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Feb 1st, 2015
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  1. Week 1 summary
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  3. Berger & Kellner
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  5. The modern sociological perspective is the way of seeing the underlying rules of society below what is explicitly and officially stated. Sociology is by nature subversive of the official stated order of society as it examines and reveals the inner hidden workings of it. Sociologists in the past and present have been disillusioned by the insights of their studies but nevertheless still committed to the betterment of society. In recent times, doubt has arisen about what it means to do sociology both from within and outside the field. To fix its problems, sociology needs to return to the wide scope of things.
  6. Positivism and utopianism are the two main camps of sociology today. Sociologists need to strike a balance between merely observing what is (positivism) and proposing what should be (utopianism), and attempts by some sociologists to regain the attention of the world by trying to predict the future or be the messiah will always lead to disappointment and failure. The regaining of the consciousness of sociology will need a recognition of the limits of what sociology can do and cannot do.
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  8. C.W. Mills
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  10. People are trapped by the society they live in and feel even more so when they become aware of the outer workings that influence them. To understand society and the individual you must understand both at once.
  11. The modern world is changing too fast for the average person to get used to, so the sociological imagination is needed for understanding the changes going on around the world and within themselves. A person will shape history, however minutely, and history shapes him even more. In this way history and personal biography is tied together.
  12. Three important questions for the sociological imagination are: What is the structure of the society? What part does the society play in human history? What kind of people live in this society?
  13. The sociological imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, which leaves a person with the ability to assess situations and understand their society better. Thus, people can use it to assess the changes going on within themselves and in the world.
  14. The sociological imagination distinguishes between personal troubles within a person's immediate social circle and the public issues of society. Structural changes in society causes ripples in many personal social circles and as the institutions we live in become more interlinked, more structural changes are caused, and it is up to the sociological imagination to determine the impact on the immediate social circles of people.
  15. In modern times, people do not have any perceived values that they cherish, and they either feel no threat or a perceived indistinguishable threat, which leads to indifference and unease respectively. Man's primary danger today is the ungoverned forces of society and so it is the role of the social scientist to define what exactly causes the indifference and unease of people today.
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  18. Week 2 summary
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  20. Horace Miner
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  22. This article is actually a satire, or maybe a critical look at modern society.
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  24. The Nacirema people are an example of the extremes to which human behaviour can go. A significant part of everyday life of the Nacirema people is spent on rituals that mainly involve the human body. Every house, rich or poor, has shrines that are dedicated to these rituals, which include an ablution by holy water (bathing) and storing used magical charms and potions in a box for warding off ill health (the medicinal cabinet). The population of the Nacirema tends to be masochistic, based on all the painful rituals they willingly and regularly go through. There appear to be sadistic specialists in the society too, namely three main kinds of medicinal practitioners. The “holy-mouth-men” (dentists) perform rituals of the mouth once or twice a year, which seem to not do much to help the condition of the people undergoing the rituals but yet the compulsion of tradition ensures that they continue to regularly undertake them. The medicine men (doctors), who have to first receive a lavish gift before commencing treatment, perform gruelling healing rituals on their patients and most of the very sick people who are admitted do not survive. The last is a “listener” (therapist), who exorcise the devils that reside within their patients' minds by getting them to tell him all their troubles and fears.
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  26. The general dissatisfaction shown with the general aesthetic show up in the way there are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat (diets) and the rites made to enlarge or shrink women's breasts (breast augmentation surgery). A few women blessed with supernatural breast shape and size go around other villages and permitting the natives to look at them for a fee (models).
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  28. Tony Bilton
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