okay so it's 10 10 i'm gonna start right on time every time this is sociology one i am anne swidler if you did not get a syllabus and you want one uh cyrus deun is standing right there and you can put a hand up and he will give it to you i have a huge amount i want to accomplish today so pay attention i pay attention involves this so i'm you can't really read the words because i couldn't photograph this clearly enough but i am going to read you this cartoon heads up dude he's emailing his friend heads up dude professor atkins just asked you a question zipper about what no clue just heard your name maybe if i ignore her she'll think i'm taking notes click click click on his computer she just asked you again man your major greenhou four major greenhouse gases uh stole her while i google it he says so clicky click click professor we couldn't hear the question back here could you repeat it i asked zipper to name four major greenhouse gases and then water vapor co2 ozone and methane he says having googled it uh right you owe me one dude his friend says if this keeps up i'll never get through my email click click click okay so if you take notes on your computer that's fine with me but i do not want you checking a website facebook looking at anything else i do not want you using your computer for any other purpose in my class if you do i will see it because the kid behind you will be distracted looking over your shoulder and i will stop the class and humiliate you and ask you to leave so don't do it it's incredibly rude don't do it okay don't even think about it don't do it okay this is an interpersonal situation it's believe it or not you and i actually have now a relationship of sorts and so i'm asking you not to do something rude and i i really also shouldn't be gasping with your friends uh borrowing a piece of gum and so forth okay now i am going to give a real lecture for about 20 or 25 minutes then i'm going to talk about some administrative things then i'm going to do something extremely important give another tiny bit of a lecture that has an in class written assignment so do not leave unless you're not in the course because you can't stay in the course unless you complete this assignment and it cannot be done at home it must be done in class so don't leave me stay with me okay now uh what is sociology and i have there that it is a weird feel and what i mean by that is that the sociological way of thinking about the world does not come naturally to most americans it is an unfamiliar odd different way of thinking and even those of you who are from immigrant families will find that you increasingly no matter what you think about yourselves you are becoming more american by the day indeed there is a lot of research showing that even those of you who are visiting from abroad will be changed by this experience there's actually very good research on japanese students showing that having spent time outside of japan in canada or the us at all changes people changes the way they think about the self so what is sociology well you could say it is the systematic this is not going to be very informative it is the systematic study of social life or the attempt to explain the causes and consequences of social phenomena but the reason it's a weird field is because most of us tend to think about everything that happens as being determined by our own individual traits we think that it's how much character we have how hard we work how uh how committed we are whether we're good people or not and for example we have an election coming up and rather than people really being focused on policy or even party platforms they are mainly concerned about whether these two people are good people and in fact the polls show that people like obama better he's better on the sort of relaxed get together with people somehow comfortable in his own skin factor and romney people are afraid is too cold well in most countries in the world actually these features play a much smaller role and people are much more worried about what political party people are in and how they actually would organize policy but americans tend to think in terms of individuals and in fact i see this i like murder mysteries so i read a lot of mystery novels and one thing you will notice is that french murder mysteries for example the classic are by a author named simone and the chief detective is inspector megret m-a-i-g-r-e-t and inspector magret is a bureaucrat he's actually the director of a major office of the french the paris police force he's a conventional guy he has a team of people who work for him he has deep psychological insight into the weirdness of human personality but he goes every home every day for lunch cooked by his wife drinks a little glass of brandy she madame magret makes a chicken for him something like this the american detective would never never never be a bureaucrat he would be a cop who got dismissed from the force because he was rebellious he would be the classic american detective as a down and out detective he works in a shabby little office or lately she works in a shabby little office where the phone never rings barely scraping by totally outside the rules operates completely unconventionally in other words the heroes in this individualistic culture are not people who are part of a social organization not people who are part of a system not people who are part of a social institution they are lone rangers they are by themselves and you can think all the way the matt damon movies this endures right down to the present even though we don't watch westerns it's the lone cowboy the person who can't get along in society who is the hero well that makes it very hard within that cultural experience to think about the power of social forces so sociology is a weird field largely because it requires you to re-work your intuitions a little bit now when you do that it is enormously fun enormously interesting enormously revealing but at first it does not come naturally it will not be easy and this leads me to say this is not an easy course so if you started doing the readings you already recognize that the first week's readings are very very difficult it's i mean the thing you're reading was written uh i think in 1902 so the very very beginning of the last century it was translated not very well sometime in 1930s or 40s and so it's just i we recognize this you have very few pages but the pages you have are quite tough going but it's difficult for even a deeper reason which is that at first it will not naturally fit with your intuitions so this leads me to say something quite important especially to those of you who are college freshmen or transfer students for whom this is your first semester at cal which is do not fall behind at the beginning of your courses and this is true not just for this course but for every course the one of my lectures my freshman year in college someone said keep up for the first six weeks and you will be okay and what the person meant by that was that once you have understood the kind of thing a course is about the readings get easier writing the papers gets easier everything sort of but that if you don't get those first six weeks down where you really understand it then trying to do it later you don't know what you're reading you don't know what you're they're talking about you don't understand it so in this course and in every course you should really put other things aside it's not the first six weeks party and then i'll do some school work it's the first six weeks really work then you can explore more what college might have available join a club do political work yes um you know join the campus newspaper whatever your favorite activity would be but keep up the second thing and this isn't just about sociology again the part that's about sociology is that once you get intuitively what we're doing you can only get that by reading by going to the lectures by paying attention the second thing i would urge you to do in all your classes is take notes don't just sit there watching i you might not see it right now but some of the lectures at least will be quite entertaining i think i'm a fun lecturer one teaching words blah blah blah but if you think you will remember that is incorrect you will not remember and if you have not processed what you heard through your own mind and written it down it will not stay in your brain now there's one other thing this course either this is the good news of the bad news is being webcast so you can actually either skip a lecture and watch it on the web i hope not too many people will do that or the room will kind of shrink but i'm this is an experiment i'll find out what it's like i'll find out whether i'm lecturing to an empty classroom which i would hate and it means that you could review but do not imagine that you were going to you know sit there the night before the final exam and listen to 26 hours of lectures uh no it's not just that you don't have 26 hours it's that that process of really incorporating what you've learned so that you can think with it cannot happen unless you do everything as the course is going along especially early on so invest your time now okay now substantively today i'm going to talk about one of the great sociologists person you're reading this week emil durkheim and his classic book suicide so durkheim wrote three great books and many many other important books and many many hundreds of articles but the one that well there are several but the one that sociologists go back to again and again and again is this one suicide i used to assign it and i had all these students walking around campus with a red book that said suicide and people would be stopping them and say oh no don't don't things will get better don't worry um so it's not a how-to book um it is one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the relationship between individual life and social life ever created and durkheim's fundamental insight was that what seems like the most individual act a person could commit the loneliest saddest most individual possible action is actually profoundly social in its causes and i would say that even though the language he uses is very old-fashioned he has a few observations particularly about women that are completely out of sync with what modern people believe nonetheless his insights into the social causes of suicide have held up they're basically still the basis on which this sort of analysis is done okay what was his insight well he starts from paying attention not to individuals who commit suicide but to how suicide rates differ between groups right so he's interested in what he calls the propensity the likelihood the sort of statistical differences between one group and another in their likelihood of committing suicide he analyzed huge amounts of data from europe in the 19th century and one of the funny little footnotes here is that um he actually had his son-in-law also a great sociologist marcel most m-a-u-s-s uh hand code 30 000 suicide records so uh i don't know what you know if he had to do that in order to earn the daughter or if he just uh maybe he obeyed everything durkheim told him and durkheim said analyze 30 000 suicides marry my daughter uh come with me to class and he just said yes sir yes sir yes sir we don't actually know how that happened but in any case durkheim's first insight was or his first analysis and this is what you're reading this week is that he noticed that protestants were substantially less likely to commit suicide than either catholics or jews so there was variation by religious group and this was true across different countries in europe and he asked why would that be what what is it about protestantism that puts people at greater risk of suicide and his argument is one that sounds strange to us now he argued that what protestantism did was tell people to rely more on their own judgment their own conscience their own reading of the bible so protestants he argued were vulnerable to suicide because they were in some odd way too reliant on their own judgment right so relying on your own judgment put you at risk and in the 19th century both the catholic church and ghettoized jewish communities had religious authorities the pope and the priest or the rabbi who told you how to behave what to believe what to do now this is not true of either of these movements in the 20th century to the same extent but in the 19th century it was protestants who made up their own minds about more religious issues and jews and catholics were more subject to authority and being subject to that authority was somehow protective now why would it be protective against suicide doesn't was not talking about making you a happier person just protective against suicide to be told what to think and make you vulnerable to suicide to exercise your own judgment and der khan developed this category of egoistic suicide to explain suicides of this type and what is the problem with egoistic suicide what is it the problem with protestantism in durkheim's understanding for durkheim the problem is that if you have to answer the question what should i live for you're feeling bad you're feeling depressed and you ask what should i live for if the answer to that question is well me my rationality my understanding of the world my judgment my freedom my and you are you don't like yourself that day you hate yourself then the answer to the question of what you should live for is there's really not much outside yourself that matters and so there isn't a reason to live right and being told by other people by your community by an authority what's true what's real what matters means you have something outside of yourself to live for and durkheim was saying that what protects people against egoistic suicide is that they have something outside themselves greater than themselves that provides meaning and purpose it's the answer to the question what do i have to live for now durkheim further pursued this and kind of tried to prove that egoistic suicide really was a social cause that there really were social causes that created this sort of suicide by looking at the difference between married and single people and he showed that married people are considerably protected against suicide he did all even though he had almost he didn't have computers needless to say maybe that's not obvious obvious to me these were all hand calculations they didn't even have calculators so i mean they may have had mechanical ones or an abacus or something but this is really hard work to do this he showed that married people are protected against suicide compared to single people this is still true being married is hugely protected for your health in a whole variety of ways well you might say okay but married people are happier you know they have companionship they have well what he showed that's so brilliant is that even widows and widowers are protected against suicide compared to single people especially he showed if they have children so the burdens are terrible you're a young wife your husband dies in the 19th century you would have had almost no way to support yourself why would that be protective against suicide i would assume you're miserable even compared to a single person but think about it egoistic suicide is the kind where you have nothing to live for outside of yourself and if you're a widowed parent with children you have to keep going you have to keep going for your children so doing things only for yourself actually is dangerous and having to do things for someone else so i make this joke that um parents of young children not only can't commit suicide they can't even get sick for a day because because they have to get up in the morning they have to change the baby's diaper they have to feed their kids they have to drag themselves up they just can't not function they have to function yes uh because why do widowers and widowers the protective effect is less for them but even widows and widowers without children i think durkheim believes and this will get us into next lecture but it's a very good question have been incorporated into a little society that's larger than themselves and that is the marriage and the family they're now part of and so even if the spouse is dead they still are part of a social entity greater than themselves so you can then sort of turn this around and say if egoistic suicide is the society the suicide of meaninglessness and by that i just mean not having something greater than yourself that matters that's worth living for okay the second type major type of suicide durkheim discusses and there are not one but two more types besides these that i'm not going to tell you about that you can learn about only in section so you must do your reading and go to section um is what he called anomic suicide and i'm sorry to say you have to just write down the word anomic and memorize it it's from a french word anomie you might have heard people use it to mean kind of alienation like oh it's a very anomic situation everybody's miserable nobody's really talking to each other it means kind of the breakdown of social ties something like that it literally means loss of rules so the word nomia is the word for rules or laws so it means kind of without rules that's the literal meaning again we use it to mean kind of lonely and out of it but it's technically it means without rules an anomic suicide durkheim argued was quite different than egoistic suicide economic suicide tended to exist in periods when there was very rapid social change so it's essentially the suicide of rapid social transformation and if any of you come from societies that went through very very rapid economic growth you will know that in fact very traditional societies where people are very very very poor suicides are incredibly rare incredibly rare india before the modern period asia is very very rare but suicide increases rapidly with modernity and the anomic form of suicide for durkheim is the suicide where you no longer know where what the rules are or the rules break down and i'm going to try to explain intuitively why that's so important but first his first example was that in periods of very rapid economic growth and in periods of depression like the great depression so suddenly your business collapses well that's quite understandable that you might and there were during the us in the great depression there were a lot of suicides um i don't know how many of you remember the madoff scandal but the son of madoff you know he killed himself a couple of years ago and you could say well his whole world had collapsed around him you know very understandable but why would people also commit suicide when things are getting better rapidly and durkheim really saw a nominic suicide i've used the term here the suicide of frustration but another way to think about it it's the suicide people are tempted to i'll put that it that way uh when there are no limits to their aspirations so he his insight is that most of us most of the time judge whether we're doing the right thing whether we've behaved appropriately whether we've achieved enough by the rules of our subgroup so you're in high school you know what it is to be a cool kid or a nerdy kid or an academically successful kid which i hope all of you and some of you might not be kids some of you might be real grown-ups but you know what it is to be an academically successful person you come to college and suddenly you're in a new world you don't know what's except expected of you you don't know how you're supposed to behave you don't know what's appropriate i used this example with my teaching assistants yesterday and they might have already used it or use it again in section but one of the huge things are you going to embarrass yourself in every imaginable way wearing the wrong clothes the first day of school not knowing how to greet people are you if you come to see me which i hope you will what will you call me will you walk out of the office saying oh my gosh i think i called her and oh my and then just spend hours staring at the ceiling thinking what have i done what have i done what have i done will you call me professor swidler and say gosh that sounded so formal i don't know if she thinks that's the right thing should i call her i actually had a professor who i couldn't bear to call by his first name his name was leo lowenthal and after i passed my oral exams he said he was european born he said ah you can no longer call me professor london and i said okay professor leo and so i just couldn't couldn't bring myself okay but when you don't know what the rules are anymore because suddenly the rules have changed you're in a lot greater danger of making a lot more mistakes and feeling a lot more awkward and uncomfortable and bad about yourself so that's just one obvious thing that if the rules suddenly change on you but durkheim is thinking of this in a deeper sense and maybe i can explain this better with the following so again i'm going to assume most of you are freshmen but even those who aren't um i'm going to assume you were pretty good students in high school and when you get to berkeley uh what would be a good performance here what would you feel good about what would make you feel good about yourself what's really worth doing here and let me tell you i know there are a certain number of you who just want an a and you want an a in every class and you're desperate for that a and so let's imagine miracle of miracles you actually get those a's and you end up with a 4.0 your freshman year and then i'm gonna ask you is that really important do you know the names of all the people who had 4.0 last year they're written down somewhere they're carved in stone they're you know incredibly no well what if you didn't cr what if you actually had the best gpa or whatever they i'm sure that doesn't isn't how it's done but you actually were the valedictorian at berkeley yeah okay can you name last year's valedictorian or the one from 1957 or from 1968 or from 1974 or from 1994 or from 2003 or from 2012. anybody okay so i'm just going to say basically who cares it's not i mean these things there really is no accomplishment that is so important that if you do that it's enough you have done it you have even if you become a scientist and you develop some wonderful new molecule that improves the survival of a certain kind of cancer there are millions of people dying all over the world whom you haven't helped a bit your little accomplishment just objectively speaking doesn't amount to much take me well i go to cocktail parties people say oh what do you do i say uh i'm a sociologist and they say oh uh john what what you know what i mean really maybe i'm gonna make cocktail party chatter out of being a sociologist and i'll confess something incredibly embarrassing which is for me publishing an article in the american sociological review or which i have never done the american journal of sociology is like oh my god the bl and end all and for you guys it's a joke i mean you wouldn't give up you know next saturday afternoon for an hour to be able because what does it matter in the big scheme of things all the things we think are so important don't matter a bit that's the actual truth that's the objective truth and what durkheim is saying is you don't live in the objective truth you live in social truth and for social truth it's incredibly important that you do okay at college and if for your parents just to survive your freshman year and not get thrown out is a huge victory that's a real victory but it's not objectively a victory it's a victory because somebody your family defines what's important they define when you've done enough and if you're the first person in your college ever to go your first person your family ever to go to college then getting here was a huge achievement not because objectively it matters and is going to change human history but because you live in a social world that defines what is enough it defines what are appropriate aspirations and it limits those levels to some meaningful standard that's meaningful in your world so for me in the sociology because i am a part of a discipline that values research and publication it's incredibly important but it's and i have devoted my life to it not just an hour here and an hour there whatever meaning my life has is my life as a parent my life as a wife and my life as a scholar but it's not other people would just think they're not part of that social world so it's social worlds that create our limits and that define our aspirations and this is what durkheim called regulation he argued that the social rules we live in regulate our aspirations and tell us when we have done enough so you can think of a nominic suicide as when the rules break down and you no longer have a definition of when you have done enough then you are really in trouble and i hope you'll talk in section about celebrities this is a huge fascinating thing these people achieve what you have wanted to cheat achieve their superstars everybody worships them they walk down the street and people take pictures of them they produce you know records and concerts that earn millions and millions and millions of dollars they are superstar athletes that anybody who's in sports would give you know anything to be like them and their levels of self-destructive behavior are absolutely astounding they destroy themselves at a rate that is just and it's because they have no limits so i'm going to ask you to think in section about what it means to have no limits on your aspirations no limit on your behavior okay now i'm going to take a break do not go anywhere i want the gsis to start handing out one of these to each of you and you are going to have to write something so i want you to pay attention while i talk to you so don't don't pay attention to anything but me except get a sheet and then i will tell you what to do but first i'm going to talk about a few details of the course and then i'm going to tell you what you're going to do with this sheet so quiet no talk no talk okay because all right so first grading in the course the basic system is 10 for the midterm and this will be on the powerpoint you don't have to worry about it 30 for the final exam so there are two in-class exams 20 for each of the two papers and 20 for section participation i want to highlight this last point which is that all grading is on a 0 to 100 scale so not doing something will destroy your grade basically if you fail to do any of those things if you blow off section and get a zero you will fail the course it just it's i mean it takes 20 points off the top of your grade so conceivably if you did everything perfectly you could get an 80 which is the lowest imagine will be minus but it just it does not pay to skip anything so that's the basic point the second thing is what is the standard and i wanna uh just say i want you to do the reading to attend and pay attention in lectures not be asleep not stare off into space but try to pay attention go to section if you really do all the work in the course if you really do all the work in the course so it's not we're not giving out the yeah it's the one page sheet that they need yeah if you really do all the work in the course i hope you would get at least to be if you do all the work in the course well you'll get some kind of a and if you mess up and you don't do it those are the people who get to see these naps so i i guess what i'm trying to say is i'm basically an easy grader i want you to do well if everybody does great work they can all have a's and a minuses or whatever but if you do not do the work and it's a hard course it has a lot of work i will fail you and there are plenty of f's in this course every year because people basically blow off the work they don't do it and i mean they don't do it and i won't have so if you're not going to do the work in the course don't take the course it's not a gut it's not an easy course it's a course for people who ideally want to be sociology majors we put a huge amount of resources into the course and i want you to do it okay now this assignment has two parts one is that one theme of the course is going to be about institutions we are going to read about institutions all next week here i am giving you a quick and dirty understanding which is most sociology textbooks let's say we'll tell you a little bit about you know sociology has culture and so on and so forth and then they will run you through the basic institutions of a modern society so there will be a chapter on sociology of education and education is an institution there will be sociology of law sociology of the family sociology of religion sociology of politics sociology of there's now a field economic sociology so the basic institutions of a modern society are things like the legal order the family religion the economy government that's really what sociologists mean by institutions but i want to give you a little deeper sense that what it means to be a person is very much anchored in your connection to an institution and that institutions aren't just what i have here which is a pattern of expected action of individuals or groups enforced by social sanctions which means rewards and punishments and that is just that's going to be in your reading next week that exact quote so you don't have to worry about it terribly much but i'm trying to get the idea that when something is an institution first it's lasting so the wonderful question this person here asked about why widows and widowers are still protected and i kind of said well they're part of a little society that lasts beyond them well you might say one thing is they've become part of the institution of marriage right so their individual marriage has broken down because somebody died but they have participated in the institution of marriage which existed before them and will endure after them right and so one part of institutions is that they are reproduced even when the participants come and go the second thing about institutions is that they have a kind of because there are rules let's say there are rules and there are rewards for obeying the rules and punishments for not obeying the rules they tend to help you know what to do with yourself and they also provide um a sense of identity so the role of if somebody asks you oh what do you do you will say i'm a student or i'm a student at berkeley and that is understood to be a role that has some meaning you are a son or daughter in a family you are a member of maybe a religious institution so without going into this i'll just say institutions are patterns that are reproduced and endure there is some kind of rule that defines the pattern there are sanctions that enforce the pattern and there are purposes and meaning so for every important institution you can say why does it exist why does the university as an institution exist well it exists to produce new knowledge and to educate and transmit to educate new generations of people and to transmit that knowledge that's what they exist for so now i want you to write on that sheet of paper i handed out a brief very brief it can be just two or three lines i want you to name one institution the family education religion law that matters to you and i want you to say something about your own position in it your role as it were so and i'm gonna leave this for next week but i think this is and again it doesn't have to be good oh you also need to put the name of your gsi or your section number so if you're filling out this i have the list of all the section and who the gsis are and so you should know your the easiest is if you just know your section number that's fine if you're going to change section or try to change that's fine put your current section okay and it's really important to me i don't want anybody everybody who takes the course if you have not done this if you have not written this one page you can't say in the course so you might as well do it because the other thing i'm going to talk to you about while you're writing is plagiarism so i don't know if everybody here is an english speaker it's a funny word you don't have to know how to spell it but you have to know that it's incredibly important and that the institution of the university is about helping you develop your skills acquire knowledge and become in many many ways a better thinker a better citizen a better person and we cannot do this we invest enormous time and energy in helping you improve your work if you turn in work to us that is not your work we are enraged so there are many parts of social life where it's fine to copy if i go to my synagogue and i say the same prayers people have said for thousands of years it's totally fine i'm not supposed to make up my own prayers i'm supposed to use exactly the ones that have always been there there are many other situations where if you go home and tell your friends everything you learned in class i'm thrilled i don't want copyright i want everybody in the world to share my wonderful ideas no but i do not want you to copy anything not for if you copied from the web we will find it i guarantee it if you borrow a paper from somebody else from your fraternity or sorority this incenses i love that i go to sorority dinners i love the greek system but the one thing i hate is that they keep files of old papers i don't give the papers out i mean you have to come get your paper for me or give me an envelope because i'm not leaving it around for somebody to collect and and we will catch it and we will try to get you thrown out of the university so just let me tell you however embarrassing you think your english is how you can be illiterate and we will work with you but if you try to fake work that is not yours if you copy a paper buy a paper borrow a paper copy a paragraph from somewhere so we don't expect you to have all your own ideas the whole point is to teach you ideas for you to learn ideas the ideas don't come out of your head they come from elsewhere of course you're going to put in your paper ideas that you got from your reading if you quote something fine put quotation marks around it tell us where you got it i don't care much about footnote format you can use any just give us the title of the book and the page number fine i'm not worried about that you know what copying is you know what it is to lift things off the internet i read the papers i know this has become incredibly common in american high schools and it is not going to happen here and again if it does happen it creates huge amounts of paperwork for us because i have to take you to the dean's office i have to fill out a whole complicated form about what the punishment is i will fail your assignment and i will fail you for the course and i will do everything in my power to get you thrown out so just don't do it okay and there's a reason which is that the university is a place that's about helping you improve your skills about teaching you and we cannot teach you if we do not know how you write the mistakes you make those mistakes are precious to us we love your mistakes right a perfect paper that someone else wrote is useless a paper full of errors that you made because you actually don't understand something is great because then we can help you understand so there is a real reason it's not some i don't make money out of copyright law or anything these are the institutional purposes in my role as a professor i'm just telling you this is one of the greatest academic crimes professors get fired from their jobs if they do it it is just unacceptable so i want you now to write in your own words it can be as simple as you want your understanding of plagiarism and i want you to promise that you won't do it in your own words and i want you to sign the bottom of that page and you cannot take my class unless you do that so you've got two minutes and go for it and then you can hand all those things into me and i won't yell at you anymore i promise huh oh yes right can i give you back the section numbers yeah i spent a lot of time actually trying to fit everything on the slot it was a little tricky and then while you're doing that i will say a couple of i've told you none of the practical things i meant to tell you so don't talk the reader is going to be available by tomorrow morning for those of you who want it this week's readings are on b space if you are not in the course and after this you still want to join no the only way to be in the course or to change sections is to attend a section and have the gsi tell you there is room and then the gsi will tell me that's true for concurrent enrollment students that's true for people who aren't in the course at all and that's true for people who uh if you want to get on b space i can email me and i can put you in as a student or a guest or something yeah okay so finish filling out i i need you to tell me what plagiarism is and that you're not going to do it yes you forgot which section at the time and the you don't know the time and you don't know the number or anything well just say forgot which section and we'll look you up okay okay and then when you're done bring me your sheets or give them to one of the gsis thank you so much