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Abandon Canon in American Sociology1
Anson Au2
April 2019
Accepted Version
Forthcoming in International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy
Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to challenge the practice of having, using, and
constructing any canon in sociological theory. This paper argues that the elitism of American
sociology and the forms of inequality it engenders are sustained by the construction of a canon
itself.
Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts a conceptual approach to examine the
problems of research practice, academic writing, inequality, and empirical translation that
canonical thinking engenders within the academy and beyond.
Findings: Reflecting on the problems outlined, this paper articulates a more democratic agenda
for treating canon in research and education by drawing upon standards of practice in
ethnography, participatory action research, and Southern Theory.
Originality/value: This paper interrogates the relations of domination that remain at work in the
discipline and that which concern the elite position of American sociology itself.
Keywords: canon, higher education, global sociology, social theory
1 Cite as: Au, A. (Forthcoming). Abandon Canon in American Sociology. International
Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.
2 Department of Sociology, University of Toronto; Department of Sociology and Chinese
Literature (Joint Appointment), National Sun Yat-Sen University
2
Introduction: What is Canon?
In the American sociological tradition, sociological theory is a contentious ground upon
which the discipline draws its boundaries (Bourdieu 1988). In sociology’s boundary-making
exercises, there exists a set of thinkers whose work is recognized by a large proportion of the
discipline as formative to its identity – a “canon” of knowledge deemed indispensable to
sociology’s disciplinary identity, its researchers’ self-understanding, and educational curriculum
(Baehr 2017). A large-scale study of sociological theory education in Canada, for instance, has
recently laid bare how a core set of works/authors are commonly anointed classical canon and
specifically orbit around the Holy Trinity of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, demonstrated by the
fact that they are taught, heard, scrutinized, and labeled as canon almost universally in syllabi for
classical sociological theory courses (Guzman & Silver 2018).
Who decides what goes into canon? The constitution of a canon is informally decided by
the entire body of sociologists in the academy, based on what we teach and engage with
sociological theory in the academy, but the reproduction of a pattern like canon on the scale of a
discipline is a matter of structure, more so than agency (Abbott 2010; Sahlins 1992). Inhered in
this structuration of knowledge and discourse in sociological theory are epistemic values that
speak to a deeper elitism rooted in colonial traditions (Smith 1999).
In recent years, the landscape around canon has begun to shift. In response to the isolated
but concurrent development of dissonant research agendas across communities that suggest a
severely fragmented enterprise of social scientific theory construction (Abbott 2012), an impulse
to congregate increasingly localized theoretical productions has emerged amidst calls for
universal, general theorizing methodologies and agendas (Swedberg 2016; Timmermans &
Tavory 2012). Within this scope, strategies have prescribed recourse to the use of a sociological
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canon in teaching and empiry: an orthodoxy that allows enough flexibility to stimulate
productive lines of inquiry, such as the inclusion of new figures and the reworking of old ones
(Mouzelis 1997; Shalin 2015), whilst retaining its form enough to anchor these intellectual
developments onto a common basis bound enough to find sympathy, if not understanding,
amongst other actors in the discipline.
Indeed, these developments strike at the heart of new tensions and debates over who to
include in the canon within the practice and education of sociological theory (Au N.d., 2018;
Dodd 2017; Hess 2019; Swedberg 2016). New figures have since been inducted into the
mainstream sociological canon over the past few decades, most apparently with Simmel
(Guzman & Silver 2018) and most recently with W. E. B. Du Bois (Rabaka 2010). The
circumstances surrounding Du Bois have exposed and challenged the esteem of the Chicago
School of Sociology, long revered as the birthplace of the discipline but which has been built, we
now know, upon a highly racialized, elite legacy (Morris 2015). Out of these challenges have
emerged more institutionalized changes, such as renaming major awards1, conferences, and, most
emphatically, educational curricula around how to shape the canon. But in spite of these
progressive changes, surprisingly little has been done to interrogate the relations of domination
that remain at work in other parts of the discipline and that which concerns the elite position of
American sociology itself.
The problem, this paper asserts, lies with the construction of a canon itself. Opening
dialogue on these lines of inquiry, this paper challenges the existence of a sociological canon in
graduate education. To this end, this paper adopts a conceptual approach to interrogate two
interrelated foci, which elaborate the problems that having a canon engenders, within the
academy and beyond: (1) preserving the hierarchical tendencies of canon as an oversight of
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redeeming unsung historical thinkers, including elitism, inequality, and poor standards of
research, as well as (2) the disastrous consequences of canon when translated into practice,
evinced by the case of China. Throughout, this paper argues for the dismantling of canon as an
obstacle towards (i) opening up the traditions to which research can connect to; (ii) dismantling
systems of inequality; (iii) informing quality research practice and translation. Finally, this paper
articulates ways to move forward with a more inclusive, democratic agenda by gleaning insights
from standards of practice in ethnography, participatory action research, and Raewyn Connell’s
Southern Theory.
Redeeming Du Bois and the Elitism of the American Academy
The tradition of paying homage to the origins of sociology as a formalized discipline and
research enterprise is deeply and universally impressed into North American graduate education.
But it is the need for such a traditionalist reverence to sociology’s theoretical and scientific
origins itself (Parker 1997), which belies a penchant for metrics of comparative evaluation and
scientific primacy (Au 2018; Horowitz 1994:22), that allows for the very academic stratification
and inequality that recent scholarship has denounced in case studies of unsung thinkers (Morris
2015). That is, this need itself introduces a hierarchy, wherein different actors lay claim to elite
positions; yet, the ability to make, disseminate, and legitimate such claims is bound up with the
institutional power wielded by claimants, and, more importantly, whose distribution is stratified
according to axes of inequality, including race, class, and gender. In this manner, (reverence to)
canon becomes a tool with which to extend and maintain hierarchies grounded in existing system
of inequality. As Morris (ibid) compellingly argues with the case of Du Bois, his pioneering
empirical articulations of a scientific methodology to study urban (black) communities (Du Bois
1995[1899]) and empirically-generated theoretical formulations of the intersubjective
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construction of identity, wherein blacks were torn between normative acculturation to white
culture2 and a divided, disenfranchised black identity (Du Bois 2007[1903]:147), were
suppressed by and in favor of white social scientists on grounds of race, class, and ideology
(Morris 2015:4). Although the refusal to recognize his contributions that called attention to social
equilibrium in the moral worth assigned to racial identity (Du Bois 2007[1903]:224), clearly
surpassing race by essentially anticipating tenets of middle-ranged theory, dramaturgical
performance, double consciousness, symbolic violence, was a strategic move by white, elite
social scientists to preserve their institutional prestige and the legitimacy of their racial
ideologies about black inferiority and education (Morris 2015:107), it was evidently allowed by
the very reverence for intellectual primacy, crystallized in the maintenance of a sociological
canon.
Thus, the move to dismantle a canon would not only foreclose the ways in which systems
of inequality in social domains as race, class, and gender are replicated through the academy, but
better organize the motivations for framing and producing research around merit, and
democratically open up the theoretical traditions to which research can connect to. For instance,
recognizing Du Bois as the progenitor of American sociology succeeds in challenging the
dominance of white, class, but generates two further repercussions that fail to realize, if not
contradict, the need to dismantle systems of inequality.
Indeed, it fails to challenge the elitism of the American sociological discipline itself as a
whole. Positioning Du Bois as the pioneer of American sociology importantly challenges white
supremacy in the American academy concerning sociology’s origins, but nevertheless replicates
an infatuation with American sociology as the elite standard for the globe. Redeeming Du Bois
as an unsung hero suppressed by racial differences in connection to institutionalized and social
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elitism (Morris 2015) has done alarmingly little to generate discussion about challenging the
elitism of American sociology or to interrogate how the case’s fundamental power differences
remain at work in other areas of the discipline. Without a vocal discussion about the failures of
the American sociological standpoint itself (Collins 1986:12) or the need to bind its canon within
the national context of its origin, it continues to spur the obfuscation of localized theorizing in
the Global South (Hsiung 2015).
Let us examine as an example the sociology of China. Western scholars have exported
and Eastern scholars imported an array of Western theories to the study of China, including
Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Park, among others (see Bian 2003), but there exists little
reference in the Western sociology of China to the pioneering work of Fei Xiaotong, China’s first
sociologist, despite his fame in China for his prominent contributions to understanding Chinese
society from within (1992[1947]; see also Bian & Zhang 2008). In their seminal review of the
revival of sociology in China after Mao, Cheng and So (1983) demonstrate how Western ideas
and theories penetrated the Chinese academy in a way that, even if inadvertently beneficial to the
development of the discipline in China, positioned Western ideas as superior to local knowledge
up till even the end of the twentieth century. Thus, knowledge exchange remains a colonized
enterprise that conceiving an American canon propagates and which merely replacing Park with
Du Bois fails to challenge, let alone dismantle: American sociology remains unmoved as the elite
standard towards which the Global South can and must strive, but can never reach nor impress
(see also Connell 2007), fated to remain a data mine for social theory (Connell 1997, 2005).
Repopulating the Canon: New Wine in an Old Skin
Reorganizing the bases of a canon has also inspired efforts to populate it with thinkers
who have been similarly obfuscated. But two interrelated problems arise in the treatment of such
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figures: (i) the criterion for inducting such figures into the canon has simply been historical
oversight, allowing a clandestine introduction of largely personal research agendas and interests
into hierarchically shaping graduate education and the future of research practice in ways no
different than the “lily-white, elite” sociologists at the University of Chicago (Morris 2015;
Zuckerman 2004). Take, for instance, the instruction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in my own
department. In Women and Economics, Gilman (1905) is noted for her creative reliance on
reform Darwinism to analyze the social forces anticipating the gendered reproduction of
inequality in the balance of work, education, household/family life, such that even raising
children was pulled into their fold to disproportionately disadvantage women (ibid:245-247).
Underpinning her emphatic calls for duties within such domains to be shared equally by both
genders and for the family to be reconceptualized as more than an economic unit was a vision of
social evolution as a melioristic process through which gender equality emerged. Gender
equality, no longer withholding from society the intellectual capital of women, crystallized what
she believed would be a shift from primitive to advanced social life, characterized by a “struggle
for the life of other” (Egan 1989) above the need for nutrition and reproduction.
But this vision of social evolution bleeds across her views on gender to include race,
principally claiming how blacks, despite having been received benefits from mutual servitude
with whites through their household and labor roles, remain a “backward race,” whose progress
is not a matter of equality, but a matter of convenience to whites, for without which they will
remain “a problem and a menace” to the latter (Gilman 1908). The failure to become “decent,
self-supporting, progressive negroes,” on this score, mandated appropriation by the state to be
integrated into a system of labor that would halt their proclivities for degenerate, socially
harmful behavior (ibid), betraying an apparent conceptualization of blacks as naturally inferior
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objects, whose right to self-definition as a human mode of identity-creation was stripped from
them and redefined in relation to whites (Collins 1986:1, 10).
Given how the chief theoretical framework with which Gilman propounds feminism,
social evolution, is simultaneously inextricably woven into overtly racist overtones, it hardly
deserves the visibility or dignity of being introduced as classical sociological theory. There are,
in any case, other women who both precede her work and present more progressive theoretical
accounts to exemplify historical feminism, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau,
Simone de Beauvoir, among others (Walters 1976; Zeitlin 2001). Thus, if we are to accept the
contemporary rejection of the Chicago School sociologists to redeem Du Bois in recognition for
(a) the perpetuation of racist, white supremacist ideologies, and (b) lack of scientific or
theoretical primacy, then by the discipline’s standards, Gilman should also be charged and
abandoned.
(ii) In a similar vein, a paradox emerges: engagement with incipient canonical figures
finds parallels with the exegetical treatment of the old ones, like the Holy Trinity of Marx,
Durkheim, and Weber, yet comes coupled with admonitions against replicating their research
methodology and use of language (Parker 1997). On the one hand, dissonance with canon, old
and new, is only permitted to the critique of concepts and highlighting deficiencies within them,
but forbidden are challenges to their importance or the choice to study them. To paraphrase
Schopenhauer, “we can do what we wish, but we only wish what we must” (Zucker 1945:531);
the reconceptualization of individual work into canonical knowledge rests upon the
naturalization of their status as indispensable to future lines of inquiry in the discipline.
But on the other hand, the armchair theorizing conducted by canonical figures and obscure,
ambiguous language used to communicate their research is rejected by contemporary standards
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of research production. Let us consider Simmel’s characterization of the metropolitan blasé, an
important spatial context for his broader theorizations on interactions. In making the case for the
blasé, he concludes that a psychological foundation exists “upon which the metropolitan
individuality is erected,” which is “the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and
continuous shift of external and internal stimuli...” (Simmel 1976[1903]:325, italics added). The
evidence with which he supports this assertion consists of “lasting impressions, the slightness in
their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and contrasts between them” that are
apparently replicated in the metropolis “with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and
multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life..." (ibid). In so doing, he theorizes the
common existence of a blasé as a natural psychological defense or a “protective organ” in
response to the violent overstimulation that a metropolitan environment erects (ibid:326, 330).
Simmel then extrapolates from this theorization to build another of a higher level of abstraction:
the psychological characteristics of callousness inculcated within people by metropolitan life
facilitates, given the metropolis as a context for institutions and flows of economic exchange, the
proliferation of a “rationally calculated economic egoism” – an essentially economic mentality
governed by “punctuality, calculability, and exactness” upon which capitalism itself hinges
(ibid:327-8).
But his observations of the overstimulation and the blasé are neither systematically
sampled or gathered and disentangled from any methodological rationale, such that the
interconnections between his theorizations of varying levels of abstraction are tenuous, at best,
and entirely dependent on intuition and armchair theorizing. His unit of analysis, without
methodological rationale to verify his claims, so assumes the form of a mere impression. It must
be noted, on this score, that important insights exist to be gleaned from impressions, as Adorno
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emphasizes, citing “out-of-the-way details,” “lasting impressions,” and minutiae of everyday life
that draw attention to variation in details as a simplifying manipulation (Adorno 2000:84).
Consistent with his social philosophical foundations in a negative dialectical balance between
induction and deduction to decrypt empirical phenomena from within (Adorno 1998[1963,
1969]:28, 32-34), such impressions help to “feel society… on one’s skin” (Adorno 2000:36-7),
not unlike Wright’s sociological imagination. Yet, Simmel’s observations precede and are
without the philosophically rigorous, methodological foundations that Adorno provides to
otherwise distinguish them from overstated, extrapolated conjectures on brute observations.
Thus, the problems embedded in the standards of deciding and maintaining the old canon,
though increasingly under fire by mainstream sociology (Go 2016; Morris 2015:xix), are
replicated in attempts to construct a new one. The impulse to possess, teach, and engage with
some exegetical canon to underpin the sociological enterprise fails to preclude a hegemonic
determination of graduate education and institutional research, which indiscriminately gives
power and voice to personal interests that are, in turn, shaped by social axes of inequality. At the
same time, it engenders modes of thinking disconnected from contemporary standards of
research practice with which to guide, judge, and improve its quality.
Problems with the Ideology of Canon: The Case of China
The sociological canon, particularly Marx out of the Holy Trinity (Marx, Durkheim,
Weber), is commonly praised by Western sociologists as a prophetic vision of emancipation for
the disadvantaged and vocal call to action towards effecting this vision. Marx’s eleventh thesis
on Feuerbach has become the most quoted line in protest demonstrations and among young
sociologists, enamored by its idealism and rushed to build a more equitable social world. It is
popularly claimed that Marx may yet be right – that we have yet to witness Marx’s revolution or
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its aftereffects, embodied in a society committed to the socialism he envisioned. My heritage
disagrees. These claims have resulted from myopic worldviews confined to the West. While the
import of these traditions in the West has innocuously become actionized in protest
demonstrations, their impact in the Global South has already born fruit and with far graver
consequences, which have gone largely uninterrogated and thoroughly ignored by most of the
discipline.
The case of China during its extended period of Maoist reforms offers a prominent
example. It has been argued that Mao simply misinterpreted Marx (Schwartz 1951). But such
arguments are isolated from the content and motivations of Mao’s oeuvre, in connection to his
policies (see also Pfeffer 1976). Taking both into account, it emerges how the theory and
strategies Mao mobilized during and after his rise to power resonated with Marx’s ideals and
realized the societal arrangements outlined by Marx for what should have been a successful
socialist society. Consistent with how Marx saw the proletariat as the savior of mankind and key
to revolutionary mobilization, Mao supported the mobilization of peasant associations against the
“evil gentry” during his struggle for dominance over China against Chiang Kai-Shek. Towards
the goal of emancipating peasants from the fetters imposed by the bourgeois, “the rural areas
[needed] a mighty revolutionary upsurge, for it alone could rouse the people in their millions to
become a powerful force” to “… smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along
the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local
tyrants and evil gentry into their graves” (Mao 1927). After his successful rise to power, Mao
mandated a period of farm labor for all able-bodied men, idealizing the life of the proletariat,
whilst strongly rejecting and destroying the bourgeois. A violent class-based revolution swept
across the country for the next thirty years to abolish private property and eliminate the
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bourgeois (Marx 1978:490), culminating in the mass killing of the majority of the landlord class
in China.
Adopting Marx’s rejection of (the need for) possessions and commodities that
represented estranged labor as a condition of enthrallment (ibid:87, 204-5, 479), Mao
promulgated iconoclasm during his rule, which peaked with the Cultural Revolution, a thorough
cleanse of idol worship and its practitioners, despite its widespread centrality in Chinese
traditional practices, norms, and daily rituals. Cultural and religious sites, historical relics, and
artifacts were destroyed, and millions were persecuted. Furthermore, Mao congregated power in
the state and, in the Great Leap Forward, attempted to convert China into one consistent with
principles outlined in The Communist Manifesto, including a hatred for capitalism, coupled with
the endorsement of a strong state that abolished private property, centralized control over
resources and production, and relied on agriculture and industry (ibid:490). To this end, Mao
introduced a program of rapid industrialization and communal farming to urban and rural areas.
Yet, the abolishment of private property starved even peasants, unable to rent or use their land as
collateral for loans, as the country suffered from an economic downturn due to insufficient
productivity with its industry (Perkins 1991:493). Deviants were labeled as remnants of
capitalism that threatened to regress society from socialism to capitalism, and so faced
expungement by torture and execution.
Through it all, the fundamental acceptance of an ideology inspired by a piece of
sociological canon drove a systematic, thorough, revolutionary overturning of the bourgeois elite
in China to realize the vision of a centralized state committed to Marx’s vision of a socialist
society. Estimates of deaths by successive mass killings in China during its socialist period,
ordered by the implementation of Mao’s policies per interpretations of Marx, average at a
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hundred million. To return to the counterargument that Marx did not intend for the case of China
(Schwartz 1951), I do not question Marx’s intentions. But good as they may be, they are
insufficient to absolve him of the disastrous consequences that “misinterpretations” of his work
anticipated. That a nation could fall into turmoil, its culture nearly extinguished, and mass
killings of the most prolific proportions in human history ensue as a result of mere
misinterpretation should stimulate discussion about the dangers, let alone the demerits, of the
content of Marx’s ideas, the practice of armchair theorizing, disconnected from empirical
research, that birthed them, the obscure language that make him canon for the interpretive
flexibility it permits, and ultimately, the reverent impulse for canon that insulates its members
from thorough theoretical rejection. I detest Marx’s theoretical ideas. The family members and
the home my family lost in the recent past molded out of his ideas permit me this right. But I fear
canon. That the atrocious, near collapse of China is insufficient to dispel the ideological fervor
with which his ideas are still taken up and inducted into canon is a case of oversight which,
purposeful or otherwise, looms as a prescient insight into the future.
Gods become Men: Directions for a New Agenda for Canonical Social Theory
I do not argue that we should altogether abandon those who have traditionally been called
classical thinkers. Intellectual censorship is its own problem, as the Chicago School’s treatment
of Du Bois itself reveals. I have instead aimed to address the opposite problem: the ideology of
canon. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, for instance, are commonly discussed in the classroom and
in the academy, but treated with a canonical esteem that refuses to acknowledge their work as
research productions, so much as holy writ. In cases as with China, this practice has held
devastating consequences in the Global South – it must end. Tear the canonical thinkers from
Olympus. Dispel the apotheosis that canon has afforded them and banish canon itself. There are
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obvious merits and important concepts within the work of the canonical roster, and so their work
should be open to discussion, but only as productions made by fellow researchers held to the
same standards we hold proper, evidence-based research to; they should not be censored, but
neither should they be imagined as reincarnations of Plato.
I am not concerned with the content of a research agenda so much as the values we
espouse when building it. Dismantling the canon should be a part of ongoing efforts to ultimately
(i) open up the traditions to which research can connect to; (ii) dismantle systems of inequality;
(iii) and inform quality research practice and translation. Keeping this in mind, a more
progressive treatment of canonical thinkers should: (1) bring to bear the question and guidelines
of empiry on their work – and expose where they fail to meet these criteria. Sociology, at its
core, is not philosophy3. Work in the discipline carries and aims to carry implications for
rethinking the social world, often in practical forms, such as policy and education. This cannot be
accomplished without established guidelines about the nature and retrieval of evidence, metrics
to assess its quality, means to verify its analyses and claims, commitment to social good
grounded on proper evidence, and sound ways of communicating relevant results. If mainstream
sociology’s popular claim to pursuing sound scientific practice is true, for which Du Bois was
also praised as a reason for his redemption, then these standards must be applied to the canonical
thinkers, as much as they are applied to ourselves. As the exposure and renunciation of the
Chicago School has come to show, the discipline will be better for doing so.
(2) In a similar vein, engagement with canonical thinkers must address the issue of
consequence. The canonical thinkers have dealt with macro-sociological claims about the nature
of society itself, often betraying implicit (and very explicit, in Marx’s case) assumptions and
judgments about ways to diagnose and improve upon its problems. But the case of China
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showcases how white men writing theories in isolation from evidence is little more than
ideology, yet produces terrifying results when translated into practice.
(3) Greater reflexivity must be paid to the global positionality of Western, particularly American,
sociology. In particular, as Raewyn Connell (2007) beautifully and powerfully asserts, more
attention must be paid to the Global South, not merely as a data mine, as much of canonical work
and the American sociological enterprise continue to do, but as a source of local knowledge
production in its own right. Just as empirical research is sensitive to (accounting for) the
relational nature of unfamiliar cultures and social phenomena it aims to explore, so too should
theoretical work cultivate such a sensitivity, awareness, and respect for this knowledge – the
commitment to seeing social reality unfold and become constructed from within should be
shared by empirical and theoretical research alike. On this account, there are several ways
empirical research obtains such a sensitivity, which theoretical research can benefit from
adopting:
(i) Collaboration with local scholarship and measuring results against the findings from a
prominent, local literature. Failing to acknowledge the standpoint of the researched in knowledge
production essentially masks the power relationships behind the determination of what
constitutes knowledge, and so “in the guise of objective science, expands the project of…
colonial knowledge production” (Tuck & Yang 2014:811, italics added). Recognizing local
perspectives, therefore, not only helps to sand down the power relationships between researchers
and researched (Au 2019; Smith 1999), but allows the subaltern to speak and to reclaim their
own lived experiences (Spivak 2005; Tuck 2009), simultaneously enabling a strengthened
abductive analysis, developing theoretically richer concepts by cross-comparisons with broader
bases of literature and results (Timmermans & Tavory 2012).
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(ii) Consultation of locals, which gleans justification from ethnography and participatory
action research literatures as learning about a social phenomenon using perspectives closest to it
from within and ensuring the research products reflect the interests of the locals involved (Baum,
MacDougall, & Smith 2006; see also Duneier 1999, 2002). The theory-building exercises typical
of an immerse ethnographic approach is inclusive of dissenting and assenting among the natives
of a field, going so far at times as to allow the self-determination of their own representations in
the final research product (Contreras 2012). In these cases, theoretical structures of signification
emerge only from a balanced dialectic between researcher and researched, preventing the
distortion of their interpretive standpoints (ibid:26; Au 2019; Emerson 2001:63; Harding 1992).
Thus, understanding a phenomenon from within means to beckon into view the intimacy of a
situated context (Adorno 1998[1963, 1969]:28; Au Forthcoming) and unpack the webs of
relational embeddedness within it that evoke how actors are influenced by and influence both the
form and content of their surrounding social structures (Au 2017a,b; DiMaggio 1992).
Ultimately, this not only frees up theory production from “conceptual straitjackets,” (Lukacs
1971:13) fated only to take on the forms prescribed by Western theories imported at a distance
from local cultural understandings that misunderstand the phenomena in question – but serves to
empower the very lives of those whom we study (Sprague & Hayes 2000)..
(iii) Reflexivity as a way of exposing the biases immanent to one’s social position
(Landy, Cameron, Au et al 2016). Gleaning insights from the way reflexivity has traditionally
been applied in research and education, it emerges that reflexivity also calls into account the way
positionality and sensitivity to culture affects the development of theoretical insights. Take, for
instance, Loic Wacquant’s assessment of Sidewalk, The Code of the Street, and No Shame in My
Game (Wacquant 2002) and the popular, highly-charged dispute that emerged thereafter. While
17
the former was inclined to infer a highly rigidized class structure from the ethnographic data, the
authors strongly resisted this account, noting the intersubjective production of meaning in daily
life as a much more compelling and accurate reflection of the subjects’ lives on the street
(Anderson 2002; Duneier 2002; Newman 2002). Thus, disregarding cultural tendencies, norms,
and history, which can only be understood using perspectives from within, risks “forcing reality
into theory” that ultimately allows for hierarchical, Eurocentric worldviews to enter and distort
our understanding of social reality (Anderson 2002).
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1 Aldon Morris’ successful campaign for the American Sociological Association’s
lifetime achievement award being renamed as the W. E. B. Du Bois Career of
Distinguished Scholarship Award has been a highly public (and discussed) recent
example.
2 Here, Du Bois anticipates Fanon’s eponymous “white masks” concept in Black Skin,
White Masks (1967[1952]).
3 Although it may be said that even within philosophy there exist methodologies
through which ideas are systematically vetted.
