A sociological travelogue

This blog is meant to be a kind of sociological travelogue about my coming six-month stay in Israel as a visiting professor, from mid-January through July 2008. One aim of the blog is to communicate with my American friends and family and keep them updated about my life while I’m abroad. But, as a comparative-historical sociologist, I also want to use this blog to reflect a little about Israeli society in comparison to American society. Hopefully this aspect of the blog will appeal to my non-sociologist friends and family as well as my colleagues. I want it to be thoughtful and interesting, not dry, tedious, technical, or boring. I’m hoping to avoid the “impressive incomprehensibility” that Mark Twain wryly noted was “so proper” to the “record of a solemn scientific expedition.” I trust that my friends and family will use the comments feature to let me know how I’m doing on that score.

So what do I mean by a “sociological travelogue”? Sociological travelogues seem to rest on the assumption that a visitor can in some ways understand another society better than its own members precisely because he is not a part of it.

The brilliant German-Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel made this argument in his essay “The Stranger.” The stranger is capable of greater insight, Simmel argued, because of his peculiar relation to group members: He is simultaneously close and remote, an insider (“an element of the group itself”) and an outsider (“an element whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it”). By virtue of this unusual relationship “he often receives the most surprising revelations and confidences … about matters which are kept carefully hidden from everybody with whom one is close.” But more fundamentally, the stranger’s insight stems from the fact that he is “not bound by ties which could prejudice his perception, his understanding, and his assessment of data.” “Because he is not bound by roots to the particular constituents and partisan dispositions of the group, he confronts all of these with a distinctly ‘objective’ attitude…. [H]e examines conditions with less prejudice; he assesses them against standards that are more general and more objective; and his actions are not confined by custom, piety, or precedent.” In the language of Simmel’s contemporary Emile Durkheim, the stranger observes without “prenotions” – or at least without the particular prenotions of the group he has entered and which he seeks to understand. He has in a sense always already accomplished the epistemological break with common-sense assumptions and preconceptions that Durkheim thought was indispensable for scientific knowledge of society. It is precisely “this freedom,” according to Simmel, which “permits the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a bird’s-eye view.”

A frequent corollary of sociological travelogues is that the visitor may also come to understand his own society better – or at least learn to see it in new and fruitful ways – by means of comparison to the strange and unfamiliar place he is visiting.

Most of the classic sociological travelogues that I know involve Europeans traveling to my own society. Maybe the best known is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written after a nine-month stint traveling in the United States. It sought to shed light on the “great democratic revolution” sweeping Europe by examining the country where it had reached its furthest limit. Tocqueville understood democracy as a particular kind of society, the defining feature of which was “equality of condition.” In the second volume of Democracy, he examined the influence of this equality on various aspects of American society, from “intellect” (religion, science, literature, art, language) and “feelings” (individualism, love of equality) to “manners” (class relations, family structure, treatment of women, attitudes to war) and “political society” (the sustainability of free institutions). Karl Marx took an interest in America for similar reasons. While Marx never traveled to America, he devoted increasing attention to the United States as it became a leading industrial power. “The country that is more developed industrially,” he wrote, “only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” Later, in the early twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber spent four months traveling in the United States – he thought Chicago was “incredible,” but couldn’t be bothered to visit Wisconsin – but he came to the opposite conclusion: Rather than America showing Europe the image of its own future, an increasingly bureaucratized New World was coming to resemble the Old World.

All of this raises some interesting questions in my mind. Am I really capable of the kind of objectivity and freedom that Simmel associated with the stranger? I’m not entirely a stranger to Israel. I have visited the country on three previous occasions (though never for more than a week or two each time), I have Israeli friends, and my own social background (my father is Jewish) disposes me to identify with Israel and feel a strong sense of solidarity with the country and its people. But I’m hardly an Israeli, and my relationship to Israel – simultaneously close and remote, an insider and an outsider – may be exactly what Simmel had in mind. That said, I think it’s important to realize that Simmel is describing a limited and partial kind of objectivity and freedom. I may be free of Israeli “custom, piety, or precedent,” but my perception and understanding will still be shaped by the mental baggage that I bring from my own society and history.

Another question: I’ve heard it said that the influence of American pop culture and the close ties between Israel and the United States are Americanizing Israeli society. I’m interested to see whether and to what extent that’s true. Does America, for better or worse, still show the rest of the world – and Israel in particular – the image of its own future? (And if so, how different is my mental baggage from theirs?)

As I ruminate on these and other questions, I’ll need a few guides (besides my Israeli friends and colleagues) to help stimulate my sociological imagination. At the top of my reading list for the next few months is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Twain’s novel is an obvious inspiration for this blog. Unfortunately, however, my blog will be less satirical and therefore not nearly as amusing. Another Twain book that would be fitting to read is The Innocents Abroad, a collection of letters he wrote during a transatlantic voyage to Europe and Palestine as a traveling correspondent for a San Francisco newspaper. (The newspaper paid his fare in exchange for the letters – what a great deal!) My friend M. recommends Israeli Society by the great Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt. Though dated – it was originally published in 1967, and Israeli society has changed greatly since then – it’s probably still essential reading. At age 84, Eisenstadt is now professor emeritus. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get a chance to meet the great man in person. Also on my reading list is Reflections on America, a thin book by the German sociologist Claus Offe about Tocqueville, Weber, and Theodor Adorno’s historic visits to the United States, and American Vertigo, an account by the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy about retracing Tocqueville’s journey through the United States. That gives me plenty to read and ponder over the next several months, but if you have other suggestions, send them my way.