Master Status

July 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Disability is often a “master status.”*  The term was coined by Everett Hughes seventy years ago to indicate a characteristic that, from the perspective of other people, floods out other aspects of a person’s identity.   

Last week’s “This American Life” provided an excellent example.  The story was about an actress and dancer – Mary Archbold - whose left arm ends at the elbow.  She was born that way.   Outside the house, she wears a prosthesis, and though it is hard plastic and cannot do anywhere near what a real arm can do, she is able to keep other people from realizing that she does not have two normal arms. 

And that’s the way she likes it – mostly because she is acutely aware of the master-status problem.  Here is the audio clip (it runs less than two minutes), followed by the transcript.

IRA GLASS: Is that moment [when you reveal to others] a moment of horror or a moment of pride? MARY ARCHBOLD: Half and half. There’s the horror of: What reaction is it going to be? And then there’s the quiet pride that maybe you saw me as me before you saw me as an actor with a disability. IRA: You feel like those two things are contradictory? MARY: [Immediately] Yes. IRA: I’m not sure I understand that. It’s like you’re saying you want them to see you. But you includes the fact that you have only one full arm. MARY: True. But it’s not my leading characteristic. And often times when people find it out first, that’s sort of how they describe me. I’m like categorized “one-arm Mary.” IRA: But everyone when you see them, you see some superficial thing – their hair or the way they’re dressed or their age whatever it is, their race whatever it is, and they get classified . . . MARY: And I’d be happy to be classified among any other things. You can call me “the short girl,” you can call me “the brunette girl,” you can call me “the blue-eyed girl” – whatever you want to say. Just not “the disabled girl.” . . . . . And because I am a performer, it’s sort of a professional necessity, ’cause otherwise the only role I’ll be called in for is “wounded vet who just came home from Afghanistan.” And this way, I get called in for “housewife,” I get called in for “mom.”

The entire episode of TAL illustrates other sociological and psychological principles as well.  The Mary Archbold segments (one with the title “There’s Something About Mary”) take up only 13 minutes, and they could easily be used as a companion piece if you’re teaching Goffman (especially Stigma).

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*Hughes was using the old status/role distinction.  Look in almost any introductory sociology text, and you will read that “status” refers to the position in a social system while “role” refers to the expected behaviors of someone in that position. “Brother” and “sister” are statuses; the behaviors we expect (sharing certain chores, giving Christmas gifts, etc.) are part of the role. 

However, if you listen to sociologists any time except when they are delivering the intro lecture on role, they use role to refer to both the position and the behaviors.  Just as we say that someone is in the role of Lady Macbeth, referring both to her position in the play and the things she will do and say, we refer to  “the role of sister,” not the “status” of sister. 

As for “status,” except for the intro lecture and surviving coinages like “master status,”  sociologists speak of “status” almost exclusively to refer to hierarchical position, usually socio-economic status.

More Auroras?

July 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Will Wilkinson blogs (here) “Why Aren’t There More Auroras?”  Why don’t we see mass killings every week?  The Aurora slaughter, he says,  was not “senseless.” Just the opposite.

It is so easy to imagine from the perspective both of the murdered and the murderer . . . that I cannot quite fathom why it doesn't happen all the time. It is our safety that’s mysterious.

His answer is basically human nature.  His view is comfortingly anti-Hobbesian:

We are more thoroughly controlled by our society's norms than we tend to imagine. In a setting of peace, outside the context of war, to perpetrate an act like the Aurora massacre requires an almost superhuman feat of volition. There aren't more Aurora's because we are sociable robots, programmed for peace. To override that programming and act really monstrously requires both an uncommon estrangement and an implausibly free will.

My first reaction when I read Wilkinson’s question was that his starting assumption was wrong:  in fact there are more Auroras – disgruntled or unstable people who walk into an office or public space and start shooting.  There are so many in fact – twenty a year on average (USA Today) – that to be national news, the incident has to be unusual in some way.  Just three days before Aurora, a man in Tuscaloosa who had recently been sacked from his job got his AK-47, stood outside a crowded bar, and opened fire.  Nobody was killed, so the story didn’t get much coverage. 

My second reaction is that the question, stated that way, doesn’t easily direct us towards empirical data.  It does not imply variables – things that can be different in a way that allows comparison.  Instead, the question should be, “Why are there more Auroras at some times and places than at others?”  Why, for instance, does the US have many more Auroras than do other countries?  I doubt that human nature in the UK or Poland or Japan is any different than in the US.  I doubt that we have more people of “uncommon estrangement” and “implausibly free will.”  

But what we do have is guns – lots of them.  And really good ones too.  As in other countries, the uncommonly estranged here are very rare, as Wilkinson says.  But in the US, an uncommonly estranged nutjob can walk into a friendly gun shop and walk out with an 100-round AR-15. 

It’s much easier to be a mass murderer if you can get weapons of mass killing, much harder if you can’t.

In many countries, that AR-15 would be considered an unusual weapon and subject to greater restrictions than other guns.  But here in the US, it’s as normal as blueberry pie.  The Times (here) quotes Eugene Volokh, who is most definitely not a nutjob; he’s a law professor at UCLA, an expert on Constitutional law:

The guy basically had normal guns.

Maybe the Times quoted Volokh out of context.  I hope so, but I fear not.  I would like to think that a military assault rifle with a 100-round clip is not a normal weapon.  But apparently I am out of touch with the realities of American life. 


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(Note to commenters: please keep your remarks civil and relevant.  This post is not about freedom or self-defense or the Constitution.  However, actual evidence on mass shootings, access to weaponry, uncommon estrangement, etc., in the US and elsewhere would be welcome.)

A Book by Its Cover – Children’s Version

July 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

What’s this book about?” asks the little girl as her parent browses in the Classics section of the bookstore.  Maybe she’s pointing to Middlemarch. Or Ulysses. What do you say?

Sunnychanel, who blogs at Babble.com, turned her slight frustration at trying to answer that question into a research opportunity.  If life hands you an inquisitive six year old, do research on book covers and youthful ideation.  Sunnychanel turned the question back on the daughter and asked her what she thought the book was about.Here are the book covers and just below them, the daughter’s synopsis.

Sometimes the kid came close to the mark.  For example, she totally nailed the “magical realism” of Garcia Marquez.

(Click on the image for a larger view that will allow you 

to read the synopsis beneath the book cover.)

On The Great Gatsby she wasn’t very close, but I’d have to blame that one on the graphic designer.

And there are some, like Lord of the Flies, where she hears the basic tune, but the minor sonorities of the original become a bright major upbeat melody, the sort of thing you might skip along to.

And then there’s Jane Eyre, the gold digger.

“Reader, I could really dig him.”

I guess you could turn this exercise into a projective diagnostic instrument – the Rorschach or Thematic Apperception Test, but more fun.

The full post is here.  An earlier SocioBlog post on book covers is here.  And if you haven’t seen BetterBookTitles, browse here.

HT: Shamus Khan

Postal Wisdom

July 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some people are unhappy about the Happy Valley statue of Joe Paterno.  They want it removed, torn down. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Times says let it stand.  Coates, who is African American, also wants to preserve a Columbia, SC statue of Senator Ben Tillman, “who helped found Clemson University and, in his spare time, defended lynching from his august national offices.”

For both statues, Coates applies the same reasoning:  We need to be reminded of our past sins – ours, not just those of the racist or the child-abuse enabler.

Arguing for the [Paterno] statue’s removal, the legendary coach Bobby Bowden said he wouldn’t want Sandusky’s crimes “brought up every time I walked out on the field.” That’s the point. Sandusky’s crimes should never be forgotten . . . .  It is shameful to deify men who put nationalist ritual before children. But it is more shameful to pretend that this elevation was achieved by Joe Paterno’s singular hand.

I’ll pass for the moment on questions about the function of heroes and whether we really need them and what it says about our society that we apparently do need them and who are the people we choose to make our heroes.  But the simple point is that the statue should never have been built.  And if the Happy Valleyans had known then what they know now, it would not have been built. 

What was the hurry? 

The Post Office comes in for a lot of criticism, but on this one they got it right: no commemoratives  until the person has been dead for ten years.* 

That seems like a wise policy other institutions should follow.

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* I was watching Jay Leno one night back when there were sightings of Elvis in supermarkets and other venues.  Leno mentioned the Elvis commemorative stamp and added, “The Post Office rule is that you have to be dead for ten years . . . and stay dead.”