I know this is out of the list-topic but I found this interesting and couldn't help myself on sharing it with you all. Best, nuri,- Nuria Widyasari Université de Paris 8 Vincènnes à St.Denis UFR 6 - Langage, Informatique, Technologie Dept. Hypermédia DEA - Enjeux Sociaux et Technologies de la Communication Option: Réseaux d'Information, Réseaux Sociaux Website: http://nurisoeharto.multiply.com --- Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i33/33b01001.htm From the issue dated April 22, 2005 The I in Sociology By BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN My husband and I were sitting in the kitchen, the edited manuscript of my first book in my hands, the galleys in his. I always read aloud, he always proofreads -- that's our system. That was the first time, though, and we didn't really have a system yet. It was just the two of us, trying to figure out how to review galleys. Daniel, our first child, was 8 years old. I can't quite remember what he was doing, but I can picture him, leaning back against the kitchen cabinet, engrossed in something, while I read. Suddenly his head snapped up, he turned to me, and he demanded: "What?" I'd just read a description of his birth, a graphic, personal account of what it felt like to give birth to him. It was from the preface of my book, a piece that would segue into an academic discussion of the home-birth movement and the politics of midwifery, the work that had been my dissertation. The book opened with my own story, my own birth. But "my own birth" was Daniel's birth; my birth story, his. He had become a character in a book. As, by now, have my other two children, my husband, other family members, friends, colleagues -- and, of course, I too am a character in my own books. Writers of fiction are known for stealing bits of life and putting them in their books. That practice also defines the increasingly popular genre of memoir. But what does it mean for a sociologist? What does it mean when I "use" my life and the people in it that way? More and more sociologists are doing just that: mining our own lives, our own experiences. Just as the anthropologists have moved closer to home, losing some of their fascination with exotica and exploring their own locales, sociologists have moved in closer as well. But for us, it was never about sailing off to some island somewhere -- we were always exploring close to home. Increasingly, though, we've come closer and closer, turning our sociological eyes on our own lives. In that first book, I used the personal as a frame -- Daniel's birth in the preface; Leah's birth, which also took place at home seven years later, in the epilogue. I published the book in the early 1980s, and that was pushing the envelope about as far as I cared to: I felt uncomfortable enough discussing intensely personal experiences, let alone ones as physical as giving birth. So why did I do it? I was criticizing contemporary medical practice, and I must have sounded like a total flake. Whenever I presented my work about home birth, except at midwifery meetings, someone was sure to ask me -- no, accuse me -- "But is it safe?" People seemed to think that home birth was an indulgence for the mothers, but what about the poor, helpless, abused babies, born without the benefit of a labor-and-delivery suite? The way to counter that was not, I came to realize, with endless statistics demonstrating the safety and improved outcome of births outside the hospital. This was just not about the numbers, not to be answered with studies showing home birth to be safer. More effective than data, I had myself. I was a graduate student when I had my first baby, an assistant professor when the second was born. I was married to a computer programmer, living in Flatbush. Could anybody be more normal, more square? If I introduced myself to the reader -- placed myself in my home, with my family, in all my ordinariness, decency, plain old niceness -- maybe the reader would accept me enough to hear what I was saying. What I was saying was, I thought, really fascinating sociologically, which made it worthy of being a dissertation. The work came about because I was at a particular moment in my life and my work: Academically, I was finished with my course work; personally, I wanted a home birth. As I explored my options (really, really limited in Brooklyn in 1974), I found my mind was working on two tracks. One was trying to solve the immediate problem of finding someone to attend a home birth, getting what I wanted for myself. The other was listening to my sociological imagination, which kept saying, "That's fascinating." I knew there was something important in what I was going through that I needed to get back to in my scholarly work. And so I did. When I had the baby, when I'd accomplished what I wanted for myself, I went back and mined what I had found in the world of birth. I was, of course, primed to find things: Years of sociological training had made me ready to see the ways that obstetrical knowledge, like all knowledge, is constructed, and the powers served by that construction. So I finished my dissertation, using very standard research techniques. I analyzed the content of medical and alternative literature; I conducted long interviews with medically trained nurse-midwives who had begun to do home births. Between my first book's preface and its epilogue, the word "I" appeared only to represent the researcher ("I asked the midwives I interviewed ... ") or the author ("In this chapter I will show ... "). I the mother, I the woman, I the character in the book showed up only at the beginning and end. Now, more than 20 years later, I have just finished another book inspired by my transition to motherhood: this time, on account of my third child, Victoria. Victoria is mine by adoption, and it is a kind of adoption that has a troubling -- and fascinating --history in America. It's a "trans-racial" adoption: I'm white, as are my husband and thus, definitionally, our first two kids; Victoria is black. I find that sentence very difficult to write. I need pages and pages to discuss the meaning of terms like "race" and "transracial adoption," and to explain why I prefer "white" and "black" in this instance to "East European Jewish" and "African-American." I took that amount of space to examine those language issues in my new book, Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption (Beacon Press, forthcoming). I have written books in between, and probably more as a matter of style than substance, my use of "I" has grown over the years. Still, most of the time in my books, it is a fairly restrained, controlled "I," used to announce my authorial presence, to provide a helpful anecdote, to ease the reader along with a personal touch when I present difficult, troubling, or perhaps threatening material. That is how most of us in sociology have been using the personal voice in our work. But my latest book is different, not only because of the informal language or the more-frequent use of "I." This is a far more personal book, one that grew out of and is informed by my life, not simply framed by, or sprinkled with, personal anecdotes. I weave back and forth in my writing between my research and my feelings and responses to that research. Some sociologists call such work autoethnography, to distinguish it from simple memoir. In memoir, the driving force is the story: You want to tell your life. In autoethnography, your life is data. Autoethnography is a methodology that makes particular sense when you're living a fascinating life, when you're having interesting, informative experiences. But who isn't? To a sociologist -- particularly the kind of sociologist I am trained to be, someone who does qualitative work, trained to regard the ordinary world itself as fascinating -- data are always and everywhere thick on the ground. Sometimes when I'm talking to a student about events that are happening in her or his life, like a relative's dying, or a traumatic move, I say, "Take notes!" When the situation has been resolved, the student may find something intellectually valuable in the experience, something on which to do scholarly work, maybe even autoethnography. And yet that's not quite what my book on race and adoption really is. It's not an ethnography of my family's lives and experiences. Partly that is precisely because of the question Daniel asked so forcefully when he was 8: Who owns the data? The experience I had giving birth was, I felt then and still feel now, very much my story, which I own. But Victoria's story is not entirely mine. I had the difficult -- and yes, intriguing, so here I am writing about it -- problem of figuring out where the boundaries are. What parts of the experience are my story, to which I am fully entitled, and what parts are hers, for her to use if and how she chooses? One thing I did was have her read the book before I gave it to the publisher for editing, or at least read all of what she so charmingly calls the "nonboring, nonsociological" parts. We went through the manuscript together and stopped at every mention of her name. Occasionally she changed a word, edited a phrase. But even before that, I had given the manuscript to someone else who knows and loves both of us, and asked her to read it through Victoria's eyes, to show me where I was treading too close to the line, where we needed to protect her life from my writerly grasp. In the end, what I am doing in the book is pretty much what I do in the classroom. It is not memoir, though I certainly do tell some stories from my life. And it is not autoethnography -- not an analysis of my life. The driving force is neither the story nor my life as data. Instead, I have a number of concepts that I want to get across to the reader. I search for examples in whatever is available to me. That includes my life. On the other hand, my life is also what gives me some of my ideas: Concepts develop out of living; experience congeals into thought. When I express the idea, I draw upon my life. I'm not searching my life for interesting scenes and seeing how I can fit them into a book, the way I would if I were doing a memoir. I'm wrestling with ideas, which have often come to me in the course of living my life. I use my writing to try to explain those ideas and introduce them to other people. Inevitably, then, in my new book I slide back and forth between memoir and sociology, treading recklessly close to what my colleague, Juan Battle, calls "mesearch" rather than research. "What theory are you using?" one of my graduate students asked me at a party when I described the book a while ago. She's doing a dissertation, and she listed the theorists who seemed appropriate. I stammered answers -- we were at a party, not an exam. I sipped my wine. Hell, I thought, I'm not using theory here, I'm using practice. But practice is, for all of us, grounded in theory, in ideology, in ways of thinking about the world. I'm a sociologist. I'm more a sociologist than I am a Jew. It's my way of thinking, my stance in the world. So when I saw how interesting so-called transracial adoption was, just as when I saw how interesting home birth was, my mind went off on two tracks: getting done what I needed to in my own life, and taking sociological notice of things to set aside for later use. Perhaps inevitably the book has a lot about who I am, how I live my life. As I have noted, we see more and more of that kind of work in the social sciences these days. Some of my colleagues regret that move to the personal, and some revel in it. Oddly enough, I am unsure how to feel about it. I hate to read autobiography; I rarely even read biography. The stories of individual lives interest me less than the contexts in which they are placed. So I have to ask myself if I am spreading my emotions across the page, my reactions to both the events of my life and to my research inspired by those events, just because it has become more fashionable to do so. Is the use of the personal voice what one expects or needs these days, to reach readers outside academe -- a way to be nonboring, nonsociological? Or am I making good, intelligent use of myself, my life, and my experience, as a resource? What I like to think I'm doing is being nonboring and sociological. But I've just been reading a paper by one of my graduate students, Colin Jerolmack, about sociability and pigeons -- he hung out in parks and watched the interactions between people and birds. It was perfect sociology. And it made me jealous. I know how to go out and gather data. I could do that again. But my life, well, my life keeps getting in the way. Just let me finish revising a book on birth and midwives, wrap up the one on adoption, make some progress on the new work I'm thinking about doing on home cooking -- just let me get past my own life for 10 minutes, and maybe I could think about something else. Maybe I'll go hang out in the park and see what strikes me as interesting. Barbara Katz Rothman is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York's Baruch College and Graduate Center. She is the author, most recently, of Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption, forthcoming next month from Beacon Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 33, Page B10