an effort at persuasion—even seduction. My colleague and friend Joe Gusfield might call it a rhetoric, a drama in which I have cast myself as Mr. Nice Guy, who raised himself up by his own bootstraps but never lost his identification with the underdog; the intellectual whose home runs proved he was no sissy; the fancy writer and talker still overcompensating for that stutter; the former ladies' man who affects gratitude but is really boasting. The modest late starter who had to hurry to catch up with, and pass, those who began with greater advantages is really gloating; the vaunted marginality or alternating in-and-outness is really no more than a sly and cynical gutlessness. And despite my mother's voice still at my shoulder counseling prudence, my disdain for the reward system that has so well rewarded me could turn out to be simple ingratitude or a more complex ambitiousness and pride that reaches beyond the academic reward system to a still more prestigious transcendence: hubris. By taking the role of the other, in this case a hostile other, I am trying to show that the autobiographical data I use in order to do self-congratulatory ideological work could well be used by a hostile ideological worker to cut me up. That is as it should be.

Chapter Seven—
Working in Other Fields

Dean MacCannell

No one knows yet who will inhabit this shell [of industrial capitalism] in the future: whether at the end of its prodigious development there will be new prophets or a vigorous renaissance of all thoughts and ideals or whether finally, if none of this occurs, mechanism will produce only petrification hidden under a kind of anxious importance. According to this hypothesis, the prediction will become a reality for the last men of this particular development of culture. Specialists without spirit, libertines without heart, this nothingness imagines itself to be elevated to a level of humanity never before attained.
—Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatz zur Wissenschaftlehre

It has been more than ten years since I left the sociology faculty at Temple University for a research and teaching appointment at the University of California, Davis, College of Agriculture. I should be counted among the lost generation of sociologists in the 1970s who work mainly outside of the discipline. Like the man without a country, I sometimes feel nostalgia for my old intellectual haunts. But there are other separations in my life deeper and more problematic than this one. Spatial and institutional fragmentation is a fact of modern existence. The only question is how we handle it. Do we yield to the demands of this last "development of culture" by narrowing our thoughts and feelings to fit in to the fragments that are called business, government, education, and the like? Or do we attempt, somehow, to change things, to create new arrangements that can be inhabited by whole human beings?

I was born in Olympia, Washington, in 1940, the son of Earle H. MacCannell and Helen Frances Meskimen MacCannell. My father and

mother were too young at the time of my birth (twenty-two and nineteen years old) to have begun their careers. They would both eventually finish college, attend graduate school, earn Ph.D. degrees, and become professors, my father going into sociology before me. But my birth and the birth of my brothers intervened, followed by World War II and a divorce, so that in the actual progression of events my father's first faculty appointment preceded mine by only ten years, and mine preceded my mother's by two.

Given the fact that my mother, my father, and my wife are all university professors, one might assume that I grew up in intellectual and bookish surroundings. Nothing would be further from the truth. I was born of two opposing American types and married yet another, and my entire life has been an exercise in synthesizing contradictions. My father's family is New England Yankee, MIT-educated, originally Boston-based professionals. My mother's family is militant working-class, expioneer, Oklahoma oil field boilermakers and roughnecks, Depression migrants from the dust bowl to the Pacific Northwest. My wife's family is urban (Chicago and New York) European ethnic—Jewish and Italian entrepreneurs and professionals. The only major American experiences not in my background, or that of my children, are farming and oppression based on skin color, two topics that, interestingly, are among my current research concerns.

My father was drafted into the infantry in the late stages of World War II and remained with the occupational forces in Italy after the war, staying there until 1949. I lived with my mother and two brothers in enlisted men's base housing at Fort Lewis, Washington. My brothers and I were sent for visits, often long ones, with my uncles, aunts, and grandparents. My summers were spent with my paternal great-grandmother, Emily Amelia Hughes MacCannell. She was thin, passionate, sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, and very old. She made a habit of saying that I was her favorite among all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, a stance that provoked other members of my father's family. Her favoritism did not lead her to spoil me. On the contrary, she corrected each of my errors of grammar and etiquette on the spot and insisted that I read aloud at least an hour every evening and maintain regular habits of eating, sleeping, and dressing. Except for an early edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin , which I still own, she left me nothing material, but she prepared my heart to give and take unqualified love from another person. The value of this gift is incalculable since the alternative is madness.

I also spent many days and weekends with my maternal grand-

mother, Frances Meskimen, who was the only member of my family on both sides to own an automobile during the war and the immediate postwar years. She was the driver. My grandma Fran was also the first woman welder to enter the ship-building industry in World War II. She is featured in a news documentary from that era that still plays occasionally as filler on late-night television. She provided inspiration for a popular song, "Rosie the Riveter," and later was the subject of an oral-history project in the Women's Studies Program at the University of Washington. She was left-handed, as I am, so it fell to her to teach me to write in cursive. She was also a published poet, and she gave me a manuscript memoir, written in a clear and humorous style, in 1982 not long before she died.

I do not recall ever thinking like a child. My thought processes, as far back as I can remember, were substantially the same as they are today. This is a condition I share with my wife, Juliet Flower MacCannell: we both feel about seventeen years old. I recall my grandfather, Ross Meskimen, a tough, left-leaning union man, giving me my first lesson in critical theory when I was nine. We were walking together in downtown Tacoma when the air raid alert sirens were tested, as they were then once a week at noon.

"What's that?" I shouted.

"It's the atomic attack siren test," he answered, or something to that effect. (I remember the word atomic and that he pronounced siren "sigh-reen .")

"Why do we need it now that the war is over?" I asked.

"So the people who make sirens will have a market for their product," was his instant reply. There is no question in my mind that this childhood incident influenced the way I approached the nuclear question in my article "Baltimore in the Morning After."

My uncle and cousins on my mother's side to this day direct the crews that lift the high-voltage cables onto the towers at the points where the electrical grid crosses the Great Divide. They repair the damage to sawmills that results when a twenty-foot blade leaves its shaft at high speed and cuts its way through the other machinery. My brother William is a pioneer homesteader and frontier newspaper editor in Alaska, where he went to work as a dynamiter. Brother John is an Air Force systems analyst and weatherman but also a gifted builder. Of all the nephews and grandchildren, my maternal relatives refused to teach me their skills because they insisted that I should never have to work with my hands. But through them I came to regard writing as a form of

handiwork, and I went with them to their jobs often enough as a child that, in spite of their efforts to shield me, I later discovered that I am a good pipe fitter and metal worker.

My mother's people did actively teach me never to cross a union picket line and, by example, instilled in me an attitude of fierce independence from authority. I do not believe that any of them ever stayed on a work site more than five minutes after forming the opinion that they were not receiving a fair wage, a fair hearing, or proper respect.

Growing up in this setting, I developed an attitude toward technology that remains with me even today: I feel I must know exactly how everything works. Probably no other quirk of my mind has led me to make so many mistakes. I have taken apart the carburetors of every automobile I have ever owned (including two exotic English sports cars) and have not, in every case, been able to fit them back together again. (I have only been a little luckier with Swiss watches, ignition systems, valve trains, hydraulic door openers, and submersible bilge pumps.) One night as a graduate student at Cornell I was working alone at two or three o'clock in the morning in the data processing lab when the equipment broke down in the middle of a calculation. I was impatient to see the results, so without hesitation I found tools and dismantled the old IBM 101 accounting machine that had failed. About an hour later, when dawn broke, I was surrounded by subassemblies, relays, nuts, wires, and machine screws. I had not found the problem, and in my exhaustion I had lost all sense of how to put the stuff back together beyond a crude, right-hemisphere gestalt not unlike science-fiction "machineyness." After agonizing over some moral and economic choices for a few minutes, I reassembled it as best I could and hung a sign on it saying OUT OF ORDER. It only took the repair person about an hour to fix it when the lab opened in the morning, but he complained more than once about that person who last had serviced the equipment.

Whereas I was able to absorb the values and competencies of my maternal relatives only partially, my mother positively rejected them, imagining academic life to be opposed to the life of a boilermaker, not an extension of it. When I was younger, I thought her position was in error; I still do, but I am softer in my criticism now. It could not have been easy for a little girl, who desired nothing more than to be feminine, to grow up in the Oklahoma oil fields in a family of men, with a mother who came home at night wearing filthy overalls and carrying a metal lunch box in one hand and her welding hood in the other.

Somehow, in this ragbag of defiant Americana, I learned to read

before I went to school and quickly developed advanced taste in reading. When I was eight or nine, I read All Quiet on the Western Front and, soon after, an English translation of Les Misérables . I do not recall who gave me these books or why. On finishing All Quiet , I resolved never to go to war and to resist and oppose it with all my might throughout my life. My ship-building grandmother tried to dissuade me from my radical stand, but Grandpa Ross and my paternal grandmother, Alice MacCannell, supported my position. My pacifist convictions stayed with me until Vietnam, when I decided that armed struggle can be justified if it is necessary to secure self-determination and throw off the yoke of oppression. Thus my work in the antiwar movement coincided precisely with my first acceptance of war. I never changed my mind about Les Misérables . The figure of Inspector Javert attempting to elevate his bureaucratic heartlessness even above the events of the French Revolution still worries and haunts me.

In 1949 my father returned from Italy and entered the University of Washington as an undergraduate. We moved from military base housing to public housing and subsisted without supplementary income on the living allotment provided to students by the GI bill—$120 a month. Our poverty, and the poverty of the other people living in the project, was awful, and I made a silent vow never to go to college, as I judged the cost in human suffering to be too great.

At the university my father proved to be a gifted mathematician, carrying a double major in mathematics-statistics and sociology through the master's degrees, eventually doing a demographically oriented Ph.D. in sociology under the direction of Calvin Schmid in 1958. We were so poor that a research assistantship in the population laboratory brought relief. My mother was able to enroll, taking her undergraduate degree in "integrated studies," with emphasis on English. We all worked at diverse part-time jobs. By the time I was fourteen I was doing the summer gardening and winter furnace stoking for a far-flung network of middle-class households in the north end of Seattle. I started out working by the hour until my client and I could determine how much a particular service ordinarily cost. Then I cut the cost by 10 percent and switched to a piece rate so that I could work twice as fast and almost double my earnings. I built a system of regular after-school appointments on weekly and monthly schedules and was soon earning more than fifty dollars a week, which was more than my father's assistantship paid. In 1952 I spent my first hundred dollars on an English lightweight bicycle with gears. I was one of only two kids in Seattle with such a machine for

about a year; the other was a Japanese paper boy named Art, known to me only because of his bike.

I vividly recall a conversation with my father from this period. We were discussing my social-studies class, in particular the unit on social conditions in urban slums. My father could tell from my comments that I was thinking of these slums as something quite remote, limited to East Coast cities, perhaps. "Step outside for a minute," he said, and I followed him. He gestured at our neighborhood. "You sounded as if you did not know about the slum. This is the slum."

By the time I was twelve I had been introduced to Stuart Dodd, R. E. L. Fairs, George Lundberg, Otto Larsen, Norman Hayner, and the other pillars of the old University of Washington sociology department. In early spring of 1951 or 1952 my family was invited to visit with Lundberg at his summer home on Whidby Island in Puget Sound. It was during this visit that I received my first concrete lesson in sociological concept formation. The house had been sealed up for the winter, and Lundberg asked me to help him pry off a storm shutter. As the shutter came free, we uncovered fifteen or twenty ladybugs, which scrambled together rather than running in all directions when they were disturbed. Lundberg commented, "Hmm, I did not know them to be a socially organized species." Of course, until then I had not thought of animals, insects, or humans as possessing social organization. But there was a clarity of connection of concept and observation in the event that fixed social organization in my mind from that moment forward. Already I was aware of Lundberg's reputation as a leading social scientist, for there was a paperback copy of his Can Science Save Us? on my father's bookshelf. In those days it was the only paperback he had, except for several by Margaret Mead. I thought that any professor whose words were believed to be so important as to have been made available to a mass audience must be a genius, a serious ideologue, or both. Hence I was well primed to learn a first sociological principle from him.

In the early 1950s the families of the graduate students and faculty in the sociology department got together once a year for fun at the Alpha Kappa Delta picnic. I remember especially well playing baseball with Clarence Schrag. He was an excellent hitter in spite of having a wooden hand carved in the shape of a real hand and covered with a skin-toned leather glove. Bobby Fairs told me that Schrag was the professor of crime and that his hand had been shot off in a prison break while he was doing research. I do not know if Fairs had his facts right, but it was the sort of thing that made sociology interesting. (I had occasion to think of

Schrag's hand twenty years later when I was doing research in Holmesberg Prison in Philadelphia.) Bobby Faris was one year ahead of me in the same junior high school. Someone must have told him that he should act friendly toward me because he sought me out and introduced himself to me in the most singular way on the playground at recess. He walked up, placed himself squarely in front of me at about five paces, and flatly announced, "My name is Robert E. Lee Faris the Third, my father is the chair of the finest sociology department in the world, and I am a genius." Oddly enough, this statement did have the effect of putting me at east with him, although it caused me, for a moment, to doubt my own father's good sense. When I reported this weird incident to my father, his response was, "It's all true." I was never close friends with the youngest Faris, but I would often accompany him home, or most of the way home, and warn him about traffic as he had the dangerous affectation of reading books while riding his bicycle. Some years later we were together again briefly at Cornell University as lecturers. His appointment was in mathematics, I believe. Just before he came to Cornell I met his famous father for coffee at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in Montreal, at his father's request. The older Faris told me that I was a sensible person and that I should check on Bobby occasionally after he arrived. He briefly dated our (Juliet Flower's and my) dear friend Leslie Burlingame, who is now a professor of history at Franklin and Marshall College, but no romantic interest developed, and that was the last I heard of him.

I was always sexually precocious and lascivious, and from age fourteen on I regarded every day's passage until I "did it" as a horrendous waste. I was so enormously frustrated that when it finally did happen, at sixteen, I actually lost my virginity twice in quick succession. The first time I thought I did it, I narrowly missed. (It was in the dark on rugged terrain—how is a boy to know?) The girl, a year older but as inexperienced as I, never let on until, on the occasion of our "second" time, I blurted out, "Hey, it didn't really happen last time." "I know," she said. "You were so happy I didn't have the heart to tell you." I could not then, nor can I now, say which of the two times was better. My girlfriend had a clear opinion on the matter, however.

While I was in high school, I determined absolutely that I would not go to college and that I would make a career as a builder and driver of racing cars. As with all my desires, I committed myself totally and absolutely to this goal. I worked for several dealerships in and near Seattle that had active racing programs, at first without pay. I became a

good race strategist and was quick, especially in the rain, in small-displacement modified sports cars—Lotus 11, Porsche Spyder, Fiat Abarth Zagato, A. C. Bristol. On finishing high school I planned to go to Europe and apprentice myself to a major racing organization. Then, in 1957, my father took his first faculty position at San Diego State University (then only a college) and insisted that I join the family in southern California. The move threw me into a dangerous mental depression, from which I have the patient friendship of the great mountaineer Edward Douglas ("Bud") Bernard to thank for pulling me out. I barely finished high school and ran back to Seattle.

In late summer of 1958 a sociology conference was held in Seattle. My father came to the meetings and visited me at Scott Larson Motors, where I was working. He told me I should go to college. I agreed for a perverse reason. I had quite forgotten that I was in possession of a strong intellect, and I felt it would be easy for me to prove to him that I would fail. I tricked myself into thinking that if I made a good-faith effort in college, I could flunk out gracefully at the end of a semester, return to my racing, and not be bothered again after that. I figured the entire episode would be over in about six months and would cost next to nothing—tuition in the California State College system then was thirty-four dollars a semester, and books ran about twenty-five dollars, a small investment for a life of peace and prosperity in the automobile business.

Of course, that ill-conceived decision cost me a life of relative deprivation and turmoil, and the entire episode is not over yet. I earned high grades in college, much higher than in high school, and learned to enjoy taking mental risks based on intuition: for example, I predicted Fidel Castro's eventual victory on an essay exam in a political science course taught by a conservative professor. Two years later I transferred to Berkeley, and two years after that went on to graduate school at Cornell, supporting the effort with a patchwork of part-time jobs, fellowships, and assistantships. The part I loved most about my college coursework was the books I did not understand. I experienced a sensual thrill on first turning the pages of Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts and my statistics textbook, knowing that I did not understand what they meant but was going to find out. I still feel the same excitement today when I find an especially dense passage by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Noam Chomsky, Jacques Derrida, René Thom, or Charles Peirce. (I also love to read authors like Darwin, Marcel Mauss, Georg Simmel, and Mikhail Bakhtin who can represent complex ideas in clear and simple-

seeming language and, in fact, base my own approach to writing more on this second principle than on "pleasure of the text.")

I studied anthropology instead of sociology at first only because I thought it unseemly to take courses with my father's departmental colleagues. When I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley (Bobby Faris's earlier assessment notwithstanding), I had a choice between what were then regarded as the finest sociology department and the finest anthropology department anywhere. I stayed with anthropology for the bachelor's degree for two reasons: First, it was richer than sociology because it focused on culture as well as social organization and was international in practice as well as theory, and second, it was technically more sociological than sociology—that is, it had not accepted psychological explanations of social phenomena to the extent that sociology had. Frank W. Young, who taught briefly at San Diego State before moving to the University of Pittsburgh and eventually to Cornell, made me read Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method, and I took them completely to heart as only a sophomore can. When I read, "EXPLAIN A SOCIAL FACT WITH ANOTHER SOCIAL FACT," I could actually feel an old worldview deflate and sense a new direction for thought and beliefs. After such a manifestation, I thought, it was only a matter of time before we would clean up the last vestiges of psychological mystification and associated political beliefs in bourgeois individualism. That was because I had not yet learned Freud's concept of resistance .

The undergraduate avant-garde on the West Coast in the years 1958–60 was in a full-throttle skid. We would crowd into old cars and speed up the coast or deep into Mexico on a whim. The beat movement was at its crest, and it empowered many of us who were poor but smart to move in wider circles and into positions of leadership among our peers, positions formerly occupied by culturally middle-class, Junior Achiever types. We held ourselves intellectually accountable for much more than was asked in the framework of institutionalized education. If Marx, Freud, and Sartre were not taught in the classrooms, that made Marx, Freud, and Sartre all the more important to us. We got our true education, we thought, out of the old Cody's Books when it was still located on the north side of the Berkeley campus and Fred Cody still ran the register, ordered the books, knew us all by name, and hired us to do inventory when we did not have enough to eat.

My good friend and roommate in San Diego, and later on in Berkeley, where we went together, was Ronnie Wilson, a perpetually "returning" student ten years my senior. Wilson had been a child-prodigy

classical pianist and was about to begin his professional career on the concert stage when he was drafted into the Korean War. He refused combat, so he was given the job of stringing communication wire to the front lines. I believe the experience of seeing men shot and flopping around in their death agony did something to this sensitive soul. In any event, he had an awful time concentrating on his studies and, of course, he refused absolutely to touch a piano. It was characteristic of the ironical quality of his life that he eventually played Carnegie Hall in New York, but as the drummer for the rock group Joy of Cooking.

When I left San Diego for Berkeley in the summer of 1960, I was not alone. An entire intelligentsia departed in a swarm that included Wilson, Tonia Aminoff, Linda Brown, David Crawford (brother of artist Richard Crawford), John Geyer (entering graduate school), Gilberto Leal, Gordon Madison (now an attorney in San Diego, I have been told), Gordon McLure, and others. Most of this group was unable to meet the rigorous Berkeley entrance requirements for transfer students. To the best of my knowledge, of those among us who were admitted, only Aminoff, Brown, and I completed Berkeley bachelor's degrees. In the summer of 1961 Tonia Aminoff and I were married at a judge's home in Oakland in defiance of understandable objections raised by her parents. But we were temperamentally incompatible, so we separated fourteen months later and divorced soon after that before leaving for different Eastern graduate schools.

At Berkeley I was friends with musician Peter Berg and Mike Rossman, an eventual free speech movement leader who was already showing promise as a fine writer and political analyst. Rossman and I talked a great deal about the coming revolution on campus and in the larger society, and out of sheer silliness we went bowling at least once a week. I earned my living then as manager of the new Berkeley Student Union building, and in that capacity I met Senator Barry Goldwater, Pete Seeger, Aldous Huxley, Sonny McGee, Dean Rusk, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, chair designer Charles Eames, and many other interesting people. I also was the first to authorize setting up tables in the student union for leftist student groups to distribute their information alongside the Marine Corps recruiting tables.

I arrived at Berkeley the week Alfred Kroeber died. The news came within hours after I first walked through the new Kroeber Hall thinking what an honor it was for a professor to have an office building named for him. Even though I loved to take the culture area courses in the Berkeley anthropology department, the curriculum was mainly stiff and

theoretical, so I supplemented it with coursework in physics and art. Many years later, in 1976, Nelson Graburn would invite me to come and give a colloquium before the Berkeley anthropology department, and I admit to entering Kroeber Hall on that second occasion with exactly the same feeling of anxious anticipation as on the first. I also sat in the introductory sociology course that was taught by Erving Goffman and Herbert Blumer. There were about seven hundred students enrolled in the course, which met in the auditorium of Wheeler Hall. One day Goffman was lecturing on the essential asymmetry of face-to-face interaction, and he summed up by saying that there are no occasions in which the interactants have equal status within the framework of the interaction. I spontaneously called out from near the back of the hall, "What about an introductory handshake between status equals?" Goffman stepped from behind the lectern and peered through the gloom of the huge auditorium: "Who said that?" I raised my hand and half stood up: "I did." "You'd better see me after class," he snapped and went back to lecturing.

After class he asked me to walk with him in the direction of Sather Gate. As we walked along, we had an interesting argument to which I contributed not a word. Goffman said, "You're right." Then he paused and seemed to be thinking hard about something. "No," he countered, "you're wrong." Pause. "No, you're right." After several such reversals he gave me an intense look of self-satisfaction and even some disdain and declared finally, "No. You are wrong." Then he turned and walked away without another word. We met face-to-face again three years later on Christmas afternoon at his sabbatical residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He gave no indication then of recalling our first encounter.

I went to the Department of Rural Sociology at Cornell because it offered a strong applied and international program. Kennedy was president, and there were some indications in that brief moment between the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War that the United States might develop sensible relations with the Third World. I thought there would be a shift in sociological theory and practice that would lead to the development of a new kind of sociology, truly international in scope, providing approaches to the problems of poverty, exploitation, oppression, and false consciousness. I then thought that sociologists should be working in partnership with Third World nations, as well as with marginal peoples in our own society, to create a research and intellectual base for leadership that would be neutral toward both Western capitalism and Soviet Marxism. I was disgusted with the Soviet Union and the

United States for manipulating Third World peoples into positions of dependency and disadvantage, using force where there is resistance to intimidate the nonaligned—in the Dominican Republic, Bay of Pigs. I was disappointed in anthropology for its retreat from these problems, which developed in regions that included its traditional field sites. And I was equally disappointed in mainstream sociology departments for continuing to focus primarily on the Western urban-industrial proletariat, a class that was about to be superseded by an unprecedented increase in the level of exploitation of Third World labor. I could not understand how these social-science disciplines could fail to use the excellent tools they themselves had invented (especially demography and ethnography) to analyze the shifting base of their own domains.

As I applied to graduate school, I was concerned that the social and economic theories I had studied were not strong enough to explain what was happening in the world. I would eventually read with fascination Roland Barthes's description of the colonial African soldier saluting the French flag in "Myth Today" and see in these early structuralist texts the outlines of a new sociology. But structuralism had not yet developed "consciousness-for-itself," and though I was ready for it, I was also unaware of it. After Talcott Parsons tried it, I became convinced that no individual acting alone could complete the theoretical synthesis necessary to recenter sociology on the general conditions of social existence as they had evolved since 1867. But I thought that each student of society should attempt to initiate this recentering in our selection of research topics and approaches. For my part I wanted to find a program where I could study movements of national liberation, ethnic solidarity, rural poverty, and the adaptations of Western institutions as we attempt to extend our global dominance beyond our historical moment. I was not disappointed in my choice of rural sociology.

Cornell has a superior organization for its graduate education. As Ph.D. students we majored in one field and carried two minors, external to the major, which were potentially major fields in their own right. For example, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology might minor in history and economics. I majored in rural sociology and minored in research methods and anthropology. The comprehensive exams were given by a committee of the student's choosing composed of members of the graduate faculty from the major and minor fields. These exams were, by policy, not restricted to material covered in courses or reading lists. We had to go into the exams ready for anything the committee might ask us, so the preparation for the exam was an introduction to authentic scholarship.

Even though there were no requirements except passing the entrance, comprehensive, and thesis exams, all graduate students took certain courses as a matter of peer tradition. We all took Robin Williams's social-theory seminar this way. We read Parsons's The Social System aloud in class, line by line, with interpretations following every second or third sentence. Frank Young (my teacher at San Diego) gave the course on theories of development in University of Chicago style: What is the central thesis of this book? What is its theoretical orientation? In addition to doing coursework in my major and minor fields, I ranged widely, taking seminars in the history and philosophy of science, civil engineering, archeology, industrial and labor relations, and literary criticism. I made friends on the faculty and with other graduate students; many of them, including Henry Guerlac and Edward Morris, remained among my dearest friends for life.

Juliet Flower entered the graduate program in comparative literature at the beginning of my second year. We had many friends in common, including Barry Alpher, Donald Brown, Robert Maxwell, and Phillip Silverman in anthropology, Barbara Sirota in English, Alan Nagel in comparative literature, Leslie Burlingame in history, and Frances Dahlberg in sociology. I was powerfully attracted to Juliet, both physically and for her evident mental abilities and flawless character. We immediately began our collaboration, which continues to this day. I worked with her on a poem by Victor Hugo; she worked with me on the calculation of a tau rank-order correlation coefficient from Kendall's original paper. "If it is written even partially in words," she said, "we can understand it by reading." I was touched by such courage and innocence and proposed marriage. We were married in Lajas, Puerto Rico, on July 25, 1965, and from that moment I have loved her and our children as much as life itself.

I am not happy "making choices," a locution that is a code for fitting human life into bureaucratic and other institutional forms rather than vice versa. I thought there should never have to be a choice between, for example, science and humanism, Juliet's studies and my own, pure and applied sociology, or career and children. Instead of either/or , I always wanted both/and , not as a matter of indecision or greed but as a matter of commitment to wholeness and understanding. So after the original decision, the one all American males must make between sports and scholarship, I refused most other choices in my life, and I admit that this refusal has led today to some odd accommodations: airplane commuting, $300-a-month telephone bills, intimacy by appointment, too much high-speed

driving, a life my colleague Paul Craig has labeled a masterpiece of organization. But by refusing the either/or , I have been able to continue to have fun, sometimes in excess. I have not always been able to "stay in line," however, and I am afraid that I sometimes irritate those who do.

At about the midpoint of my graduate studies at Cornell there was a closed conference at Johns Hopkins University, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy." It was attended by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and many others. I do not think it possible to overestimate the importance of this meeting even, or especially, for those of us who were not invited. I was attracted to structuralism because it proffered a totalizing comprehension of social life that matched my own personal predispositions. The structural explication of binary oppositions, as best exemplified in Roman Jakobson's linguistics or Claude Lévi-Strauss's study of myth, potentially lifts sociology out of its complicitous relationship with conventional morality and established social forms. By transcending and describing the oppositions that give order and meaning to language and life, structuralism was more than a way of doing social science. The structural enterprise paralleled the urgent need to reconstruct the integrity of the human self from the fragments of modern experience, not by looking backward or by assertion, as was occurring in the realms of religion and politics, but by careful scholarship and analysis. I would eventually find in the semiotic idea of the sign an original synthesis of fact, idea , and interpretation , the element from which all of social life is constructed. This idea of the sign would resolve for me some of the antinomies of modern sociology: the division between macro and micro studies, qualitative and quantitative methods, theory and application. But by the time that happened, I had already left the field.

The idea for a book on studying tourism came to me about halfway through my graduate studies when I was in southwestern Puerto Rico doing research on farm structure in some poor villages. I could not help wondering, What is the main form of North-South interaction, and what is really happening here of potential long-range importance? My attention would vacillate between the impoverished farmers in my sample and the glittering high-rise resort hotels on the beaches. My intuition was strong that some of the secrets of global intercultural relations and change lay locked up in a hidden connection between peasant agriculture and modern mass tourism. When I returned to Cornell, I proposed a study of Third World tourism as a dissertation topic, but my commit-

tee rejected it as too cumbersome. So, following my usual perverse practice when confronted with denial, I came up with a second proposal, as unwieldy as the first, to do a comparative structural analysis of social conditions in forty-eight states. I completed the data gathering, analysis, and writing in less than a year and won the Dissertation Award of the American Rural Sociological Society. Juliet and Goffman were angry with me for compromising on the dissertation topic. I was corresponding with Goffman, and we met when we could. He told me over lunch in a café near the University of Pennsylvania, "Any idiot can do an empirical dissertation. Back at Chicago, if we had someone who could do an empirical dissertation in less than a year, we wouldn't let them do it. We made them do ethnography and left the empirical stuff to the people who were actually challenged by it." I did not share Goffman's opinion that ethnography always and inevitably requires more rigor than research involving tests of hypotheses, nor did I argue the point with him. I think he was secretly pleased that I could do regression analysis.

Soon after my dissertation defense Juliet and I left for Europe. I was as excited to see Paris as anyone since Walter Benjamin, and I felt immediately at home there. I wrote a postcard to my friends at Cornell: "It is a great place to live but I would not want to visit here." In the United States I had real difficulty explaining my interest in rural sociology, often encountering virulent anti-intellectual stereotyping unfortunately even among my most intellectual acquaintances. "Rural sociology—what do you do, count cows? Ha ha." Not so among the French. My first Parisian cab driver said, "Rural sociology—formidable . Today there is nothing more exciting or important than trying to understand the Third World." My sentiment exactly.

Juliet studied with Derrida at the École Normale Supérieure, and I attended Lévi-Strauss's class on myth at the College de France in the afternoons after my French lessons at the Alliance Française in the mornings. Lévi-Strauss's lectures often exceeded my limited grasp of the language, but my difficulties were small compared to those of the blue-clad scholars from the People's Republic of China who sat to my right in the same row. It was in these courses, from Lévi-Strauss and Derrida, that we heard of semiotics for the first time as a living science, that is, as something other than a curiosity of intellectual history that pops up every three hundred years. Ironically, it was the French philosopher Derrida who introduced us to the writings of the American philosopher Charles Peirce, initiating our semiotic studies in earnest.

We left France at the end of the winter quarter and studied briefly in Zurich, but we hastily returned to Paris for the occupation of the Sorbonne and the events of May 1968. I can still give precise instructions on how, in the heat of fighting, to transform a street barricade from a defensive position into a serious offensive weapon. Some bittersweet images from that revolutionary moment (like the wall graffiti, "my alienation stops where your alienation begins") remain fixed in mind. The faculty delighted the assembled revolutionary students when, after hours of planning for the occupation of virtually every major institution in Paris from the stock exchange to the opera, the professors stood up and wearily announced that they would occupy their own offices. When the French government "forces of order" finally got the upper hand in the fighting and began their cleanup, Juliet and I made the grand tour of student-worker revolutions in Berlin, Bologna, and Istanbul. We tried to get into Czechoslovakia and Greece, where the most interesting fights were taking place, but we were denied entry. We were, however, welcomed as nonaligned American student hitchhikers in Yugoslavia as well as in Bulgaria, where we were provided friendly transit through some rural areas by a twenty-vehicle convoy of the Soviet army.

I thoroughly enjoyed my rides with Bulgarian truck drivers, who were able to give clear explanations of the difference between Eastern European socialism and Western capitalism, at least from their perspective. Yes, they owned their own trucks and carried loads for hire, establishing their own rates and routes. Their trucks cost them about five years of wages at a regular, unskilled job, and they had to pay in cash. Usually they lived at home with their mothers for about seven years while saving most of their wages to buy a truck. In short, as near as I could figure it, the main difference between socialism and capitalism, from the standpoint of a Bulgarian truck driver, was that under socialism mothers were used as a substitute for bank credit. I told them that the same was true for the underclasses in the United States.

According to an agreement worked out in advance, we returned from Europe in the summer of 1968 to my first postdoctoral academic appointment. I was senior research associate at the Cornell Center for International Studies and lecturer in rural sociology at a salary of twelve thousand dollars a year. Under the direction of William Foote Whyte, William Friedland, Frank Young, and Douglas Ashford (in the government department) I started the Macrosocial Accounting Project at Cornell, a data bank and methodology for measuring social conditions at the community level in Third World countries.

In the spring of 1969 the black students at Cornell armed themselves and occupied the student union building, issuing a series of demands for the establishment of an Afro-American studies program. The administration yielded to many of the demands, but the faculty refused to ratify the agreement between the black students and the administration. Immediately, virtually the entire student body sided with the black students and occupied several key campus buildings, closed the university, and threatened to burn it down unless the original agreement was ratified by the faculty. Although I was nominally on the staff, my sentiments were on the side of the students, and Juliet and I were with about eight thousand infuriated demonstrators in the gymnasium at the moment of the deadline when Professor Robert Asher of the anthropology department entered the hall and asked for "a few more hours." He told us that he had been with the faculty and that they were meeting continuously and were about to come to a decision he thought would be agreeable to the black students and their supporters. I knew Asher because he had been on my graduate committee, but few others did. He did not introduce himself, and he spoke for only about one minute; but his sincerity was evident, and there is no doubt in my mind that in that minute he prevented the certain torching of Cornell University. I do not know if Asher was acting on behalf of his colleagues or on his own. Either way, it took enormous courage to do what he did.

I was still "under thirty" and very restless. Juliet was finishing her Ph.D. It was highly unlikely that we could both find appropriate positions at Cornell, and no one should have to commute to or from Ithaca, New York. We agreed that if Juliet could find a faculty position in Boston or Philadelphia, I would quit Cornell and follow, even without prospects. Our reasoning was that she could begin her career, and I could write The Tourist, and that I might pursue postdoctoral studies in Boston with Noam Chomsky or in Philadelphia, my first choice, with Erving Goffman. And that is just the way it worked out. Almost. Juliet was appointed assistant professor of French at Haverford College, on the Philadelphia main line. So at the end of one year I quit Cornell, and we moved.

From my twelfth year on, the month of August 1969 has been the only time I was ever unemployed. I have quit several times and desired nothing more than to be unemployed, but have never been so honored. It also happens that during the month of my unemployment, while doing nothing, I made about five thousand dollars, a sum that is difficult for me to duplicate even in today's inflated currency. On September

3 or 4, I walked into the Temple University sociology department asking to teach a section of the introductory course for pocket money; I was offered, on the spot, an assistant professorship. When in a somewhat bewildered state I accepted, I was told that the university owed me two months back pay since technically I was hired as of July 1. This windfall, combined with six weeks of severance pay from Cornell (one month earned vacation plus two weeks of unused sick leave), made a goodly sum. Experience has convinced me that the reason I have little money is because I work so hard, and if I was only smart enough to stop working again, I would surely be rich. The richest people I have met do not work, and the poorest landless agricultural laborers are the hardest workers I know.

At Temple I eventually took over the required courses in graduate theory (classical and modern) from Roscoe Hinkle, who was about to return to Ohio State University. I taught these courses using close-reading methods I learned in literature seminars at Cornell. The students read theoretical texts by Durkheim, Simmel, Marx, Mead, and so on, usually four a semester, as well as selected secondary comments, reviews, and extended analyses of the original texts. Their assignment for each of the original thinkers was to show exactly how a particular secondary comment (of their own choosing) was in error in its evaluation or appraisal of the original text, using that text as evidence. The assignment worked at several levels, from simple misreadings and errors in accounting for facts to total failure on the part of the critic to understand the original theory. The students in all cases used this assignment to find the limits of their own critical abilities, learned basic theory seemingly by accident, covered much of the secondary literature, and developed considerable self-confidence in the process. The seminar often had more than fifty graduate students in it, drawn from all the social-science disciplines and professional schools on campus. Several students began or finished their Ph.D. work with me at Temple and went on to become professors: Grace Chao Ayang, Edward Armstrong, Janet Connolly, Glenn Jacobs, Patrick Nolan, and Deborah Schiffrin. In the early 1970s I taught a seminar in ethnomethodology and semiotics, the first such course given anywhere, I believe.

On arrival in Philadelphia I took Goffman's seminar in social organization at Penn, as planned, sitting in the course with my friend Robert Maxwell, also a postdoctoral student. In addition, I was hired by Paul Hare to work as senior research associate in the Haverford College Center for Peace Research, where I helped write training manuals for

demonstration marshalls and wrote my monograph A Dramaturgical Analysis of 146 Protest Demonstrations . All this may sound like a fast and smooth beginning, but it was not. I was very fond of several of my junior colleagues at Temple, including Mark Hutter, Margaret Zahn, Patrick Luck, Richard Juliani, and Kenneth Reichstein, but I noticed right away that it was the less likable ones who were being advanced in the department. Where did I fit into this system, I wondered. Then, as soon as Juliet's departmental chairman at Haverford heard that I was to be employed, he fired her, effective at the end of her first year, commenting to me, "That is simply too much money for a young couple to have," and "I hear there may be something part-time for her at Beaver College." My reaction was irrational from an economic standpoint, but it satisfied my passions: I resigned my Temple appointment, also effective at the end of the first year. I still had not been able to begin writing The Tourist, and I had not yet developed a taste for dealing with the bureaucrats, weightless liberals, and small-time real-estate speculators who also happen to be faculty members and administrators in American universities.

Looking forward to freedom from institutional twaddle, we decided it was a great time to have a baby. So we finished what we thought was our first and last year as professors, methodically saving one of our paychecks each month, bought tickets on the SS France and moved to Paris. The war in Vietnam seemed as though it would never end, and we wanted our baby to have an option for non–United States citizenship. We were also concerned that we were among the "unindicted coconspirators" in the Harrisburg trial of the Berrigan brothers. The United States government had indicted the Berrigans and several other friends of ours for having "conspired to kidnap Henry Kissinger." Paris was the only place, we thought, to be unemployed and pregnant, inclined toward rural sociology and semiotics, and possibly fugitives.

Everything worked out as we had planned, except the unemployed part. Our son Daniel got his French citizenship in the American Hospital in Paris. I finished the first draft of The Tourist and gave speeches on guerrilla strategy at antiwar teach-ins. But immediately on my arrival I was contacted by the American College to teach their sociology courses. Their regular professor had suddenly fallen ill. I accepted.

When the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail and failed to stop the southward flow of supplies, I knew the war would soon end. I also knew that the United States government would take revenge on the universities by initiating an academic repres-

sion that would last at least a decade or until the coalition that had formed between intellectuals, Western social scientists, Third World peoples, and marginal domestic groups was broken. I felt directly and personally threatened and wanted desperately to return to the United States. I wanted a position in a strong, research-oriented agricultural university where I might monitor, up close, efforts to destroy recently hard-won knowledge about social and cultural development. I was even able to imagine in advance the precise form that the repression would take, namely, the redefinition of development in entirely business, economic, and technical terms, leaving out any serious consideration of culture or social consciousness except as constraints to be overcome. But at that moment there were no such academic positions to be found, certainly not for the generation of 1968. In fact, there were no jobs, period.

Then with uncannily accurate timing came a letter from Jack V. Buerkle, chairman of the sociology department at Temple. The letter explained that he and the dean had eventually decided to refuse to accept my resignation, that they had extended to me a one-year leave of absence without pay, and that they were expecting me to return and resume teaching the theory courses in September. There is something structurally peculiar about universities that makes traditional lines of authority something of a joke, and people who seek power within universities are often either deluded careerists or really serious political conservatives. But it has been my good fortune to serve under several department chairpersons and academic administrators who are also excellent and insightful, albeit low-key, human beings. Olaf Larsen at Cornell, Jack Buerkle at Temple, and Orville Thompson at Davis are among the best. I was, and am, genuinely grateful for Buerkle's help at that crucial moment. We returned to Philadelphia as requested.

The next four years were characterized by the usual academic combination of institutional success and personal poverty. I sent out my first papers for publication on my own: an empirical analysis of the causes of poverty (based on my dissertation) and a semiotically informed ethnographic report on an aspect of face-to-face interaction. Economic Development and Cultural Change sent back the usual petty and indecisive quasi-acceptance, but Thomas A. Sebeok, editor in chief of Semiotica, was unequivocal in his positive response. He made me want to publish and had an important effect on the form and direction of my writing that extends to this day. With fine teaching evaluations and acceptances coming in from American Journal of Sociology, Human Organization,

and elsewhere, the annual renewal notes on my assistant professor's contract by the senior faculty were always unanimous. At the same time we were so poor that we could not afford to buy blankets for our bed or stay in hotels at professional meetings. My field notes were stacked in cardboard boxes around our apartment. We survived by my moonlighting at Rutgers against the expressed will of my dean at Temple and by contract research at Holmesburg Prison. The Law Enforcement Assistance Agency wanted to know why the inmates had stabbed the warden and assistant warden to death with sharpened screwdrivers. The inmates readily admitted their crime and said it was for political reasons and to dramatize their situation. Marge Zahn, Bob Kleiner, and I convinced the LEAA that an ethnographic report on living conditions might provide a more detailed understanding of the problem. So for a year, once or twice a week, I went unprotected into the prison population, including murderers and rapists, to feed my family. My situation was precisely that of all of the guards and most of the professional criminals in lockup: We all faced down each other to get a living. Actually, I was safer on my own than if I had enjoyed the protection of the guard. The custodial staff hated my presence, so I had to depend entirely on my friends among the inmates, which is the first thing both prisoners and ethnographers must learn in order to have a chance at survival.

In the course of my life I have driven across the United States from coast to coast a total of fourteen times, often taking about a month to make the trip, staying on back roads. Once, though, I drove from San Francisco to Ithaca, New York, in three days, unassisted. Most of those trips were made during the summers in the gas crisis years, 1971 to 1975. As soon as school was out in the spring, we would load our car full of books, field data, and notes, drive to Juliet's family home in the San Francisco Bay area, stay for the summer, and drive back to Philadelphia at the end of August, sometimes stopping at the national sociology meetings on the way. I began making observations for my current project on "American Mythologies" during those annual migrations. I am just now old enough to know what a slow worker I really am, that a project usually takes me about ten years from start to finish.

I did most of my writing in those years in Juliet's parents' garage on a table between the washing machine and the ironing board. Juliet's mother, Patricia Flower, was an extraordinary human being with acute insight into character, a gift she freely shared, getting herself into trouble with those among us nicely socialized to overlook all the little positive and negative details of thought and behavior. But I always looked

forward to my conversations with her, and I miss them now. She was my best friend. The two traits I admire most are not often found together in the same person: critical insight that cuts to the heart, and love and acceptance of everything that is human. Patricia Flower had both those qualities in as great a measure as I have witnessed in anyone, although Goffman was a close second.

I pretend to no expertise when it comes to raising children. I fashioned a few crude principles at the beginning, focusing mainly on language, and held to them. We read to our children for at least an hour every night starting from when they were only a few months old. (And they still read, beg to read, for at least an hour every night, usually much longer.) I also made it my unwavering practice to discuss and explain everything with them from the moment of their birth, exactly as if they were an adult companion, even though that practice occasionally drew concerned stares from strangers in public places. And from the first utterance, we never let a mispronunciation or grammatical error go uncorrected. Interestingly, language is not something a very young child takes personally, and this model of precision and early adult competency extended itself easily and naturally into every other area of my children's lives (except, of course, sports). Today, at ages eleven and fourteen, Jason and Daniel are my traveling companions of first choice and my favorite conversation partners, as well as critical colleagues and the best audience around for a bawdy joke (and the best tellers). They have honored me with unforced respect, which far exceeds reasonable expectation, and from the moment of their conception have given me nothing but the greatest pleasure.

In 1973 and 1974 Goffman was sending my completed manuscript of The Tourist around to his contacts to help me find a publisher. I believe his effort was genuine, but he simply had no luck. Or, his contacts were enjoying rejecting my manuscript, something they might have wanted to do to Goffman himself but were afraid. After a year he gave it back to me, saying he was sorry but I was on my own. I got contract offers, including substantial cash advances, by return mail from both Schocken Books and the Johns Hopkins University Press. The Tourist remains in print to this day, selling as well now as in its first year, but only recently have sociologists begun to read it. In the first few years it seems to have been read mainly by architects, artists, and anthropologists, and it made many new friends for me in those fields. I was especially lucky to have met the great critic of modern architecture, Donald Appleyard, through The Tourist and to have many interesting and thor-

oughly enjoyable conversations with him before his untimely death in the early 1980s.

In the mid-1970s sociology seemed to be falling apart, mentally and physically. The University of Pennsylvania turned off the electricity at the Center for Urban Ethnography. I worried that if Goffman, William Labov, and Del Hymes could not keep their workshop open, who could? My closest ally among the senior faculty at Temple, Bruce Mayhew, resigned. One night Paul Hare dropped by. Recently divorced, he had a French friend with him and was as bright-eyed as a kid. He told me he was leaving for South Africa to head the sociology department at a university there. He took from his jacket pocket an associate professor's contract and a one-way ticket to Johannesburg, which he said were mine. All I had to do was sign them. I said something impolite like "You fucking maniac—what do I want to go to South Africa for?" Hare was dignified. "Because the war is over here. Because we need you. Because South Africa is where the next great revolution in human relations is going to take place. Because it is your chance to help make history." I did not even glance at Juliet as I handed Paul back his offer. My second son, Jason, was soon to be born, and I made one of those "choices." As it happened, that was my last chance to have a career in sociology.

For several years my friend Isao Fujimoto and a few others had been struggling with some success on the West Coast to bring human values into agricultural research at the University of California, Davis, and to establish a focus on food as well as commodities, on workers as well as machines, and on the needs of family farmers and rural ethnic groups as well as major agribusiness corporations. One day in 1974 Fujimoto called me up. "Could you come out and lend a hand?" I have always regarded Isao Fujimoto as one of America's living national treasures. "Certainly," I said. When I arrived, I found the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences under Orville Thompson to be a structuralist's dream. It had a distinguished design group (now a separate department), a museum of Third World art, and subprograms in Asian American and Native American studies, as well as the community development group, of which Fujimoto and I were part.

Davis would eventually turn out to be an ideal setting for Juliet and me to write The Time of the Sign, a series of critical and theoretical essays designed for the social sciences and the humanities but without any specific disciplinary framework. Applied behavioral sciences was explicitly interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, in its original concep-

tion, and none of the discipline-based humanities or social-science departments had sufficient force or desire to co-opt our little semiotic revolution. We wanted to show that minds can exist outside of institutional categories and that many important questions in the social sciences and the humanities are not being asked from within the disciplines. In fact, a new life and career sprung forth from The Time of the Sign, as well as a new network of friends, including Thomas and Jean Sebeok, John Deely and Brooke Williams, Paul Bouissac, Paolo Fabbri, Umberto Eco, Jonathan Culler and Cynthia Chase, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhaus, Louis Marin, Tony Wilden, Julia Palacios and Daniel Pedrero, Susan Buck Morss, and many others. In 1985 I was elected United States representative to the International Semiotic Studies Association. Juliet was called into a tenure position in comparative literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches contemporary critical theory, something that was simply not possible at Davis. (Her thousand-mile-a-week commute actually brought enormous relief from the almost complete failure of her Davis colleagues to understand her work.) We are co-executive editors of the American Journal of Semiotics . Separated geographically we continue to collaborate. Ironically, after a ten-year hiatus, The Time of the Sign has begun to establish a link back to sociology, making new friends for us in that field, including Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Alain Cohen, Fred Davis, and Harold Garfinkel. (Of course, there were some friends in sociology who remained constant throughout, notably Erving Goffman and Bennett Berger.)

During most of this decade of intense semiotic activity that has carried us to many interesting parts of the world, I have served as chairman of graduate studies in community development at Davis. In this capacity I have honestly tried to create some new institutional arrangements for whole human beings. In its original conception, at Davis, community development meant research on material conditions and class relations, work, industry and agriculture, and the effect of all of these on community life. It meant communication and understanding (and failures of understanding) between ethnic groups at the community level. It meant understanding language, art, architecture, music, games, ceremony, and ritual, all that makes community life interesting, even possible. Finally, it meant advanced critical evaluation of larger social issues, nuclear technology and politics, gender relations, the environment, poverty, and inequality. In short, the program was originally designed around the production of knowledge that empowers people to create their own collective des-

tiny. After we were able to recruit Marc Pilisuk from Berkeley, we had some of the best faculty available for these purposes.

I wrote Lévi-Strauss about the promise of the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences at Davis shortly after my arrival in 1976. He wrote back saying that he was fascinated and he would certainly visit if he ever left France. Much to my surprise, he actually did visit in the winter of 1985 to receive an important honor from the university. We had a beer in the Davis faculty club. I told him about the design group, the museum, Indian art, studies of the structure of agriculture, ethnic groups, critical theory, and semiotics. What about them? The original pieces continue to exist, I explained, but, after the fashion of all institutional "progress," not together, not as a structural totality. Lévi-Strauss raised one eyebrow and looked down at the table.

Chapter Eight—
From Socialism to Sociology

Nathan Glazer

A young scholar, Douglas Webb, has been at work for a few years on a book he proposes to title From Socialism to Sociology . I hope he does not mind me appropriating it for this memoir, for I am one of those—we seem to be legion—who has followed that trajectory. There are different variants of those of us who have managed the passage. I am tempted to construct one of those fourfold tables beloved of sociologists with the horizontal axis reading "strong or weak final commitment" and the vertical reading "strong or weak initial commitment." The upper left-hand box holds those who were solidly socialist and ended up solid sociologists. Three other possibilities exist, including the lower right-hand box containing those whose commitment to socialism was not as firm as it might have been—and whose commitment to sociology is not as firm as it might be.

Despite Saint Paul's injunction against those who blow neither hot nor cold, I feel I am best placed in that lower right-hand box. This is not to say I have no commitments, but they were not to socialism then, nor to socialism now. It is true that before college, during college, and after college I thought of myself as a socialist. But by 1947 I was no longer writing articles in which, directly or indirectly, I indicated such an affiliation. My transition from socialism to sociology occurred rapidly. My fourfold table does not include all crucial possibilities: there were those who were socialists before becoming sociologists and remained socialists after becoming sociologists. But in the mid- and late 1940s there

was something about sociology—for those of us who were socialists and were becoming sociologists—that undermined faith.

Certainly, the kind of sociologist I became was affected by the kind of socialist I was. I was a socialist not by conversion but by descent. My father always voted for Norman Thomas for president. I recall—it must have been the 1936 election, when many New York socialists and social democrats were voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the new American Labor party ticket, designed for such as they—becoming aware on election day that my father, a quiet man who did not try to convert anyone to anything, had voted for Norman Thomas. His children of voting age had voted for Roosevelt and the others naturally supported Roosevelt. (He had seven children, and I was the youngest.) But the term socialist by descent in New York City in the 1930s requires further definition: I was what would be called today a social democrat. Again, it was a matter of descent. My father, though mild, was strongly anticommunist. He was a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and, after the fierce battle over control of the union in the 1920s, communists had as bad a reputation among ILGWU members as among middle Americans. Had he been a member of the Fur Workers Union, my politics by descent would very likely have been communist.

Undoubtedly other parts of my early political and cultural makeup must also be ascribed to family influences. My father was an observant Jew, but he read the Forward, not the Morning Journal, and did not like those who made too much of their orthodoxy. He expected his children to go to synagogue, as he did. Since he did not base his expectation on intellectual or theological grounds, there was no way of disputing him on those grounds, had we been of a mind to. To him it was simply what was done, without explanation or justification. His mildness extended to Zionism: ours was not a Zionist household, but neither was it anti-Zionist. He was content to send his children to a Hebrew school that taught Hebrew and displayed a map of Palestine, the Jewish national flag, and the Jewish National Fund collection box. He did not especially seek out a Yiddishist school, though that was the language he and my mother used at home and, I am sure, at work. I cannot recall him ever speaking English, though I think he could. In the clothing shops in which he worked, while there might be Italian and other workers, there were always enough Jewish workers, and Jewish foremen and owners, to make Yiddish a shop tongue. I do remember my mother speaking

some English, however: I would go shopping with her, and not all the tradesmen were Jews.

I suspect that Jewish eclecticism was common in New York when I was growing up: socialist, but not too socialist; Orthodox, but not too Orthodox; friendly to Palestine, but not a Zionist; Yiddish-speaking, but not a Yiddishist. I was aware—who could not be?—of those who were more intense about some part of this mix and of those who were communists. Even in my father's landsmanshaft, a club or organization of people who came from the same town or village in Eastern Europe, there was at least one reader of the Jewish communist daily Freiheit . Our family culture rejected the extremes—an intense commitment to communism, Orthodoxy, freethinking, anarchism, Yiddish. Of all the Jewish variants of the day, the one for which I think my father had the most respect was Young Israel—the "modern" Orthodox youth organization that supported the creation of a Jewish state.

I speak of my father, not my mother, though she was by far the more vivid personality. She did not have strong views about anything outside the realm of proper personal and familial behavior. There she could be a terror. But when it came to all those variants of Jewish religion, politics, and culture into which the Jewish population of New York had splintered, she had no strong views except that, like my father, she opposed all excess and extremism.

In education, once again I think we were placed with that very large group, not written about much in memoirs and histories, in which the passion for education was muted. This meant we would get more education than our Italian neighbors, but we were not expected to go to college. My father's formal education was limited to a few years of religious school in Poland; he read Yiddish and the Hebrew prayer book. Both my parents wrote long letters in Yiddish to those they left behind in Poland.

We knew there were Jewish parents who were indifferent to education and showed their indifference by insisting that their children go to work, in the family store, or as errand boys, or doing whatever they could to bring in some cash. Poor as we were, there was no pressure to work while we were going to school. And I suspect my older brothers and sisters simply followed the norm for Jewish immigrant and second-generation children of their ages. My oldest brother went to work at twelve or thereabouts—but at that time graduation from high school was far from universal. The next two children, my older sisters, went to high school and took the commercial course. The next brother was the

first to go to a regular high school; my parents, thinking of our needs, insisted to his distress that he attend a trade school. Graduating during the Depression, he never worked at his trade.

The three youngest children all began college—my brother finished (and went beyond), and my sister left after a few years to go to work. I am enough of a sociologist to know that the fact that I was not put under any pressure to work or contribute to family expenses was simply because I was the youngest. I showed no sign of being the brightest; indeed, some evidence indicates that I was not. But I was able to pursue my education wherever it would take me. I do not recall my parents ever making a suggestion as to what I should become or do. My next oldest brother, the only other sibling who graduated from college, was my "manager," noting that I did well at school and figuring out what would be best for me.

I liked drawing. In another family someone might have suggested that I pursue a career based on that. But by the time I entered high school, it seemed clear—why, I do not know—I would do something with words, not in math, science, or the arts. The fact is role models were in scarce supply. I recall there was someone on our block who had become a high-school teacher. He was the object of universal admiration, as it was known to be very hard for Jews to become high-school teachers. It was believed they could not pass the oral examination because of their Jewish accent. But enough did: there were quite a few Jewish teachers in my high school, James Monroe, which we were told was the largest in the world—sixteen thousand students. Most of them attended "annexes," high-school classes in elementary-school and junior high-school buildings, and even when we got to the main buildings, we attended only a half-session, morning or afternoon. Classes were large, and it was not possible for teachers to pay much attention to us. We seemed often (perhaps more commonly in elementary school and junior high school) to be arranged by size, the smallest in the front and the largest, unfairly, doubling up in the back seats.

But the education must have been sound. For one thing, the curriculum was dictated by the requirements for entry into the city colleges, City, Hunter, Brooklyn, and Queens: three years of one language, two of another, four years of English, two and a half years of math, and similar amounts of history and science. One did have electives: most of my classmates added physics or trigonometry to their two or three years of math and science. In my senior year I took the course that made the deepest impression on me, fourth-year French, and found myself in a

small class in which the first assignment was to read eighty pages of a detective story. (I had never before been asked to read more than three pages of French.) It certainly did wonders for my facility in reading, if nothing else.

The first glimmer of what was to end up as a career in sociology was neither an exceptional curiosity about the social world nor a bent arising from family culture. Rather, I realized that one should pursue one's best chances, and since I was not particularly good at math and science, and no one dreamed of a career in the arts, it had to be words. But what to do with words was not clear.

I entered City College in February 1940 (City in those days had two entering and graduating classes a year, keyed to the New York City public-school calendar) and majored in history. I liked history and had a good memory. But my academic life soon had to contend with another interest. I was persuaded by a fellow student to attend a meeting of Avukah, the student Zionist organization. I was not a Zionist but was willing to hear what there was to be said for Zionism. It was an accident that had a strong impact on the rest of my life. The speaker was Seymour Melman, a recent graduate of City College who had just spent a year in Palestine and was reporting on his experiences. Had Avukah been simply a Jewish organization, I doubt that it would have made much impact on me. But these were socialist Zionists. What is more, they were intellectual socialist Zionists and looked down on nonintellectual socialist Zionists.

Melman was a charismatic figure. (The author of many books, he is now a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University. At the time there was no hint of what he might become—as was true of most of us.) What led me to speak to him after his lecture I do not know. But soon I was on the staff of Avukah Student Action (the organization's national newspaper) and had become a Zionist; indeed, before that was settled, I was named editor. No loyalty oaths were required to become a member of Avukah. We had a three-point program, presented in documents portentously titled "theses," and in theoretical pamphlets. The organization may have been Zionist but the culture was in most ways left sectarian. We were generally allied on campus issues with the anti-Stalinist left—the socialists and the Trotskyites.

The three points of our program were to build a "non-minority Jewish center in Palestine," to fight fascism, and to foster a democratic American Jewish community. This program represented a somewhat off-center Zionism. The term non-minority was meant to leave room

for a binational state of Jews and Arabs. In those days we believed it possible for the two nations to share power, with neither being in the minority in a political or cultural sense. Our notion was that if both nations were guaranteed equal political rights, the Arab majority of Palestine would allow unrestricted Jewish immigration. At a time when Jews were being hunted down by the Nazis, when the doors of the United States and other Western countries were closed to Jewish refugees, and when Palestine itself had been closed to Jewish immigration by the British, unrestricted immigration was the minimal demand of every Zionist group, even one as eccentric as ours. In retrospect, our views were naive.

Avukah was a switching point on the road from socialism to sociology. At first it emphasized the socialism, of which I knew little until I became involved. But Avukah, following the pattern of other left sectarian organizations, had "study groups," in which we read not only Zionist classics but also socialist classics. Bukharin's Historical Materialism was particularly favored by some of our elders. But we were not Leninists. Though left, and critical of social democrats, the radical leaders of Avukah who tried to influence us were (Rosa) Luxemburgian—revolutionary, but against a directing central party and for education of the working masses. It was a very congenial bent. The only issues that called for action were Zionist ones; for the rest, education was sufficient. The doctrine hardly mattered, I am convinced. It is almost embarrassing to say we believed in revolution. The only way to relieve the embarrassment is to confess that we really did not.

What actually mattered to us was not our doctrines but the people we met and the things we read. For example, we read Partisan Review and The New International , in which Sidney Hook, James Burnham, and Dwight Macdonald then wrote. We often invited Macdonald to our summer camps, devoted to intensive "education." He had started the journal Politics ; some members of our group attended the early meetings and some wrote for it. My predecessors at Avukah Student Action had been Chester Rapkin, then beginning a career as a housing economist that would lead him to Columbia and Princeton, and Harold Orlans, who studied anthropology at Yale while working in an insane asylum as a conscientious objector during World War II (he wrote brilliantly on the joint experience for Politics ). Alfred J. Kahn, one of the three (very modestly paid) officers of Avukah, was to become a leading social worker and analyst of social policy; another, Meir Rabban, was to become, after some years in Palestine and Israel, a professor of psy-

chology at Sarah Lawrence. It would be impossible to list all the members of Avukah who became professors. No one expected that they would become professors before the war.

As editor of Avukah Student Action one of my duties—as Chester Rapkin explained—was to liven up the pages with pictures and cartoons, and I could find them free at the New Leader by burrowing through a pile of cuts they received from unions and other sources. There I met Daniel Bell. An informal seminar took place every Friday afternoon at the New Leader office. I did not participate directly but listened as I looked for something we could use in Avukah Student Action . Seymour Martin Lipset, with whom for a while I took the subway to college, joined Avukah briefly. He told me about the gifted and learned new Marxist refugee, Lewis Coser.

Thus a second effect of Avukah was to introduce me to the New York intellectual milieu. I will not exaggerate my modest position: I went to more meetings than I can remember on what is living and what is dead in Marxism, and I heard Philip Selznick, then moving steadily toward sociology, speak brilliantly. Just what he said I no longer recall.

A third effect, as the names Bell, Selznick, and Lipset suggest, was to make sociology a possibility—not as a job (who dreamed of any job except a clerkship with the government?) but as a role definition. I recall I abandoned history for economics, economics for public administration, public administration for sociology, and graduated in January 1944 with a degree in sociology.

The inner core of Avukah believed in social science as the handmaiden of socialism and revolution. In our little study groups we learned about Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom and about the interesting mix of the two scientific approaches, as we then thought of them, of psychoanalysis and Marxism being developed by the Frankfurt school, some of whose members had just arrived in the United States. Later, when Max Horkheimer was lecturing at Columbia, we all went religiously. After one or two lectures, he turned over the course to Leo Lowenthal. We were all deeply impressed by Lowenthal's range of learning. We read articles from the old Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , aided by our German-reading members (young refugees), and from Studies in Social Science and Philosophy . We learned about Horkheimer, Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin before they became the objects of serious study, though we did not learn much about them—that may have been our failing. Having known them in their early years in America (of course, not Walter Benjamin; he, alas,

never made it to the United States) colors our reading about the Frankfurt school now, when they have become legendary figures.

It was clear my bent toward social science owed more to nonacademic influences than to City College. I did not get to sociology until my third or fourth year. Though the sociology department had some able people, it did not influence me greatly. I remember other courses, in philosophy and psychology, better. These were the areas of strength at City College then, but I found that out too late.

I did learn one thing in the sociology department of City College, though. I learned about community studies and was fascinated by it. I wrote an honors paper on American community studies, and without ever having been to Chicago, I was converted to the Chicago style of ethnographic sociology. I knew very little about it, but I knew it was the kind of sociology I liked best.

By 1942, through Zelig Harris, one of the older people connected with Avukah and a gifted theoretical linguist, I had an opportunity to join a small wartime group at the University of Pennsylvania who were trained under Harris in what was then called descriptive linguistics. We were to specialize in various African languages and prepare teaching materials in case we were called on to teach them to soldiers. At that time I was in my third major at City College (public administration) with the vague thought it would help me get a government job. I leaped at the chance to work with Harris, and on something for which I would be paid (modestly). Harris believed that the only really difficult subjects were mathematics and theoretical physics and that anyone could learn linguistics and languages, in short order. He gave me two books, Edward Sapir's Language and Leonard Bloomfield's Language , and a few theoretical articles, and said, "Really, that's all there is. You won't have to spend much time on it [learning linguistics]." His was the arrogance of a supremely gifted mind. In time I was to be part of a team teaching Bengali; another team taught Moroccan Arabic. My own language, Swahili, was never called on. The fact that I was assigned Swahili indicated either that the American military was then very pessimistic (it is spoken in Tanzania and understood in the surrounding countries) or that Harris was particularly interested in it. Meanwhile I took courses in anthropology with A. Irving Hallowell and worked on a master's thesis on Swahili.

In the spring of 1944 I received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a fellowship to study there for a doctorate in anthropology. Hallowell took me aside and said it was not a sensible thing

to do; there would be no jobs. (Whether he also thought, and said, that there would be no jobs for Jews, I do not recall; I had the impression later that that is one of the things he must have meant, but I may be wrong.) I regret taking his advice. I realized linguistics was not for me, but I found social anthropology very appealing.

And so I returned to New York to look for a job. One of the people one saw in those days when one was looking for a job was Daniel Bell. He told me that Max Horkheimer had been hired by the American Jewish Committee to do studies on anti-Semitism and was looking for an assistant. He tried me out, and I became his reader of American social-science literature. By the time he realized that was not what he wanted, I had found a job at another branch of the American Jewish Committee, the Contemporary Jewish Record , then being edited, surprisingly, by Clement Greenberg, the art critic of Partisan Review . He appreciated my modest connections with the intellectual left (after all, I had written for Politics ) and the fact that I must have learned something about Judaism and Jewish life and politics while I was in Avukah. I knew less than he had hoped, but more than he himself knew. The future of the Contemporary Jewish Record was then being reviewed by a committee headed by Lionel Trilling, whom I did not know, and as a result of their proposals it was transformed into Commentary , under the editorship of Elliot Cohen, not long after I joined the staff.

I was twenty-two, I had a job, but I do not know what to call the "occupation" of a staff member of the new Commentary of 1945. I did not call myself a journalist because I did not go out on stories, except perhaps to cover a speech. Cohen, aware of my interest in sociology, suggested I write a column on the social sciences titled "The Study of Man." One reason it suited a Jewish magazine was that so much of the research of the time dealt with anti-Semitism, incipient fascist tendencies, and national character—why were the Germans that way, or the Japanese, or the Russians? Or, for that matter, the Americans? All this interested me enormously, and the column played a role for a while in the early postwar period in bringing the work of the social sciences, in particular sociology influenced by social psychology, to an audience that would not have known it.

Simultaneously I was taking courses at Columbia toward a Ph.D. in sociology, but my time horizon was extended indeed. In those days one could work toward a Ph.D. as a part-time student, taking most of one's courses at night. Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld taught at night or in the late afternoon. The classes were large. I do not know how many

of those taking courses really intended to become, or did become, sociologists. I received no support, but courses cost something like $12.50 a credit. The New School, where a galaxy of German refugees was teaching, was just as cheap. Since our friends often acted as ticket takers, we could sneak in and hear Erich Fromm and Meyer Shapiro free. Had I known of them, I would have tried to listen to Alfred Schutz, Albert Salomon, and Leo Strauss, all of whom I heard later but in individual lectures rather than courses.

I would not underestimate the education I received in sociology at Columbia University; the education I received at Commentary was, however, deeper and wider. At Columbia those two remarkable sociologists, Merton and Lazarsfeld, were presenting an exciting picture of the possibilities of sociology as a science. Merton's lectures brilliantly illuminated the nature of sociological thinking and sociological analysis; Lazarsfeld's were equally brilliant in demonstrating how the most subtle points of theoretical analysis could be tested through the analysis of quantitative data. C. Wright Mills lectured at that time in the college rather than in the graduate sociology department. But everyone went to hear him, and, from his own perspective, he also demonstrated the possibilities of a science of sociology. A few of us worked with him Saturday mornings at the old cavernous quarters of the Bureau of Applied Social Research on Fifty-ninth Street (where the New York City Convention Center now stands). Our task was to extract from long interviews, done by a previous class for the work that ultimately became White Collar , evidence in quantitative form for a large statement about what was happening to society.

Certainly I was as taken by these possibilities as anyone. For a while I was enthusiastic for sociology as a science. But by 1949 I had become doubtful. In that year I published a long essay in Commentary , "'The American Soldier' as Science," reflecting those doubts. Man, I wrote, was part of history, not nature, and the uniformities we might discover, whatever their interest and importance for a given time, place, and issue, could never achieve the generalizing power of theory, hypothesis, and law in the natural sciences. The American Soldier , a short series of books on which some of the leading sociologists of the time worked, made the greatest claim to establishing sociology as a social science or at least putting it on the road to becoming one. I argued that it was simply no more than a study of the American soldier in World War II: the generalizations that flowed from it and might be used in other settings were weak and thin, and the infinite variety of situations in which men

were found in history ensured that result. What we learned would inevitably be bound by time and place. My efforts at generalization after that point were carefully restricted and narrow: situation, facts, and data were crucial for determining what was in fact true, and any large statements about society, culture, personality, capitalism, industrialism, social control, and so on I met with skepticism. It always seemed to me that whatever the large generalization, one would always have to comment, "It all depends."

Was it the counterpoint of Commentary versus Columbia sociology that led to this result? Very likely. I spent most of my time at the magazine, and only one day or so a week at Columbia. Commentary was then one of the best schools one could attend (as is probably true for all intellectual magazines). There was Elliot Cohen, once a brilliant student of English at Yale and a remarkably creative editor of the Menorah Journal , an excellent Jewish magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a radical in the early 1930s, part of that group of New York intellectuals who founded Partisan Review and have since become the subjects of memoirs and research.

The staff was much younger, except for Clement Greenberg, still an editor of Partisan Review and becoming a major figure who explained and promoted the work of the then young New York school of painters. In his double life (one assumed Commentary provided him with the basic living that neither Partisan Review nor his art reviews in The Nation could) he represented good English style and a particular empathy (though I am not sure that is the right word to apply to his crusty personality) for the intellectual German refugees he had strongly favored during his tenure at the Contemporary Jewish Record . I learned more from the younger members of the staff, and the particular view of man and society that I have presented owed the most to Irving Kristol. Kristol had come out of the same radical group that had once included Phil Selznick and Marty Lipset, but he had, without any apparent guru, abandoned socialism and radicalism and was reading European philosophers and theologians. He brought to our environment a concrete, practical interest in politics and journalism. Other members of the ongoing shifting seminar that Commentary was in those days included Robert Warshow, a celebrated critic who died young, Martin Greenberg, Clement's younger brother, and of course the many authors who dropped in and talked. The pressure was remarkably low. There seemed to be time for work on the magazine, attendance at Columbia courses, my own writing, and even chess games beginning at lunch that sometimes lasted

through a good part of the afternoon. The concrete education received at a magazine of high standards addressed to the general reader made us intolerant of nonsense or, even if it was not nonsense, anything that could not be made clear. This attitude was in some ways a help to me as a sociologist—we have a good deal of nonsense in our discipline (what academic discipline does not?). But it perhaps also led to an unwillingness to penetrate obscurity. Considering how much of what is, and has been, important in sociology is undoubtedly obscure, this unwillingness may have been a handicap to me.

In 1946 I went to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Chicago to write a column on it for Commentary . There I saw Dan Bell, who had recently joined the staff of the social-science survey course at the University of Chicago, and I was taken with the idea of joining it myself. I was deeply impressed with the solid grounding in sociological classics the course gave. It is hard to realize that at the time the major works of Weber and Durkheim were not translated or in print in English, and special editions had to be prepared for these courses. Not long after, David Riesman passed through New York. As a member of the staff of the social-science course he was in a position to report back on my suitability. I did not go the University of Chicago: instead I took a leave from Commentary and worked with David Riesman on the project that became The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd . By the time The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950, it was clear to me that in addition to being a social commentator, an editor, and an expert on American Jews, I was also a sociologist.

It is true that my attendance at Columbia was erratic. Some years I took no courses; others, I returned to coursework with gusto. Whether I would ever get the doctorate was neither clear nor important to me. In 1955, at the invitation of Daniel Boorstin, I gave the Walgreen lectures on American Judaism at the University of Chicago. American Judaism, based on those lectures, was published the next year in his series on the history of American civilization. It might have served as my Ph.D. dissertation, but in a fit of bravado I decided I did not want to adapt it.

By that time I had left Commentary and was working as an editor at Anchor Books. Anchor Books was the brainchild of a recent graduate of Columbia, Jason Epstein, an editor who had wanted to start an American series of serious paperbacks modeled on the British Penguin series. In 1955 all American paperback series were for the mass market. It was Epstein's idea that there was or was going to be a market for paperback books in colleges. Among the first of the books he wanted to publish

was The Lonely Crowd . It was, however, too long for his series, which required books short enough to keep prices down. It fell on me to cut The Lonely Crowd by about a quarter, a task I approached not only with an eye to reducing size but also to some modest restructuring for clarity. I do feel the resultant work was easier to read, and it was that abridged edition that was read by a million American students (sales reached that figure by the early 1970s).

I have been associated with David Riesman since, and for some years as a collaborator, for following The Lonely Crowd we published Faces in the Crowd . All along we produced joint articles sociological and political, including "The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes," which first appeared in Partisan Review and then in The New Radical Right (1955), edited by Daniel Bell. This book was a collection of essays in response to McCarthyism, on which we held a somewhat middle position owing to our sense that intellectuals could not be entirely applauded for their distance from the experience and feelings of middle America. The article—and The Lonely Crowd —demonstrated David Riesman's remarkable ability to understand general currents in American culture even without spending much time experiencing them directly. He can from a few fragments imagine the rest—and most of the time get it right.

The nature of our collaboration, as of all collaborations, was distinctive. When we first met, I was still excited over learning something about how to analyze qualitative questionnaires with C. Wright Mills, and Riesman thought of me as possibly bringing the then newer techniques of social science to his intended study of apathy, the origin of The Lonely Crowd . And indeed, we did work with questionnaires of various selected groups and occasionally individuals either selected or found accidentally (many are in Faces in the Crowd ). We also tried to develop ways of extracting meaning from them. But my role changed as we worked together. Influenced by the scientizing tendency of social science in those distant days, I tried to put Riesman's ideas, which were always intensely concrete, into some more general structure. He would take my bare, thin manuscripts and expand and embroider them, filling them with evocative details. These details often fought with the structure, and that clash is what many readers of The Lonely Crowd felt.

Collaboration with Riesman at Yale was an experience of living and working together, exchanging manuscripts for revision, expansion, and clarification (Riesman doing most of the elaboration, I attempting to introduce order). I believe, from conversations with Christopher Jencks,

a later collaborator, that he too tried to bring order to the richness and variety of Riesman's insights. That often meant sacrificing a few of them. So many thoughts and observations in so many directions was not my style: my work alone is rather more bare and, I must confess, less original.

Collaborating with Riesman involved more than scholarly work: for him, as for me, analysis and action (at least some kinds of action) were never far apart. While we worked on The Lonely Crowd, Israel was being born. Riesman opposed a Jewish state, as did Hannah Arendt and his mentor Erich Fromm, and as I did, from my own perspective. He became involved in efforts to divert the steady march to the creation of such a state. I participated to some extent in those efforts. In retrospect, however, I believe the opposition did not fully grasp the power of the demands by the two ethnic groups, Jews and Arabs, for separate and independent states regardless of the costs—internal disorder and poverty in many Arab states, eternal conflict for Israel. I believe now that there was no alternative to statehood; Riesman's thinking has not proceeded in that direction.

On the danger of nuclear warfare we shared the same view, and this was one of the principal concerns of the Committees of Correspondence, which Riesman helped organize in the late 1950s and which I served for a while as editor of its newsletter. Riesman's path was from liberalism to sociology, rather than socialism to sociology; he was never a socialist. But he retained, as I did, a sense of sociology as more than a scientific discipline divorced from a life involved in political and social issues. Sociology is still for many socialists and sociologists the pursuit of politics through academic means, though it is today a far different politics, pursued with different means.

As a result of my work in abridging The Lonely Crowd, Jason Epstein asked me to join him at Anchor Books, and I left Commentary . My years at Anchor also served as an education: in an institution in which there were almost no Jews (the first time in my life I was in such an environment); in the strange divorce between commercial publishing and what I conceived of as the intellectual life, a divorce that it fell on Jason Epstein to overcome; in the incredibly dynamic quality of American business. For no sooner had the first dozen paperbacks come out at Anchor than we already had competitors—many of them. Unlike us, Penguin had had a clear run of some years because no one had thought to challenge it.

For some reason I did not think of myself as someone who would

remain in magazine publishing when at Commentary, nor as someone who would remain in book publishing when at Anchor. The option of sociology was always available, and undoubtedly something in my temperament kept pushing me toward academic life.

In 1957 I joined the staff of the Communism in American Life project, funded by the Fund for the Republic (itself funded by the Ford Foundation), to write a book on the question of who became communists in the United States. Marty Lipset was originally supposed to do the book but decided not to and suggested I do it. It looked like a good idea, and I left Anchor. I thought that topic would fit the bill for a Ph.D. dissertation in sociology and submitted the published book, The Social Basis of American Communism, to Columbia University in 1962 to complete the requirements for the degree.

By that time I had already taught as a visitor at the University of California, Berkeley, at Bennington College, and at Smith College. I felt like a medieval journeyman, going from place to place with my tattered course outlines. But I had more or less defined my role as a sociologist. I taught race relations, or the sociology of ethnic groups, as well as urban sociology—I was, or felt myself to be, an heir to the University of Chicago tradition. I filled out my schedule with other courses—social change, nonquantitative research methods, and a variety of other topics. At Bennington I taught a course on women in developing societies. Over the years I thought of a number of projects in ethnicity or urbanism and finally ended up doing a study of the ethnic groups of New York City; this project became Beyond the Melting Pot (1963).

Beyond the Melting Pot was my second major effort in collaboration, but in this one I took the lead. It was not to be the end of my work with Daniel P. Moynihan, for afterward we considered, particularly after I relocated at Harvard in the late 1960s, conducting conferences and publishing multiauthor volumes on ethnicity as an international phenomenon. One such volume was published, Ethnicity (1975). I helped organize another conference on international dimensions of ethnicity and social policy, which has resulted in another book, edited with Ken Young, Ethnic Pluralism and Public Policy (1983). My original intention in Beyond the Melting Pot was to recruit a number of persons who had experience as members of an ethnic group and knew it from the inside to participate in a joint work I had outlined. Each section was intended to fit into an overall thesis about the character and meaning of ethnicity in New York and, by implication, in American society. At the time ethnicity was not a hot topic, and it was hard to find people I

respected who were willing to collaborate within the framework I had designed. Moynihan was then at Syracuse University, after serving with Governor Averell Harriman. He had already written widely noted articles in The Reporter, then edited by Irving Kristol, particularly on the epidemic of slaughter on the highways, which made him an authority on automobile safety long before Ralph Nader. Kristol suggested Moynihan: it was clear on the basis of early meetings he could do just about any work, including an essay on the Irish of New York, that was responsive to the framework I had set out. In the end he was the only person I recruited for Beyond the Melting Pot .

Working with Moynihan was entirely different from working with Riesman: Moynihan's prose is so elegant that I hesitate to touch it. Our collaborations have consisted of my writing what I have to say, and he writing what he has to say; then I knit the two together at the seams. Our styles are very different, and often we are saying somewhat different things, but the method has seemed to work, as in the long introduction to the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot and the introduction to Ethnicity . Daniel Bell played a key role in the origins of Beyond the Melting Pot, because he suggested me to his friend James Wechsler of the New York Post, who was considering doing a series of articles on the ethnic groups of New York. The New York Post Foundation put up some money—a very modest sum. The foundation didn't like the first installments and cut off my funding, an action that may not have been legal. Whether the New York Post Foundation was a funding agency or a means of getting publishable copy for the New York Post was not clear to me. It also insisted, despite having withdrawn support, on sharing royalties. From its financial point of view the grant was one of the most productive it ever made.

I was not sure what I would do after Beyond the Melting Pot . From an academic journeyman spending a year teaching at one institution after another I had become a wandering semiacademic grantsman, collecting small grants to write one book after another. One possibility that attracted me strongly was to become an expert on Japan. During my year in Berkeley, 1961–62, I had become captivated by the Orient. Though China was closed, Japan was a possibility. I perhaps could learn Japanese and write about the one non-Western society that was becoming Westernized in some key respects (such as achieving technological competence). I would go to Japan, although to do what besides learning Japanese was not clear to me. I would tell my academic friends just to needle them; and without a definite project—except self-improvement!—I would go on my

own money (I had some savings) rather than ask a foundation for a grant. My academic friends were shocked and prevailed on me not to do such a silly thing. One day when leaving Random House, where I was consulting for Jason Epstein—the publishing firm was then located in the wonderful brownstone Villard Houses that now form a forecourt for the Helmsley Palace—I decided to visit the Ford Foundation across Fifty-first Street. Doak Barnett was then working there. I told him that I wanted to go to Japan, and he asked me to write him a letter explaining what I planned to study. I did so, saying I wanted to learn about Tokyo by living in Tokyo, the way I had learned about New York by living in New York. How gloriously free and easy were the foundations in 1961! I was given a substantial grant and first-class airfare without having to trouble anyone for letters of recommendation, at a time when I held no academic position in the United States, and without having to arrange any academic affiliation in Japan.

My Japanese experience was too mixed to be summarized easily. After hard work I discovered that I would not, at thirty-nine or with my native talents, get very far in learning Japanese in the year I had available; instead, I decided to learn about Tokyo. I had some contacts and began writing about the city. I was able to publish articles, which I think still express a rather fresh sense of what makes cities work, in the Japan Times and in the Japanese periodical Chuo Koron . But it was clear I would never become an expert on Japan. I returned to the United States after one year with the strong feeling that I wanted to devote my attention to a country I could know well, as against one I could never know well, and get involved with something practical and useful to mankind. Washington, D.C., was then the seat of a wonderfully optimistic administration; Moynihan arranged for me to see a number of people, and since I now fancied myself an urban expert, I ended up in an undefined position in the Housing and Home Finance Agency (which later became the Department of Housing and Urban Development), then headed by the economist Robert Weaver. It was certainly one of the most exciting years of my life. The Peace Corps had started; major programs were being launched in the cities, with money from the Ford Foundation and the federal government, to deal with juvenile delinquency specifically and with poverty generally; the War on Poverty was being designed; and the model cities program would soon be under way. Since my job was poorly defined, I got involved in everything. But before the end of my first year Lewis Feuer, then teaching a huge (three to four hundred students) social science integrated course at the University of California,

Berkeley, and finding it difficult to recruit fellow teachers in that period of ample support for academics, asked me to become a permanent member of the course staff. I had met Feuer originally through Irving Kristol, whose teacher he had been at City College. And so in 1963, at the age of forty, I became a sociologist by appointment and profession as well as through the content of my work, and I have remained one ever since.

What kind of sociologist? As a sociologist I have been more interested in specific issues than in the discipline of sociology itself, more in empirical subject matter than in theory, more in substance than in methodology. The issues, subjects, and substance have been drawn mostly from my experience. I wrote about Jews because I knew something about them and worked on a Jewish magazine. I wrote about American communists because having been a radical I had some experience of communism and felt I could understand why people become communists. I wrote about student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s for similar reasons—and had so published Remembering the Answers (1970). I wrote about cities because I had always lived in New York (though by 1963 I could reckon a year in Berkeley, a year in Tokyo, and a year in Washington) and felt I knew about them; and I wrote about public policy because after my year in Washington and my subsequent involvement in various committees dealing with public policy I thought I understood that subject. I would not have dared on my own to tackle such a topic as the American character, as David Riesman dealt with in The Lonely Crowd; but the one aspect of anthropology that truly interested me was the new culture and personality school of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Geoffrey Gorer, and others, and I felt fully committed to applying it to the United States. How to apply it is another problem: the culture-and-personality orientation has foundered on methodological issues, in part, but also because general confidence in social psychology and psychoanalysis has been deeply shaken.

Culture and personality are the only topics on which I have worked that I have never fully abandoned. A book is often a hostage to the future. Even if one desires to get away from a subject, the investment of time and energy and commitments to speak or write on the subject lead, in the absence of a strong will, to reengagement with it. My involvement in ethnicity and race led into involvement in the policy issues they raised: and so Affirmative Discrimination (1975) and Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964–1982 (1983). Though I have not written a book directly on urban issues, I have written many articles—and in the American context there

is no way of making a sharp distinction between urban sociology and the sociology of race and ethnicity. Dealing with race, ethnicity, and urban issues, I was inevitably drawn into social policy, and much of my writing for the past fifteen years has dealt with issues in that field.

Clearly my experience has circumscribed the areas on which I feel I can write with any sense of confidence, and rarely does an article, essay, or book review of mine go beyond these bounds. I regret this narrowness. But with no base in either large theory or a generally applicable methodology, I do not feel I can deal effectively with a topic I cannot approach, at least in some measure, through experience—if not directly, then by analogy.

Plainly I am only in part a sociologist. I have also been an editor, for Avukah Student Action , the Contemporary Jewish Record, Commentary , and The Public Interest and at Anchor Books and Random House. The role of early connections is evident in my current editorial role with The Public Interest , founded by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell while I was living in Berkeley. My succeeding Bell as coeditor reflected not only my own shift to policy concerns—a shift I date from the late 1950s and early 1960s but which was evident before—but also the shift of others, such as Kristol and Bell. Because I was, on the one hand, an editor, interpreter, and translator—not, I think, a popularizer—through my editorial roles and, on the other, interested in policy, sociology, which in its contemporary form has eschewed policy advice, was not fully congenial. Thus while I was a member of the sociology department at the University of California, my main job was the interpretive one of presenting the social sciences to non–social-science majors, and I cultivated connections with the Department of City Planning and the School of Social Work. As a member of the sociology department at Harvard my main job is in the Graduate School of Education—which is also something of a school of public policy and social issues. These mixed roles are in part a result of the mixed career I have followed and consequently of the opportunities that were offered to me; but they are in larger part a matter of taste. The skepticism about the sociological theory that I first expressed as early as 1949 has not been modified by the history of sociology since then.

But sociology, I believe, was the only academic discipline that might have accommodated me and people like me. For a long time it was necessary to explain that sociology was not social work and not socialism. But for some of us who were involved with socialism, and who would never abandon concern with the practical issues of society that

social work represented, sociology offered a spacious home. It was not necessary to vow fealty to any theory or methodology. With some key issues in the world, an involvement in which one abided by the normal canons of scholarship—read the literature, footnoted the facts, and examined the validity of one's ideas the best one could—was all that sociology demanded, at least of those who, through accidents of history, selected it as the discipline within which they would work. I hope that at the margin it will continue to offer this opportunity.