Understanding Social Location

Rationale

People, especially Americans, have a habit of looking at others' worlds as they look at their own. Sociologists use something called the sociological perspective or the sociological imagination as a tool that enables them to gain a new vision about social life. The sociological perspective/imagination allows sociologists (and students of sociology) to temporarily step outside of their “bubble” and look at other people's cultures as well as their own.

A more specific element of the sociological perspective is the concept of social location, which explains “where” people are located in history and in a particular society (e.g., income, education, gender, race, ethnicity, and age). The concept of social location allows us to study people in different places and even in different time periods.

As we go about our daily routines, we often forget that our lives are in many ways affected by larger, seemingly invisible forces. Once we can grasp the concepts of the sociological perspective/imagination and social location, we have the ability to study people more objectively and learn from their experiences, even if those experiences vary greatly from our own.

Instructions

• 1.
  Take approximately 10 minutes to carefully read the excerpts on the next two pages.
• 2.
  When finished, complete the reaction questions.
• 3.
  As a class, you will talk about the social location of each of the narrators to clarify the content.
• 4.
  Share your feelings in a class discussion, using your written reaction as a starting point.

Grading

This is usually an ungraded classroom assignment, although you are all required to participate. Check with your instructor for his or her grading details.

Excerpt One

Americans want to have everything sanitized. No smells! Not even the good, natural man and woman smell. Take away the smell from under the armpits, from your skin. Rub it out, and then spray or dab some nonhuman odor on yourself, stuff you can spend a lot of money on, ten dollars an ounce, so you know this has to smell good. “B.O.,” bad breath, “Intimate Female Odor Spray”—I see it all on TV. Soon you'll breed people without body openings.

I think white people are so afraid of the world they created that they don't want to see, feel, smell, or hear it. The feeling of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and thawing out before a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat bath and plunging into a cold stream, these things make you feel alive, but you don't want them anymore. Living in boxes which shut out the heat of the summer and the chill of the winter, living inside a body that no longer has a scent, hearing the noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature, watching some actor on TV having a make-believe experience when you no longer experience anything for yourself, eating food without taste—that's your way. It's no good.

The food you eat, you treat it like your bodies, and take out all the nature part, the taste, the smell, the roughness, then put the artificial color, the artificial flavor in. Raw liver, raw kidney—that's what we old-fashioned full-bloods like to get our teeth into. In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that's eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn't need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those. Use the bitterness of gall for flavoring, not refined salt or sugar. Wasna—meat, kidney fat and berries all pounded together—a lump of that sweet wasna kept a man going for a whole day. That was food that had the power. Not the stuff you give us today: powdered milk, dehydrated eggs, pasteurized butter, chickens that are all drumsticks or all breast; there's no bird left there.

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