From the Editors
Since it debuted in 2002, we’ve seen Contexts as one of the most ambitious, exciting, and downright important publications in the American Sociological Association portfolio. Not only because of its core mission to bring sociology to a wider public audience, but also because of our conviction that a publicly engaged sociology constantly reinvents and reinvigorates itself, and in so doing produces new knowledge and insight.
We’re thus honored to take over a venture which, in a few short years, has won awards, built a deeply loyal constituency and solid subscription base, and now produced an exciting new classroom reader.
Our first and most important goal, therefore, is to not screw things up—or put more professionally, to maintain the standards of excellence on features, photo essays, and reviews established by previous editors Claude Fischer, Jim Jasper, and JeffGoodwin, and the various contributing editors who have organized the magazine’s sections over the years.
We want to expand and diversify the types of sociology in our pages and the sociologists who contribute to them. That in mind, we welcome a new group of scholars to our Editorial Board, each of whom was chosen specifically to lend new voices, visions, and expertise. And we’ll look forward to welcoming your submission, too.
Our inaugural issue introduces what they call in the business a “freshened design” intended to streamline and unify some of the content and design innovations of recent years. We’re also adding a few wrinkles of our own, among them the Reflected Appraisals section, a new back page column titled One Thing I Know, and a reconceived approach to book reviews intended to better complement the academic functions of our sister publication Contemporary Sociology.
Then there’s the redesigned website, contexts.org. It’s now up and running, and we have high hopes Contexts’ online presence will provide a forum for further exchange and become a key access point to sociology for both the general public and the media.
The next couple years will be crucial as we come to the conclusion of the 10-year plan ASA used to launch Contexts. Working with our publisher and ASA’s Executive Office, we plan to test a series of ideas for dramatically increasing the circulation and visibility of the whole Contexts enterprise. So stay tuned on that.
Let us know what you think. And what you’d like to write. With your scholarship and contributions, Contexts will reflect the breadth of its ASA membership and all that sociology has to offer.
Daniel C. Dennet’s Breaking the Spell mixes a careful review of some excellent work with a poorly conceived and executed polemic. Slipshod in reviewing scholarship inconvenient to his argument, Dennett levels petty outbursts throughout toward particular scholars and general categories of people. The “brights” are scientific elites, aggressively bumping shoulders with religious elites, vying for power as part of an historic struggle. They, and we, should ask the tough questions about where religious ideas are best addressed in society, and none of us should be pilloried for asking, or for a strong secularist answer. But the brights have not been pilloried.
The information contained in the City Crime Rankings, which is less a book and more a compendium of statistical tables, provides an important opportunity. It allows us to discuss the appropriate uses and limitations of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports data and the role responsible social scientists and journalists can play in starting a meaningful conversation about this nation’s crime policy. There’s nothing objectionable about organizing and disseminating crime data in tabular form. The problem comes in using those data to designate the residents of some cities as “safe” and the residents of others as in “danger” based on an undisclosed, proprietary scoring methodology applied to the FBI’s crime statistics.
Public attention directed toward the wealthy seems to take the form of intrigue about what they do. The impoverished, however, seem to attract attention for their perceived lack of meaningful employment opportunities or prospects for pursuing upward mobility, their perpetual struggle with destitution and despair. We wonder whether they ascribe blame to others or themselves for their life situations, what they think they can do about their plight, or what they think about the more privileged in society. In Poor People, William T. Vollmann attempts to answer this first question and, in doing so, offer some insight into the others. Vollmann intends to address what’s in the minds of poor people by literally trekking across the globe to meet and interview them. His succinct title severely contrasts with the enormity of the task at hand in this volume.
The gyil is a 14-key frame xylophone played during funerals by the Lobi people from Ghana’s northwestern region. Gyil music combines overlapping melodies and bass patterns enveloped by a dense layer of buzzing. The keys are cut from the liga, a red hardwood tree, and strung above gourds that are modified with thin paper or spider silk to create a sympathetic drone. Playing the instrument with the two heavy mallets takes great endurance, and a musician may be expected to play for several hours before another takes over.
Elaine McArdle is a journalist and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the co-author of