Published in Sociologists in a Global Age, edited by M. Deflem. Ashgate, 2007.
Chapter 16
Have Sociological Passport, Will Travel
Edward A. Tiryakian
My entire academic career has been as a sociologist, from being an undergraduate
major to becoming (in 2004) emeritus, a milestone in anyone’s career, to be sure, but
for me not the end point of being professionally active in coming years. Contributing
to the present volume provides an occasion for stocktaking of the stages in one’s
career, the stimuli that have given it a bearing, and retracing the road map along the
way.
To state at the onset my major enduring intellectual stimuli, I consider Emile
Durkheim and Max Weber as my major totems; Talcott Parsons and Pitirim Sorokin
as my major personal mentors. But the trajectory that I have taken has other elements
in my fields of research and major preoccupations, since if theory is a primary
area of self-identification, I also am much taken with the interaction of theory and
questions of religion, ethnicity and ethnic conflicts, national identity, development,
and modernity. How these have bundled over the course of years will and the bearing
of the international setting on the bundling will be the thread of Ariadne for my long
intellectual journey. To provide a simple structure to a rather complex excursion,
I will follow a modified chronological route of tracing the career in four major
stages: childhood years, formative years, early adult years (post Ph.D.), and mature
years. Seemingly discrete, I view them as a totality in which, to paraphrase the great
positivist historian Hyppolite Taine, what I have produced as my sociological oeuvre
is a resultant of idiosyncratic family circumstances, the particular environment in
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which I was formed, and the historical intersection of my life course with the national
and global setting at career stages.
Early Years: History as an Important Feature
Although nobody is born a sociologist, there are early circumstances which may play
a part in the process of becoming one. Of course, this recognition is after the fact. In
my case, my predilection for comparative-historical sociology may well have some
very early family circumstances that have sensitized me to history and large-scale
social change.
History is not only a continuous time series of occurrences. It is also punctuated
by breaks, by unexpected events, which may alter the course of events and the
societal structures in which they are embodied. I tend to view globality as having
not only continuities, for there is a basic aspect of the socialization process which is
to reproduce what has been institutionalized or internalized at the personality level,
but also discontinuities. I take discontinuities to be both “bad surprises” and “good
surprises”.
My family background being on both sides Armenian, it is perhaps not surprising
that history should have cardinal importance, though unfortunately, the weight of
history for Armenians has tilted toward the “negative surprise” side. Most persons
on either side of the Atlantic have heard about the Armenian genocide, which took
place at the height of World War I in Turkey. But most have no or little knowledge
that in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, an initial wave of massacres took
place under the rule of the Sultan Abdul-Hamid, who might in retrospect qualify
as the mentor of Saddam Hussein. Both of my grandparents’ families, long settled
as esteemed professionals in the capital of the Ottoman Empire which then and for
centuries past was known to the civilized world as Constantinople (modernized in
the twenty-first century by Ataturk as Istanbul), were told by Turkish friends to leave
as fast as possible because of a forthcoming campaign of nativistic ethnic violence
aimed at Armenians in particular. Given the sources, both grandparents took their
families and precipitously left, going in separate direction to the confines of the
Ottoman Empire, one family going to Egypt, the other to Iran. What happened to the
unfortunate ones who did not leave in time is documented in a recent work in French
(Bérard 2005). This was, in a sense, a warm-up for the even bloodier genocide that
took place twenty years later, but I will not dwell on it.
The historical break that my grandparents painfully experienced, leading to their
exodus from home, was experienced in the year of my birth as a global economic
tsunami: a few weeks after I was born in a comfortable suburb of New York, the
October 28–29, 1929, stock market crash punctured the great “bubble” of the 1920s,
wiping out millions of investors and speculators alike. This was a horrendous
“bad surprise” since only a few months before it had been widely thought that the
world—and certainly the United States had entered into a new era of wealth and
Taine’s historical positivism, of course, saw a work as a resultant of race, moment, and
milieu.
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prosperity fueled by the stock market. Instead, the new era that came in was the
Great Depression decade, which permanently marked adults and children, as well
captured by Glen Elder’s classic study, Children of the Great Depression (1974). I
both was and was not one of the latter. Leaving out the details, my father’s business
was wiped out, yet as the oldest child, he felt obliged to provide for his mother and
several of his siblings. To ease the severe financial strain, it was decided that my
mother would take me to live with her family, then living in Europe, until economic
recovery would permit coming together. And thus, early in 1930 at a very early age
I took my first trans-Atlantic voyage.
Undoubtedly the 1930s in Europe was a very different decade for Europeans
than it was for Americans in the United States. Living in (southern) France, learning
French as my maternal tongue (my grandparents, although fluent in many languages,
only spoke French to me), I attended French primary school and learned history
through French eyes. Among other things, this meant an identification of myself
with the brave French—first the Gaelic ancestors who had courageously defended
Gaul against the Romans, then the brave French who turned back the invading
Muslim hordes at Poitiers in 732, saving Europe for Christianity, then the Hundred
Years War against the English with the redemption of France by Joan of Arc. On and
on I learned the passionate side of French history, through the glorious campaigns
of Napoleon and the tragedy of Waterloo. The rise of the Third Republic in 1871
was not given that much attention—though in my later years, it has come to be an
historical object of great interest. But we did in our class of geography appreciate
the far-flung colonial empire developed during the Third Republic—and perhaps
that class and the colonial stamps of distant lands that were given me initially by a
major who had served in Africa were childhood stimuli for my research and travels
20 years later in the dying days of colonialism.
“Modern” French history emphasized the dark clouds that came from across
the Rhine—we learned about the disaster of 1870 at Sedan (but no mention of
the equally bloody Paris Commune) and the amputation of Lorraine and Alsace.
Then came the even worse bellicosity of the Kaiser in overrunning Belgium and
invading France to launch the holocaust that became World War I. And if the Allies
won, with American help, by the mid-1930s, clouds coming from across the Rhine
had gathered again. I still distinctly remember listening on the short wave radio an
emission in a language I did not understand but whose harsh, metallic voice made a
strong though unpleasant impression—it was one of Hitler’s radio emissions, which
paralleled with a very different message the soothing tone of what Americans were
hearing as Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”.
A young child has a limited knowledge of what is going on in the larger society,
much less the world. But the decade of the 1930s were tumultuous enough that
some of the violence filtered through, so that I had awareness of a nasty civil war
in Spain, of an Italian bombardment of a country called Abyssinia, and of some
nasty political conflicts in France involving “reds” and “Cagoulards” (hooded
ones), the right-wing Croix de Feu militants and the left-wing Front Populaire. In
grade school, especially the one I attended in Southern France (Nice), far from the
political maelstrom of Paris, everyday life was relatively tranquil, the violence not
in the immediate vicinity of school and home. Little did I know that I was living in
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what would be the last decade of the Third Republic. But much later as a mature
sociologist, my fascination with Durkheim and the Durkheimians took me back to
the Third Republic, to analyze and study it as the historical and cultural setting for
the Durkheimian school, and to understand their collective oeuvre not only with the
outsiders’ knowledge of scholarship but also, as Merton so beautifully paired it off
(1972), with insiders’ knowledge from having lived my early years in the midst of
the Third Republic.
Before the start of the school year 1939–1940, in a horrible repeat of what had
taken place a quarter of a century before, the dark clouds from across the Rhine
gathered again. In August, my mother, like other American citizens residing in
France, received an urgent message from the American consul saying it would be
well to return to the States. My mother was a woman of action, and like her parents
who had left Constantinople without hesitation, she also secured passage on the first
ship available. It was an Italian ship sailing from the port city of Genoa, and after
spending the night in Italy, we boarded the ship that departed on September 1, 1939.
Our departure date coincided with the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak
of World War II—another break with history which had global consequences as
well as personal ones, since it led to my return to the States, as an American who
only spoke French and had only known French culture. Getting to Gibraltar as a
gateway to the Atlantic proved to be uneventful but nevertheless suspenseful since
our Italian ship was followed a few hundred yards away by a German submarine,
and Italy had not committed itself so that the submarine appeared to me and most of
the passengers more like a potential shark than an escort.
And so I came back to America as Europe—where I had left family, friends,
school—was sinking in World War II. After a few months of a tutor, I could enroll
in public primary school in Mt. Vernon, the first city north of New York City.
Looking back, it was rather amazing how quickly I came to experience the world
as an American, not as a transplant. Although a pre-pubescent boy would not have
heard the term “melting pot”, this one did his best, and rather easily in many ways
(but perhaps not all ways), to become like his peer group. The school was a key
institution: a meeting place for the children of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants; of
Irish, Italian, and other ethnicities. Doing well in academics was one way of being
accepted by the teachers, but engaging in the common pastimes of baseball and
football was equally important for peer acceptance. And when the United States
entered the war in December 1941, there was further integration and solidarity in the
patriotic efforts we engaged in.
I dwell on the school as an institution which played a major part in my becoming
(really, renewing) an American. If in the third grade in France I had no problem
identifying with nos ancêtres les Gaulois, in the fifth (or sixth) grade in the United
States, I did not blink in reading about our Pilgrim fathers, and going on in later
grades to read about the rich history of New York State, the novels of Fennimore
Cooper, the winning of the West and so on. All in all, it took very little time for
me to become “assimilated” in the mainstream ethos of American life, and Mt.
Vernon was very much a microcosm of the American macrocosm of the 1940s, one
in which teenagers, at least, were evaluated by their peers in terms of who they were
as persons and their personal talents (I remember one year in high school the senior
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class president was Dick Clark, who has been an icon for decades; the next year it
was Charles Taylor, an African-American—both were popularly elected for their
personality and leadership qualities). Unfortunately, I think, the decades of the 1970s
and 1980s gave a bad name to “assimilation” under the cover of “multiculturalism”
that it deprived persons of their collective cultural roots. I have become very
interested in “multiculturalism” as an ideology and its bearing on national identity
(Tiryakian 2004). However, my childhood personal experience with assimilation—
and observing the rapidity with which new immigrants to the United States today,
and certainly their children attending public schools and utilizing popular culture
can become part of the mainstream, no matter what their physiognomy or cultural
background—makes me skeptical of those who advocate and seek to implement
pluralism as a paramount value of the educational system. At least I find it gratifying
that two major authorities on immigration have recently made the case for a new
look at assimilation (Alba and Nee 2003).
I will close this section with a different vignette, but one that also has a
sociological bearing. My father had had to drastically alter his lifestyle during
the depression years, and unfortunately I only knew him for a few years before
his early death (he died the same age as Durkheim). We lived in an apartment and
only used public transportation. But what was a great thrill for me was on his free
day—Sunday—when he took me on the train to New York City. From Grand Central
Station we would walk down 42nd Street to the East River, then walk uptown on 2nd
or 3rd Avenue for countless blocks, and my father would point out various ethnic
neighborhoods as we passed one after another. On the way back, before taking the
train home, we might walk outside or even go inside the New York Public Library,
with all its wealth of books, for my father, though having had to forego a college
education, had a deep love for books and learning. This outing to New York was for
me all I needed for a perfect day (made more perfect on rare occasions by going to
see my beloved New York Yankees play).
How does this vignette fit into a later sociological career? First, because walking
in ethnic neighborhoods and taking delight in observing in the urban setting how
different cultural milieus are to be found in close proximity to one another—and the
social interaction taking place in everyday life—this was a very early appreciation of
outdoor sociology. Much, much later it made me resonate with the urban sociology
that became the hallmark of “the Chicago School”. Second, this childhood memory
of the urban wonders of New York became reawakened in 1994 when I attended a
special event in Philadelphia on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the American
Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The invited speaker was Robert K. Merton,
who gave a magnificent spellbinding autobiographical talk, disclosing more about
himself than he had ever done (Merton 1994). What is relevant here is that Merton
began by indicating he had been born just a few blocks away from the setting of
the ACLS meeting, the American Philosophical Society. Merton’s home was in a
poor Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Philadelphia, and Merton displayed for
the audience a large city map indicating not only where his home had been but
also all the various cultural sites of major importance scattered around. And Merton
indicated that, as a boy, driven by curiosity and intellectual desire, he could and
did walk to enjoy the various cultural treasures the city had to offer. Merton was
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a master of subtlety and there was a context to the point he was making, but that
is extraneous here. When I heard Merton mention his childhood experience, mine
came back immediately.
Formative Years: Education/Teachers as a Key Feature
I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had my career formed in two great
institutions of higher learning, Princeton University and Harvard University. For the
purpose of this essay, I will concentrate on the teachers and intellectual stimuli I had
in the course of eight years at both places, and will gloss over friends and personal
experiences that were equally rich in my overall development.
While entering college intending a career in medical research—I had been much
taken in high school with Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters and had some vague
hopes of finding a cure for an ill of mankind—after three semesters I decided I
was not cut out for laboratory work. The semester (Spring 1950) we had to make
a decision as to a major, I took a course in social anthropology with Melvin Tumin,
who made the subject matter very lively. We had a long talk and he convinced
me with little difficulty that I should major in sociology (at the time there was a
single Department of Economics and Social Institutions; there was an introductory
course in Anthropology but the rest of Social Institutions were listed as sociology
offerings). So I became a sociology major and by the time I graduated I had taken all
the departmental offerings for undergraduates and two at the graduate level.
There were relatively few sociology majors, certainly in comparison to economics
majors, which made it possible to have a lot of interaction with the faculty. I found
sociology a fascinating subject and not very difficult to master. Mel Tumin was not
only my advisor (and thesis director in my senior year), but also opened his home to
me, which for an undergraduate student was almost a privilege. His major interests
were social stratification and race relations. Quite different was Marion Levy,
much more haughty but also more intellectually challenging; Levy had a Harvard
Ph.D. and had done his Ph.D. research applying Parsonian structural-functional
analysis to the modernization of China and Japan. His theory course was to a large
extent an explication of structural-functional analysis, but also gave considerable
attention to the theorist Levy most admired after Parsons, Vilfredo Pareto. I also
found a great deal of satisfaction taking demography with Frank Notestein, who
straddled economics and sociology and headed the Office of Population Research;
the comparative and historical materials he provided us in dealing with population
In retrospect, having laboratory instruction in chemistry, physics, and biology is a
very sound training/discipline for social scientists in providing them with experience as to
empirical “facts”—the “science” component of “social science”.
I came to share Levy’s evaluation: reading Pareto’s Mind and Society and The Socialist
Systems offers not only a wonderful training in logical thinking but also the pleasure of finding
a sociologist/economist with a great sense of humor. Unfortunately, while still highly respected
by economists, Pareto seems to have fallen outside sociological radar screens, perhaps because
of his views on the inevitability of social inequality.
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trends have continued to be what I consider important aspects of the infrastructure
of social relations.
Lastly in the department there was a very junior faculty person who I actually
found to be the most intellectually exciting sociologist, an instructor by the name of
Harold Garfinkel. He gave a course on deviance and one on criminology which used
a frame of reference radically different from the prevalent positivist one. Most people
who took his courses, and most of the department faculty, found him very opaque, but
I found him as clear and as refreshing as mountain water. I don’t think he ever used
the term “phenomenology” in his lectures, but in retrospect, he was applying Husserl
to empirical phenomena. He was delighted to find me an appreciative audience,
and when at the start of my senior year came the occasion to do a senior thesis (a
requirement of all students at Princeton, then and now), Garfinkel asked me whether
I would like him to direct my thesis on a research project he planned to embark on.
I was very eager to do so, but unfortunately it turned out that for his research, he
needed a research associate with advanced knowledge of chess, because, Garfinkel
said, he wanted to design a three-person chess game. So I did not get Garfinkel as an
advisor, who left Princeton the next year once he received his Ph.D. from Harvard,
and perhaps had I been an advanced chess player I would have been one of the
first trained by Garfinkel in “ethnomethodology”. My undergraduate exposure to
Garfinkel has led to my lifelong respect for him as a true American sociological
genius, despite his becoming for some a cult figure.
Princeton was more than majoring in sociology. I found a great deal of stimulating
materials with a minor in psychology, especially in taking courses with Hadley Cantril
in social psychology, who had studied with Gordon Allport and whose own work
on social movements and public opinion polling were pioneering efforts, and with
Sylvan Tomkins who also was a Harvard Ph.D. and who gave fascinating courses
on abnormal psychology. Another field of study in which I took various courses was
philosophy, including ones in the pre-Socratics (who really developed consciousness
about theory, as acknowledged by Husserl [1970]), Hindu philosophy with Walter
Stace, with whom I also took a course on Hegel; Nietzsche with Walter Kaufman,
and, perhaps of lasting significance, a special ongoing seminar taught by the great
French philosopher Jacques Maritain. Although Maritain’s seminar was nominally
for graduate students only, I was allowed in having some background in France and
having retained fluency in French. His seminar’s theme changed each year, with the
first one being devoted to how the problem of evil was treated in various philosophies
and traditions, from the ancients down to Sartre. It was a unique learning experience,
greatly enhanced by the friendship and fellowship that Maritain and his wife shared in
their home, not only during the rest of my undergraduate days but well beyond, until
his retirement and leaving Princeton for a return to France. Maritain, in retrospect,
was one of the two or three most powerful intellects I have met in my career, and the
linkage between philosophizing and theorizing was something very palpable.
For whatever reasons, Garfinkel did not publish his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, which
is an exposition of Husserlian phenomenology and its application to the problem of the
meaning actors give to the situation.
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Princeton was also something more than academic courses, albeit these
were taught at the highest caliber in both lectures and small discussion groups
(“precepts”). It was (and still is) very much cosmopolitan in the etymological sense.
It had been modernized at the turn of the century by its president Woodrow Wilson
whose Presbyterian sense of duty and service made his take as a mission statement
“Princeton in the nation’s service”; as reluctant wartime leader, Wilson sought to
take the United States to a new level of world moral leadership with his vision of
a League of Nations where transparency would prevail over secret covenants that
had brought about the horrors of World War I. Wilson’s idealism had crumbled at
Versailles, but his vision of the United States providing moral leadership was still
(and still is, I believe) very much present on the Princeton campus when I was an
undergraduate. In my senior year, I took a course in international law and became
fascinated with the cases we studied and the development of international law from
Hugo Grotius in the sixteenth century down to the present. Noting my interest,
the instructor invited me to become a student member in the American Society of
International Law. That spring its annual meeting was in Washington, D.C., and
listening to the papers and the discussion I felt this was an exciting milieu for a career
in public international law. To cap it, the Society was received at the White House,
and I had the distinct pleasure of being first to shake hands with President Harry
Truman. I left Washington in a rather exalted mood of seeing public international
affairs as a meaningful career.
One last component of the college years which may be noted in the background
preparation of a career in sociology: the international setting. First, during the
summer of 1949, and again in 1950, I thought it well to complement knowing
French with learning German, and found an ideal setting in the summer school of the
University of Vienna, which was held not in Vienna but in the Salzkamergut region
near Salzburg. In going to Austria, I stopped in Paris (where I had not been during
my stay in France in the 1930s) to visit family and pre-war friends from AlsaceLorraine. The latter took me to visit historical sites of Northern France, such as the
Normandy beachhead of 1944. Perhaps what shook me the most were the military
cemeteries and the ossuary of Douaumont near Verdun, where a titanic battle was
fought in 1916, and where the remains of 130,000 unidentified soldiers are kept in
view. Seeing these and seeing the fields of graves—wooden crosses for the French
soldiers, stone ones for Americans—has not only left a burning impression but also
an equally strong repulsion for warfare. It is only in recent years that I have made use
of this stimulus to begin work on the sociology of war (Tiryakian 1999, 2002, 2003),
a still understudied and undertheorized area.
Austria in the postwar period was struggling for autonomy and a regained sense of
identity. I took courses in the history of Austria which had gone from a world power
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to an unwitting tool of German bellicosity
in the twentieth, succumbing to Hitler’s enticement in 1938 with the Anschluss that
incorporated Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich. The price Austria paid was that at
war’s end it was an only semi-autonomous country, with its capital Vienna carved into
four semi-protectorates of the European great powers: an American zone, a French
zone, a British zone, and a Russian zone. Vienna’s strategic geographical location
in Central Europe made it, among other things, a convenient meeting ground in the
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early phase of the Cold War, and it was quite exciting when at the end of the summer
session our cohort spent a week in Vienna where so much past history had taken
place, and possibly so much present history might, given that Vienna (and Austria)
were on the cusp of East and West, where conflict might break out. Vienna was a
cross-road rife with espionage and counterespionage vividly exploited in the film
The Third Man shot on location and just released shortly before we got to Vienna. In
fact, conflict did break out, but not in Central Europe: in the summer of 1950, North
Korea did invade the South.
My college years served me well in preparing me for a professional career. I had
done well and had enjoyed sociology, receiving a summa and completing a 250-page
honors thesis (“Towards a Sociology of Occupations”) directed by Melvin Tumin.
But I also had a strong vocational interest for international law. Uncertain, I applied
to Harvard and Yale law schools and to the graduate school at Harvard, and was
accepted by all three, leaving me with a decision to make less than a month before
graduation. After much cogitation, I thought I might go to Harvard and be able to do a
five-year program, taking the required courses for sociology and for law, and then, in
the fifth year, doing a dissertation in some aspects of the sociology of law. I notified
Harvard of this and when I was told this was possible, I knew that Cambridge was
my next venue. The sociology component was, of course, actualized but after one
year, the law part was abandoned.
It was in September 1952 when I entered Harvard as a graduate student in the
Department of Social Relations, probably at the peak of the golden age of this
unique interdisciplinary program bringing together under one roof sociology, social
anthropology, social psychology, and clinical psychology. The department had come
into being in 1946 as a new intellectual venture seeking to integrate conceptually
major fields of human behavior. It was intellectually fueled by a vision most
forcefully articulated by Talcott Parsons in an evolving theoretical approach called
“the theory of action”, oriented to bringing together the analytical realms of the
social, the cultural, and the psychological in a comprehensive frame of reference.
Just the year before, Parsons had brought out The Social System that some took
as the new bible of sociological theory (Parsons 1951) and he was co-editor of a
volume that sought to advance the integration of the four behavioral sciences by
laying out a common conceptual framework of inquiry (Parsons and Shils 1951).
It was very heady to be a graduate student at what appeared to be the center of
theoretical action, not only in the United States but globally. I say “globally” because
Parsons—who served as chairman of the department from 1946 to 1956—became
rapidly recognized in the postwar world as offering new theoretical conceptions that
were tacitly in keeping with the desire in the world to promote social and economic
development in a liberal, non-coercive set of institutions. Essentially, the “theory
of action” and the analysis of social systems, including societies, as phenomena
that are not reducible to a single stratum but rather are made of interrelated and
interdependent functional components, did fit in the political (and liberal) ethos of
the postwar world. The Department of Social Relations as a new innovative center
of social science learning was a microcosm of the pax Americana that had set in the
“free world”.
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To do justice to the Department of Social Relations as a center of innovative
research and as a center of graduate training would require a full-length essay, if not
a monograph, but perforce I can only condense and unwittingly leave out materials
(and individuals) that are important but tangential to the unfolding of my own
career.
The department accepted only a small cohort, about half of whom in sociology,
and the other half in the three other areas. The first year we all took “proseminars”
in the four areas, which meant learning the basic texts, core problems, and
conceptual frameworks of sociology, social psychology, social anthropology,
and clinical psychology—essential knowledge given the guiding assumption that
social interaction involves personalities and their motivation, cultural symbols,
and structured role relations. In addition to statistics and reading proficiency in a
foreign language, there was a requirement that a certain number of hours needed
to be completed before graduation in some sort of field research, which might be
done as part of course work or separately. Aside from that, students were free in the
first two years to take any electives they wanted, and at the end of the second year
take comprehensive examinations in two areas in addition to theory. It was natural
for students to take the bulk of their coursework in the discipline in which they
were admitted to the department but there was considerable cross-fertilization in the
taking of courses, and several faculty appointments were persons who were equally
at home in two disciplines.
Gordon Allport was the director of Graduate Studies for all departmental students
and helped me devise my program. I opted for his seminar in social psychology since
he was one of the foremost figures in the field of personality. It was stimulating in
many ways, since he dealt not only with the bearing of values on motivation but
also with the dark side of personality, the nature of prejudice—the latter with the
very title The Nature of Prejudice came out two years later as a landmark study. The
seminar dealt extensively with racial prejudice, a topic that concerned me deeply,
and I asked Allport if I could do it on other than American materials. I had while
at Princeton had a long conversation with a person who pointed out to me some
interesting parallels between South Africa and the United States as two advanced
countries with severe restrictions based on color. I remembered that conversation
and Allport readily encouraged me to do research on South Africa for my term paper.
The serendipitous result of the research was to make me informed as to similarities
and differences in the sociohistorical development of the two countries, given their
similar starts in the seventeenth century, their Calvinist matrix, their identity as an
“elect nation”, the importance of the frontier setting and their democratic institutions
within, but only within, the dominant white population. How is it, I began to ask,
that the “Protestant value orientation” and the doctrine of predestination cardinal to
Calvinism, so manifest in common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had
led to the patent divergence in race relations in South Africa and the United States in
the postwar world of the 1950s? In 1948, Harry Truman had won an upset electoral
victory in the United States over the conservative Republican candidate; in 1948,
D.F. Malan and his National Party had won an upset electoral victory in South Africa
and introduced the ideology and retrogressive policies of apartheid. My comparative
historical research on South Africa and the United States did not end with Allport’s
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seminar, and led to some early publications written “at a distance”(Tiryakian 1955,
1957, 1960), but equally important, with a desire to go to Africa to see things in
sito.
Equally important for my training, I entered the ongoing seminar that Parsons
(who had agreed to be my advisor), Florence Kluckhohn, and Samuel Stouffer
co-taught. The substantive topic of the seminar, if I remember correctly, had to
do with the American family and kinship structure. Parsons provided the theory,
Florence Kluckhohn cultural aspects of family variation, and Stouffer provided
statistical modeling. Being in the seminar was an essential and exciting socialization
experience into the ethos of the department, to see theorizing and empirical analysis
taking place with the three major organizers and with the free-and-easy contributions
by graduate students and distinguished visitors (such as Guy Swanson and Alain
Touraine) coming from abroad as well as at home. There was a certain stratification
system operative, with advanced graduate students (like Neil Smelser and Robert
Bellah) sitting up front close to Parsons, Stouffer, and Kluckhohn, and first-year
students in the rear of the room. Yet, even at a distance, one felt that this was where
the action in sociology was and that one should demonstrate being a contributing
part of it, no matter how modest the initial contribution!
There also was an informal structure in our graduate training. In the fall of the
first year, the new cohort met Monday evenings for a non-credit session with a
young instructor. He would invite the luminaries of the department to come in and
talk about their work and anything else. This for the cohort was a visit of Titans
coming down to impart the secrets of academic pinnacles to neophytes. Early in the
semester Pitirim Sorokin was the visiting speaker. I had read his Social Mobility and
Contemporary Social Theories as an undergraduate and knew of his monumental
Social and Cultural Dynamics, and had expectations he would motivate us to write
an epochal dissertation in keeping with being at Harvard. Much to our surprise
Sorokin admonished, “The best advice I can give you is to pick a small, empirical
topic for your dissertation, do it well but quickly, then after you get out with your
sociological passport (meaning the Ph.D.), then go and do something important!”
For a while I retained my initial desire to produce a blockbuster for a dissertation,
but I wound up doing exactly what he had suggested.
There were some other stimuli during the year 1952–1953 which added to it
being a very memorable year. In the fall, the presidential campaign pitting Democrat
Adlai Stevenson against Republican Dwight Eisenhower was hard fought with great
civility, perhaps the last such presidential campaign. Stevenson had great appeal with
intellectuals, and had a tumultuous welcome at Harvard (where I had the good fortune
of meeting him at a press conference) but Eisenhower related better to middle America
and won, vox populi vox Dei. In the spring of 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy had
As the seminar progressed, I did for a term paper a bit of theorizing on the
differentiation of sibling roles as a function of birth order which was original enough to get a
positive acceptance from all three organizers, though each read a different meaning into my
analysis. Encouraged, I submitted my paper and had it accepted for presentation that spring at
the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society. It was a sort of climax of a first-year
socialization experience into becoming a career sociologist.
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risen to fame and notoriety as a hunter of communists in government, the media, and
higher education, preying upon the popular imagination of the dangers to American
security. He sought to bring his sub-committee to investigate communist infiltration
at Harvard, seen as the Mecca of left-wing subversion. While the rest of America
had crumpled before his tactics of intimidation and allegation, the young president
of Harvard, Nathan Pusey, shut the gates of Harvard Yard, refusing McCarthy access
to the university and its faculty in the protection of academic freedom. For all of
us, students and faculty, this was a courageous and heroic moment, perhaps akin to
Bunker Hill in 1775 repulsing Howe’s charge. McCarthy returned empty-handed
from his foray against the academic citadel, and in effect his power in American
affairs waned shortly after.
Just prior to the second semester, I met with Parsons, who suggested that since
I had taken a number of philosophy courses at Princeton, I might be interested in
one given that spring by Norman Kemp Smith, who was retiring after the semester.
The Department of Philosophy was in the same building at the Department of Social
Relations, so attending the course presented no logistic problem. Practically the
whole semester was devoted to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a foundation of
modern philosophy and an excellent sharpening ground for sociological theorizing
(Parsons himself in several essays made extensive reference to Kant). The following
year I also availed myself of the proximity of Philosophy to audit a course on
existentialism by John Wild, who greatly filled in holes in readings on existential
thought that I had begun in the seminar with Maritain, who had introduced us to
Kierkegaard. Although these audits were not at the time related to making progress
toward the Ph.D. in sociology, in the long run they proved to be important intellectual
investments in developing theory as one major area.
I entered my second year with two prizes: my first year record entitled me to a
teaching fellowship, and on the eve of the new academic year I was able to persuade
a charming, multilingual graduate student in Latin-American history to marry me,
promising her in lieu of riches that we would see a lot of the world. This we certainly
have done.
I was assigned for the fall semester to be the teaching assistant of Pitirim Sorokin
in his course on the history of sociological thought. This was considered something
of a hardship assignment for graduate students, since Sorokin was de facto relegated
to teach only undergraduates and was alienated from the rest of the sociological
faculty. Immediately, Sorokin’s impassionate and learned lectures greatly impressed
me, as much by his erudition as by his sense of the dramatic: they were on the
European style of the magisterial course in which the lecturer puts on for the
audience a dizzying area of knowledge, then retires without interaction from the
audience. In contrast, Parsons equally captivated the attention in his lectures but
also invited interaction from peer and graduate students alike. Years later while on
sabbatical in Paris I witnessed the same difference of styles going to lectures at the
Collège de France of Foucault and Lévi-Strauss: the former made the audience feel
he was engaging with them, inviting their interaction, the latter keeping the whole
time a distance and avoiding eye contact. Perhaps the salient difference for me as
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a graduate student was that I could (with intellectual pleasure, to be sure) listen to
Sorokin and (when the occasion arose) talk to Parsons.
Early in the semester, Sorokin’s secretary telephoned me to say that he had
developed laryngitis and could not give his scheduled lecture on Herbert Spencer
the next day. I could, she said on Sorokin’s instruction, announce to the class a
cancellation, unless I wanted to give a lecture on Spencer. I hastily said I would give
the lecture, although Spencer, as everybody who has read Crane Brinton’s opening
quote in Parsons’ Structure of Social Action will remember, was “dead”, expunged
from the sociological canon, having perished with his theory of evolution. Immediately
after the telephone, I rushed to Widener Library, grabbed all books I could find on
Spencer and for the next several hours immersed myself in the sociological works on
and by this figure who had in his lifetime made the English-speaking world aware of
sociology. My lecture the next day must have not been too bad because word got to
Sorokin, who thereafter took interest in his teaching fellow, even inviting him and his
new bride in the Sorokin’s home in Winchester. Thus began a long friendship, even
though my thesis advisor would be Parsons, for whom Sorokin had rather negative
feelings. I felt then, and still do, that both provided important complementary rather
than zero-sum models of large-scale societal systems, and exposure to both provided
me with much theoretical fuel.
In the spring semester of the second year, I was assigned to be the teaching
assistant to George Homans in his course on social organization. Homans was not as
flamboyant a speaker as Sorokin, not as analytically profound as Parsons, yet gave
clear, crisp lectures, many derived from his well-written, jargon-free books English
Villagers and The Human Group; the materials were thoroughly comparative and
historical, since Homans also brought in materials on social organization from social
anthropology. I took a course with Homans in industrial sociology, in which he was
recognized as a major authority. The course was excellent, covering all the major
works (Chester Barnard, Elton Mayo, and so on), including Durkheim’s influence
on Mayo in dealing with the human group outside the individualistic perspective
of Taylorism. This led me to my second close reading of the Division of Labor
in Society, and reinforced the importance that Parsons gave to Durkheim in The
Structure of Social Action, a “must” reading along with The Social System for anyone
taking Parsons’ theory seminar.
During the year, I profited from the department’s numerous courses on
comparative analysis to take a social anthropology course on sub-Sahara Africa,
which provided a lot of factual materials on traditional African social structure.
More interesting was work on comparative aspects of Far Eastern social structure
with sociologist/social anthropologist John Pelzel; after taking his course, myself
and a first-year student, Ezra Vogel, took a reading course with Pelzel, and I took
comparative aspects of modern China and Japan as one of my areas of specialization,
In retrospect, I think I have internalized something of both styles depending upon
whether I am lecturing to a large and rather impersonal audience away from home, or in the
classroom as part of a regular course.
As a recognition of his status, Homans not only taught in the department, but also gave
courses in industrial sociology at the prestigious Harvard Business School.
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the other being industrial sociology and stratification. In the ongoing seminar of
Parsons, Kluckhohn, and Stouffer, Florence Kluckhohn took a warm liking to Vogel
and myself, and highly recommended that we go overseas to do a dissertation in a
non-Western setting instead of remaining in the confines of the United States (she
was a social anthropologist under the shadow of her husband, Clyde Kluckhohn, a
dominant figure in cultural anthropology; the two were part of a team that organized
a long-term project of cultural diversity and value orientations in the American
Southwest). As it turned out, Vogel did a dissertation on the family and the new
middle class in Japan, and became one of the leading American sociologists of
modern Japan and China. I was to do my dissertation on occupational stratification
in Central Luzon, the Philippines. Years later when we met a professional meeting,
we reflected on the wisdom of following Florence Kluckhohn’s admonition to go
outside the United States to do comparative research, and I quipped to Vogel that he
had had the foresight of choosing a “winner” in the modernization process (Japan)
while I had chosen a “laggard”.
I will skip most of the details of my dissertation. Going to the Philippines in the
first place was serendipitous since my wife and myself had applied for Fulbright
fellowships to South Africa; after receiving and reviewing our application, the
Fulbright Commission informed us that we had good credentials but that there was
no Fulbright program in the Republic of South Africa (where I had hoped to go
to study race relations in the mining industry). However, there were two openings
for graduate fellowships to the Philippines, if we could submit new projects within
thirty days.
Although I knew little about the country, which fell outside my preparation in
East Asian materials, it seemed to be an opportunity to travel and do research in
the geographical region of the Far East. As to a research focus, I had taken work
on stratification with a young assistant professor fresh at Harvard from a Ph.D. at
Columbia: Peter Rossi. Rossi and another young colleague also formed at Columbia,
Alex Inkeles, collaborated on empirical studies of social stratification at the
community level and of industrial occupational structures. The literature indicated
intriguing similar patterns of occupational stratification in various countries where
questionnaires had been administered to samples of the population. As I went over
the materials, which indicated an interesting convergence of countries undergoing
industrial development, I spotted a lacuna: all the countries previously studied were
Western countries (including Australia and New Zealand). Would this pattern of
occupational stratification hold or not hold in a non-Western setting undergoing an
early phase of modernization, such as the Philippines? Rossi and Inkeles agreed
this would make an interesting test case, and Homans and Parsons also agreed. I
submitted a thesis prospectus to the department with these four on the committee and
Parsons as the director, and the Fulbright Commission accepted both my proposal
and that of my wife (who planned to study the influence of Spanish colonization on
the Philippines, as an extension of her own developing professional specialty area of
Latin American colonial history).
Doing field research in the Philippines during 1954–1955 was an invaluable
experience, of far more lasting value for me than just crunching numbers from a data
set that others had arduously prepared. I had had some practice the year before in
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questionnaire construction, and had devised a questionnaire that had a large number
of items that would permit comparison with the studies done in Western settings.
But the Philippines was not near the level of urbanization as the West, hence I felt
it important that besides the urban site I had chosen in proximity to Manila, the
capital of the Philippines, I should also seek a sample from the agrarian countryside.
I eventually did but in the process had some methodological and non-academic
adventures, which enrich the stock of knowledge in the formative years of a career.
The methodological challenge I faced seeking to interview peasants in the
countryside was twofold. First, a majority was illiterate, so that presenting them
with cards on which were written occupations and asking them to sort the piles in
hierarchical rankings (what had been the common practice in previous studies) was
not an option. Instead, I had to provide for each card with an occupation either a
photograph showing the occupation in practice or a schematic drawing of a person
in that occupation. After some pretesting I was satisfied that the set of stimuli was
providing the responses needed for my comparison; admittedly, some methodological
purists would challenge the accuracy of the results for the non-urban sample, but I
plead here the case for pragmatism. More taxing was that it took me one afternoon
to realize that interviewing in the communal open field situation where farmers
work was not a one-to-one situation, like interviewing an urban dweller in her/his
apartment. At the side of the interviewee and behind the interviewer gathered a crowd
of men, women, and children curious to see and hear what was going on; moreover,
they were highly amused and intrigued by the interviewer’s hairy legs so that while
asking the interviewee where he ranked, say, a school teacher, the interviewer had to
nonchalantly ignore having hair plucked from an arm or a leg.
Even more challenging than conducting interviews in open fields near Manila
was trying to go further inland to more remote villages in Luzon. In the post-war
setting of the Philippines, devastated by the Japanese occupation during World
War II, the old prewar problem of unequal distribution of land between peasants
and absentee landlords—a pattern rather similar to other Spanish colonial settings,
including Central America—had returned with a vengeance. Agrarian unrest and
violence took the form in Central Luzon of what was generally known as the Huk
(Hukbalahap) Rebellion, which received assistance from communist groups. The
year before we arrived a new popular charismatic leader, Ramon Magsaysay, had
swept in office and won popular support for reforms and for disarming the Huks. The
latter had become fragmented with some factions committing brutal violence not
only against landlords, but against common Filipinos. While the movement was on
the decline and eventually came to an official end during our year, there were pockets
of Huk strength in some of the inland parts of Luzon, including a no-man zone where
I spent some tense moments. Although I never got to interview Huk guerillas for my
non-urban sample, I did get the taste of a setting marked by agrarian unrest.
Completing my study in the spring of 1955, we flew home with a stop-over in
Japan for my first exposure to that amazing country which has been able to blend
tradition and modernity and, like Germany, learn to shed militarism in favor of
peaceful transformations. The year of my stay in the Far East, if one had to wager
See http://countrystudies.us/philippines/25htm.
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which country would become a dominant modernizing country, the odds would have
favored the Philippines: the country had (and still does) a high rate of literacy with
English spoken throughout most of the islands, a large amount of natural resources,
and having fought on the winning side of the war. Yet, when Ezra Vogel published
Japan As Number One (1979), Japan had successfully transformed itself into a
global economic giant, while the Philippines remained economically and politically
anemic, subject to authoritarian rule (of Marcos) and the same ruling oligopoly as
before. Why the difference has become for me one major problematic area involving
not only the Philippines but other so-called “less developed” or “underdeveloped”
areas.
After my dissertation was accepted the following year, circumstances led me
away from research in the Philippines (I greatly regret not having yet the occasion to
revisit it). Although I published some empirical papers related to my survey data, I
had no occasion to take a serious look at social change taking—or not taking—place
in the Philippines until unexpectedly I was invited to have my dissertation published
in 1990 as part of a series The series editor invited me to provide an introduction, and
this gave the opportunity to catch up with important happenings since my departure
from the field (Tiryakian 1990). This is not the place to dwell into the factors that
have retarded the country’s development; for the purpose of the present essay, the
advice of Sorokin and Kluckhohn proved to be excellent: I had done independent
research in what became known as a “third world” country, the specifics of my
research allowed me to complete field work and data analysis within two years, and
I got some rich experience and insights regarding problems of development outside
the West.
My fourth year was spent back at Harvard working furiously in data analysis
(yes, on the first generation of IBM computers where we had to wire our own board).
The most important stimulus was being a teaching fellow in a year-long course on
Ideas of Human Nature, from the Greeks to Freud, given by Clyde Kluckhohn and
Henry Murray. They had collaborated on a very successful textbook, Personality in
Nature, Society and Culture, and combined their knowledge of literature, philosophy,
anthropology, and clinical psychology to give captivating lectures showing the
interconnectedness of the human condition. My peak teaching experience as a
graduate student was when during the course of the year Kluckhohn and Murray
invited me to give a lecture late in the spring on existentialism, which in the 1950s
had become seen as an important alternative to analytical philosophy. The response
of Kluckhohn and Murray and of the students taking the course was very positive
and encouraging.
In April 1956 I submitted my completed dissertation and was gratified that it was
accepted without needing revisions. It also made me realize that I had completed
all my requirements, and that therefore I needed to find a job for the coming year.
Unexpectedly and without my having applied for it, a “good surprise” happened less
than a month from commencement: I received a phone call from Wilbert Moore,
who headed sociology at Princeton, and asked me if I was ready to return to my
alma mater. The department needed someone to teach a graduate course in research
methods and an undergraduate course in social disorganization, with the other two
courses being up to the individual to choose. I accepted on the spot although I had no
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special background or skills in the two required courses. I could take with me in my
first full-time employment the Ph.D. as a passport and an intellectual baggage with
adequate comparative and theoretical materials and some equally valuable research
experience.
Early Adult Years
Princeton in the fall of 1956 was not very different from when I had left it in June
1952. My appointment the first year was as Instructor in the Department of Economics
and Social Institutions, with a promotion the second to assistant professor. Sociology
was autonomous in its appointments, but since it shared the same building as
economics, it was very easy for the junior faculty in each discipline to interact freely
with colleagues in the other. I found this stimulating, in part because Weber and
Pareto offered common bridges, in part because several of the economists were doing
comparative work on social factors in development; although the interdisciplinary
contacts were less extensive than those of social relations, the overall atmosphere of
the department was exciting, especially since the top-ranked economics branch had
world-class figures like Oskar Morgenstern (of game theory fame) and Jacob Viner
(a leading economic historian). In addition, there were shared research centers, such
as the Office of Population Research with demography an important bridge between
the two, alongside an Institute of Labor Relations that had both sociologists and
economists as participants.
My major adjustment was that I arrived back having as areas of specialization
comparative aspects of the Far East and industrial sociology. In a relatively small
unit, such as sociology was, there was no duplication of specialty areas. Hence,
with Wilbert Moore as the senior person in industrial sociology, and Marion Levy
as the senior faculty in comparative aspects of the Far East as well as giving the
basic theory courses, a junior faculty had to develop a different niche as a matter of
protocol and survival.
A “substitution” for industrial sociology was the development of my fascination
with the sociology of religion. I had read Durkheim and Weber in graduate school
and had sat in on Parsons’ course on social institutions, which emphasized religion.
But I had not thought about is as a specialty area before getting an invitation from a
sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to attend a two-week
Danforth-funded faculty seminar on the sociology of religion during the summer
of 1958. Will Herberg, Bill Kolb, and Howard P. Becker were the three presenters
who offered challenging critiques of a methodological positivism which tended to
see religion (as part of the realm of values) as not a subject for sociologists to take
seriously. While initially skeptical, by the end of the two weeks, I had started to view
the presuppositions of present-day sociology as getting in the way of treating religion
with the same relevance and significance for understanding social organization and
social change as had Durkheim and Weber.
I went back to Princeton with a new perspective and in the spring of 1959 found
a congenial colleague in the religion department, Paul Harrison, with whom I cotaught a seminar in the sociology of religion. The role of religion and religious
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institutions in the dynamics of large-scale change in modern societies has since been
a never-ending topic of teaching and research in the rest of my career in at least three
areas: (1) finding linkages between religiously grounded motivations (including
those outside the religious mainstreams) and symbolisms in social movements, (2)
explicating certain texts and seminal works, notably those of Durkheim and his
associates, and (3) making sense of the United States as “the first Protestant nation”
with an underlying Calvinist culture adapted to the American setting (Tiryakian
1975).
The religious field has also led me to lasting contacts and friendships with persons
in comparative aspects of religious studies, especially in an interdisciplinary society
of scholars known as the American Society for the Study of Religion (ASSR)—a
sort of “invisible college” (Crane 1972) by election, which I joined in the latter
part of the 1960s. Their annual meeting put me in early (and continuing) contact
with outstanding comparativists in various religious traditions of all the continents:
besides sociologists like Parsons, Robert Bellah, and Benjamin Nelson (the latter
doing some pioneering essays in the sociology of civilizational encounters which I
have found extremely heuristic for some of my recent theorizing), ASSR had at one
time or another such noted world-class scholars as Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade,
and Ninian Smart. Besides their own respective fields of studies, whether Buddhism
or Islamic mysticism or Hinduism, members of ASSR have a deep appreciation of
Durkheim and Weber. It still has maintained its lofty standards of scholarship and
fellowship, enabling me to extend considerably my horizon of comparative religious
studies. All in all, then, I have found that in my career development the sociology of
religion has been an excellent substitution for industrial sociology.
As to finding an alternative to the Far East, I drew on some of my African
interests and immersed myself in contemporary African materials. This proved to be
fortunate because sub-Sahara Africa was beginning to awake from colonial turpitude
with movements of autonomy and independence sprouting in different parts of the
continent. I could share my interests in Africa with the only anthropologist in our
midst, Jim Bohannon, who had received his training at Oxford under E. EvansPritchard. While Bohannon introduced a course on Africa in kinship structure and
rituals, I introduced one on the sociology of modern Africa that took in urbanization,
race relations, and African nationalism. The investment of time and energy in
developing African materials paid off when Princeton received funds from an
alumnus to develop African studies. The research funds made available enabled
me to make in 1959 the first of some very extensive travels in sub-Sahara Africa
to visit countries from Senegal to Zanzibar and points in between, such as South
Africa, the Congo, and (what was then called) the Rhodesias. I would make in
this phase of my career two further extensive travels to Africa, in 1962 and 1966,
going to cities, rural areas, and gathering a variety of materials from interviews and
archives. My focus was to understand the dynamics of social change in sub-Sahara
Africa as stemming from urbanization and industrialization, and their context in
the colonial situation as ideology and policy, and from the reactions in opposition
to the colonial situation. I was particularly interested in the comparative aspects of
colonialism in francophone and Anglophone territories. Retaining French fluency
enabled me to move around readily in all the French-speaking countries in West and
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Equatorial Africa. Some of these, such as the Cameroon, were experiencing or had
just experienced agrarian unrest and violence (not too different from the situation of
the Huk revolt in Luzon), which authorities felt were communist-inspired. Besides
a few bad moments, the on-site travels, observations, and discussions with a wide
spectrum of both Europeans and Africans added immensely to my understanding
of the problems of development. Going to English-speaking East Africa, I noted
sociopolitical differences between Uganda and Tanzania, on the one hand, and
Kenya, on the other. The latter has a small but significant settler power elite in its
second generation and the use of British force had put down the agrarian Mau Mau
uprising among the Gikuyu people. Structurally, the situation had parallels with the
bloody war of Algerian independence that was still going on, ultimately threatening
France with civil war until DeGaulle’s intervention. Still, the end of the 1950s and
early 1960s was on the whole a period of optimism for Africa’s development and
emancipation from colonialism, and, for the United States and the former Western
colonial powers, this meant acceptance of maintaining friendly ties (and markets and
resources that could not fall in communist hands of the Soviet Union).
The idyll of Africa came to end during the decade of the 1960s—a straw in the
wind being the first assassination of an African head of state, Sylvio Olympo of
Togo, in 1963, and the military revolution in Nigeria the week I arrived in Lagos in
1966. Thereafter, it seems, Africa has wrestled continuously with political instability
and corruption, or else with something unknown the years of my travel, AIDS. Why
it has lagged badly behind all other global regions when it has so many natural and
human resources is one of the great tragedies of our modern world. I again think
about this as an extension of why the Philippines has lagged behind the “sinitic”
countries of East Asia that do not have the resources of the Philippines. This is not
an essay to account for this major discrepancy but I do want to indicate some of the
major problems of development, or lack thereof, that have concerned me along my
career path.
My idyll at Princeton also came to an unexpected end in the 1960s. I had gotten
a junior sabbatical leave for the year 1959–1960, and took my family to Paris for the
purpose of writing what I saw as an interesting possible complementary fit between
the “objective” positivist approach of Durkheim and the more “subjectivist” approach
of existential phenomenology. The year in Paris was a most stimulating intellectual
experience, with the extra enrichment of my meeting Georges Balandier, the leading
French-speaking sociologist of modern Africa, who had helped formulate the analysis
of “third world”. It has been a lifelong friendship and stimulation to find a colleague
with whom one has congruent ideas regarding sociology and current global trends.
Moreover, Balandier was one of the founders of what became known as the International
Association of French-speaking Sociologists (AISLF), which had as an unstated mission the
preservation and promotion of French in sociological research, with special attention given
to third world areas, such as the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. I was to join AISLF
in 1965, and ironically since AISLF tacitly sought to retain its autonomy from American
quantitative sociology and American (read Parsons) theorizing, by dint of long service and
friendships, I was elected president for a four-year mandate in 1988.
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When I returned to Princeton, having nearly completed a manuscript that would
turn into my first theory volume (1962), I found the ethos had greatly changed.
Sociology and economics had split into two departments; sociologists had brought a
new chair from the outside; and I certainly was not part of the new power elite. It was
a hard landing from the halcyon years before my sabbatical, but once again a “good
surprise” awaited me in the spring of 1962 when I received a phone call from Leon
Bramson at Harvard. The Department of Social Relations was seeking a new cluster
of junior faculty who had interdisciplinary and comparative interests to reorganize
some of the basic departmental courses. I had been recommended by some who knew
I had been an effective teaching fellow and had noted my continued comparative
interests. Would I be interested in returning as lecturer for a term appointment? The
timing could not have been better, and once again I headed for Cambridge.
My second stay at Harvard was short but very fruitful. The department had
suffered attrition from death or imminent retirement of its “founding fathers” and
those replacing them at the helm did not share the vision of an integrated department
of social relations, but more of a cluster of sociology, social anthropology, social
psychology, and clinical psychology. Still, if the golden age was behind, there
still was much the “silver age” had to offer: the opportunity for the junior faculty
from the three or four main disciplines to interact, either co-teaching the year long
introductory course to social relations or having offices on the same floor of the new
William James Building. Aside from teaching the year-long introductory course, one
could teach pretty much what one wanted to, which gave me the occasion to give
my course on modern Africa and to develop courses in the sociology of religion
and a seminar in existential phenomenology in the sociological tradition. Equally
important, there was a special seminar on evolution that Parsons offered with Robert
Bellah and Shmuel Eisenstadt, a visiting scholar from the Hebrew University. The
seminar attracted a large number of graduate students and visiting scholars, just as
had the Parsons-Klukhohn-Stouffer seminar during my first year. Sitting in on the
seminar gave me the opportunity of getting to know one of the visitors in particular,
Niklas Luhmann from Germany, but even more, Eisenstadt, with whom I have since
had a special friendship, partly based on rather similar outlooks on comparative
analysis of social change and a common interest in the problematic of modernity.
Just as I had been at Princeton in October 1957 when the launching of Sputnik
generated a national crisis—for Sputnik brought to consciousness the vulnerability
of a thermonuclear attack on the United States10—I was in the Harvard Club on
November 22, 1963 when the announcement came that President Kennedy had
been shot. For the next several days, the foundations of our world were shaken in a
situation of anomie. There was no collective faculty response that I am aware of, but
the assassination of a youthful president who had seemed to capture a generation’s
desire for change was for me eerily reminiscent of the premature death of Ramon
10 Immediately following the news of Sputnik, the Princeton faculty of all ranks drew
together to see what sort of informed response we could make drawing on our own special
field of knowledge. I opted to canvas the literature on reactions to disasters and look for
general patterns of response that might be of use in civilian defense program. I published my
results in a scientific journal (1959).
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Magsaysay in the Philippines. The spirit of reform and social change each had
generated in a younger generation suffered badly with their sudden loss. It certainly
emphasized the part of contingency and “bad surprises” in the historical process.
Yet, in the spring of 1964 a more positive development in my career took
place. I received a phone call from John McKinney, chairman of the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology at Duke University. McKinney, a capable theorist
who knew Parsons, was looking for a person to take up the graduate theory core of
the department since he had to give most of his attention to administrative matters.
McKinney had read my recently published Sociologism and Existentialism and other
writings, and thought that with my comparative interests I would fit it well with the
department, which also had several anthropologists. I made the trip to Durham, met
the department, accepted a tenure offer and joined the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at the beginning of the academic year 1965–1966. I did not anticipate
at the time that this would be home for the rest of the century and into the new
millennium.
The Mature Years
Duke University in the 1960s was in transition from being a high quality regional
university to becoming a nationally and eventually internationally recognized center
of learning. With funding from the Ford Foundation and vigorous backing from the
provost of the university (Taylor Cole, himself a distinguished political scientist who
shared my interest in Africa), the university significantly expanded its comparative
international studies. I became active in several faculty area committees such as
African studies and European studies, while in the department I developed theory
courses and courses in the sociology of religion in addition to teaching introductory
sociology.
In terms of career development, being at Duke as a tenured faculty provided
me with learning experiences in various administrative functions, starting with
unexpectedly being appointed departmental chair when John McKinney, with whom
I had the pleasure of collaborating in organizing a conference that led to an important
theory volume (McKinney and Tiryakian 1970), left that post to become dean of
the graduate school. Effectively, mine was to be a transition appointment with the
majority of sociologists and anthropologists opting to form separate departments,
much as I had hoped to put in place an integrated department. My later major
administrative experience at Duke came twenty years later serving as the director of
International Studies at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, a period of
enormous global transformations, foremost being the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the rejoining of Eastern European countries to western neighbors, and the rapid rise
of the East Asian “dragons” as global economic powers. The dynamics of change
in East Asia and the dynamics of change in Europe have been of particular research
and travel interest for me, and when I served as director I was able to encourage the
university to broaden its international programs and increase visitors and networks
from overseas, while finding it of equal importance for me to multiply travels to East
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Sociologists in a Global Age
Asia and Europe to get first-hand knowledge of scholars and institutions with whom
the university and myself could develop collaborative ties.
Starting in the 1970s and continuing today, I developed a new empirical focus for
my comparative interests, one of which was an extension of previous work in Africa
(where in the 1970s and 1980s political instability greatly curtailed the scope of travel
and research). The focus was on unexpected nationalist movements in the West,
not against neighboring countries but against the nation-state, movements seeking
the liberation of the “nation” from the “state”, movements from the “periphery”
against the “center”. This focus and its elements (have) provided me rich materials
for research, teaching, and even administration. It came about serendipitously in the
course of a stay in Paris in 1971–1972.
Passing by a popular forum meeting hall (La Salle de la Mutualité), I saw a
poster for a meeting that evening of “oppressed peoples of Europe sing their songs
of freedom”. The three-hour meeting featured various groups from “regions” of
Western countries such as Wales, the Basque area, Brittany, the southern French
region of Oc, Catalonia, Flanders, and Quebec. All expressed in French their plight
of subordination to the nation-state, their being “internal colonies” deprived of their
culture, including their own vernacular, by the hegemonic culture of the nationstates. I was struck by some similarities in their proclaimed grievances, on the one
hand, and the discourse against colonialism and for independence, on the other, that
had been expressed in African movements of independence in the 1950s and early
1960s. It was sociologically challenging to find as an anomaly of modernity that in
the midst of democratic and economically advanced nation-states there would be
found movements of national liberation. Following up this initial observation has
led me to do extensive research in the interrelated areas of nationalism, national
identity, and ethnic conflicts. Besides an underlying sympathy with those seeking
the autonomy of nationhood from the traps of colonial or neo-colonial or internal
colonial dependency, I have found in the study of national identity, nationalism
and nationhood an area where I can apply my theoretical background in existential
phenomenology. From the latter’s focus on intersubjective consciousness and the
meanings that structure perception, I have given attention to the dynamics of social
change involving radical changes in the collective consciousness of groups of actors.
Moreover, an objective situation may have multiple sets of meanings: so, as I first
found this to be the case in the national identity issues of Quebec, there may be
multiple meanings of what it means to be, say, a Quebec nationalist (or a Welsh
nationalist, or an American nationalist, etc). National identity as any collective
identity is a set of possibilities, some of which are actualized as the dominant form
but under certain conditions, a new consciousness may become operative, and the
consequences may be real significant structural changes. What these turning points
are should thus be of critical sociological importance.
This research vein opened up developing new professional networks and new
research sites. At Duke I started with modest resources Quebec studies as an adjunct
of the new Canadian studies area program; the latter was Anglophone to the core
and in effect promoted Canadian unity in a period of growing secession-mindedness
in French-speaking Quebec. Quebec studies brought to the Duke campus academics
from the major French-speaking universities of Quebec and organized tours of those
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universities by Duke’s administrators. Essentially, I saw our limited program as
providing information about a region that Americans knew as a tourist haven but
had little information regarding its history and on-going structural changes. After
Quebec studies had served its purpose of raising on campus awareness of “the other
Canada”, I turned to organizing in the 1980s a faculty seminar with a broader sweep.
For several years, the seminar treated contemporary aspects of nationalism, drawing
on participants from within as well as outside the Duke faculty. At a meeting on
campus of Europeanists, I met a colleague in political science, Ronald Rogowski,
who had a keen interest in both political theory and comparative European studies;
we found it meaningful to organize a group of scholars with comparative interests
and a focus on the new nationalist movements of the West. The end product of the
interdisciplinary collaboration was a well-received volume (Tiryakian & Rogowski
1985).
The breakdown of the Soviet Empire in the 1980s, particularly under pressure from
the Eastern European satellites, increased the scope of my comparative interests in
nationalism and national identity. Here the anomaly noted about nationalism surfacing
in regions of well-established nation-states appeared again: the Soviet system and
the promise of a classless society also carried with it the eradication of bourgeois
national sentiments and aspirations. Yet, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania strong national movements emerged rapidly, and as
the reform-minded Soviet Union under Gorbachev rather unexpectedly lost power
and legitimacy, it became far easier for a sociologist to travel to Eastern Europe
to observe ongoing change and meet with counterpart colleagues. The “return
to normalcy” of the academic community in the 1990s took me to various sites
and professional meetings that had been closed off ten years before. Some of the
windows opened with participation in the activities of AISLF, the French-speaking
international association of sociologists, which had network ties with sociologists in
Eastern Europe; these networks resulted in conferences and meetings in Macedonia
(the province of ex-Yugoslavia, not the one bearing that name in Greece), Bulgaria,
and Romania.
I will skip the details but only wish to indicate that in the past three decades, I have
complemented my interests in the more established areas of theory and the sociology
of religion with an equal interest in observing both at a distance and close-up areas
of the world where large-scale social changes are taking place, notably Europe (and
its evolving and expanding European Union) and East Asia. Trying to make sense of
the world, trying to make sociological sense of the human condition, is an ultimate
challenge for theory, one which concerned Parsons greatly in one of his last major
essays (Tiryakian 2005). Trying to make sense of what leads people to engage in
violence and protracted conflict against “the other” and under what conditions can
there be a restoration of processes of integration, is another theoretical and empirical
concern that has come to grip me in my “mature” years, as a strong echo of my
student days interest in prejudice and race relations.
In this regard, I had in the present decade the “good surprise” of being invited
by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars to organize and direct a
team of Fulbright scholars who would use their fellowship during 2003 to study
collectively and individually comparative aspects of ethnic conflicts and peace
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processes. Working—even if mainly online—with thirty scholars from various
disciplines and from countries in addition to the United States as diverse as Nepal,
Tibet, Senegal, Sri Lanka, as well as Israel, Belgium, France, and Northern Ireland
was an exciting learning experience for all of us.11 Although we did not find a “magic
bullet” to eradicate the virus of severe ethnic violence anymore than had De Kruif’s
microbe hunters, we did through individual and collective research and publications
provide at least some incremental advancement in the comparative approach to
conflict and peace processes.12
Severe ethnic conflicts and violence, as well as wars of various sorts—including
wars that cut across national boundaries—constitute the dark side of modernity. I
will continue seeking to make sense of the dark side. But I also have been challenged
to make sense empirically and theoretically with the constructive, innovative side
of modernity. The breakup of the Soviet Union, ultimately a closed Marxist system
based on fear and coercion, provided an opening for a theoretical retooling with a
renovated modernization theory of large-scale social change, which emphasizes that
collectively actors can redirect their energies to authentic development rather than be
at the mercy of external or imposed economic determinism (Tiryakian 1991).
Lastly, stemming from the challenge of making theoretical sense of the processes
of globalization, with some others who are especially active in the International
Sociological Association, we have begun to rethink the conceptual tools of macro
theory, giving place to “civilization” as a dynamic unit of analysis. This is still at
an early stage of formulation (Arjomand and Tiryakian 2004) but hopefully will
provide a stimulus for new creative theorizing and research, and for me personally,
new sites to travel with my sociological passport.
References and Selected Bibliography
Alba, Richard, and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream:
Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Arjomand, Said and Edward A. Tiryakian, eds. 2004. Rethinking Civilizational
Analysis. London: Sage.
Crane, Diana. 1972. Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific
Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Elder, Glen H. 1974. Children of the Great Depression. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of the European Sciences and transcendental
Phenomenology, an introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. with
an introduction by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
McKinney, John and Edward A. Tiryakian, eds. Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives
and Developments. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
11 See http//www.cies.org/download/2002_2003 NCS.pdf.
12 For a sample of relevant materials, see Tiryakian (2005a).
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Merton, Robert K. 1972. “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of
Knowledge.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 9–47.
———. 1994. “A Life of Learning”. New York: American Council of Learned
Societies, Occasional Paper No. 25. Online: http://www.acls.org/op25.htm.
Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. New York: The Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils, eds. 2001 (1951). Toward a General Theory
of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences. Abridged edition with
an introduction by Neil J. Smelser. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Tiryakian, Edward A. 1955. “Apartheid and Education in the Union of South Africa.”
Harvard Educational Review 25: 242–259.
———. 1957. “Apartheid and Religion.” Theology Today 14: 385–400.
———. 1959. “Aftermath of a Thermonuclear Attack on the United States: Some
Sociological Considerations.” Social Problems 6: 291–303.
———. 1960. “Apartheid and Politics in South Africa.” The Journal of Politics 22:
682–697.
———. 1962. Sociologism and Existentialism: Two Perspectives on the Individual
and Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
———. 1975. “Neither Marx nor Durkheim … Perhaps Weber.” American Journal
of Sociology 81(1): 1–33.
———. 1991. “Modernisation: Exhumetur in Pace (Rethinking Macrosociology in
the 1990s.” International Sociology 6: 165–180.
———. 1999. “War: The Covered Side of Modernity.” International Sociology
14(4): 473–489.
———. 2002. “Third Party Involvement in Ethnic Conflict: the Case of the Kosovo
War.” Pp. 207–228 in George A. Kourvetaris, V. Roudometof, K. Koutsoukis,
and A.G. Kourvetaris, eds, The New Balkans: Disintegration and Reconstruction.
Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press,
distributor.
———. 2003. Review essay of Hans Joas, War and Modernity. Contemporary
Sociology 32(4).
———. 2005a. “Talcott Parsons and the Human Condition.” Pp. 267–288 in V.
Lidz, R. Fox, and V. Bershady, eds, After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for
the Twenty-First Century. New York: Russell Sage.
———, ed. 2005b. Ethnicity, Ethnic Conflicts, Peace Processes: Comparative
Perspectives. Whitby, Ontario: de Sitter Publications.
Tiryakian, Edward A. and Ronald Rogowski, eds. 1985. New Nationalisms of the
Developed West. London: Allen & Unwin.
Vogel, Ezra F. 1979. Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
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