Sociology & Anthropology
BigCat's Sociology & Anthropology
Groups & culture · Classic theory and fieldwork · Scholarly, multi-perspective
Day 1
The Sociological Imagination
Private troubles vs public issues · Where biography meets history · Why this discipline exists
Day 2
Durkheim and Social Facts
The sociology of suicide · Anomie · Integration and collective conscience
Day 3
Weber and Rationalization
The Protestant Ethic thesis and its critics · The iron cage of bureaucracy · Verstehen
Day 4
Marx's Sociological Legacy
Class and conflict theory · Alienation · Ideology and material base
Day 5
Fieldwork and Ethnography
Participant observation · Geertz's thick description · Reflexivity and field ethics
Day 6
Goffman's Dramaturgy
Front stage and back stage · Impression management · Face-work
Day 7
Deviance and Labeling
Who defines “normal” · Labels as self-fulfilling · Stigma
Day 8
The Power of the Group
A sociological reading of conformity · How group boundaries get drawn · In-groups and out-groups
Day 9
The Gift
Mauss's three obligations · The Kula ring · Why gifts bind harder than trades
Day 10
Ritual and Collective Effervescence
Rites of passage · Turner's liminality and communitas · Modern secular rituals
Day 11
Social Stratification
How class is measured · What mobility data actually show · Elite reproduction
Day 12
Bourdieu
Cultural capital · Habitus · Distinction and the sociology of taste
Day 13
Social Networks
The strength of weak ties · Structural holes · Small worlds and contagion
Day 14
Organizations and Institutions
Institutional isomorphism · Loose coupling · Bureaucratic pathologies
Day 15
The Social Construction of Gender
Sex and gender · Doing gender · Divisions of labor and care
Day 16
Race and Ethnicity
Construction and boundaries · Situational ethnicity · Classification systems compared
Day 17
Education and Reproduction
What schools actually sort · The hidden curriculum · Credential inflation
Day 18
Urban Sociology
The Chicago School · Neighborhood effects · Gentrification
Day 19
Cultural Relativism
The Boasian revolution · Where relativism ends · Ethnocentrism
Day 20
Kinship
Why anthropology obsesses over kinship · Alliance theory · The logic of kin terms
Day 21
Witchcraft and Rationality
Azande witchcraft · A coherent alternative causality · The rationality debate
Day 22
Purity and Danger
Pollution and classification · The structure of food taboos · Dirt as matter out of place
Day 23
Debt and Money
The barter myth · A moral history of debt · The social life of money
Day 24
Seeing Like a State
Why legibility schemes fail · Mētis · Zomia and the art of not being governed
Day 25
The Original Affluent Society
How long hunter-gatherers actually worked · Sahlins's case and its revisions · The Dawn of Everything vs linear progress
Day 26
The Consumer Society
Conspicuous consumption · Sign-value · Taste and distinction today
Day 27
Media and Attention
Agenda setting · The pseudo-environment · The platform society
Day 28
Digital Anthropology
Fieldwork in online communities · Algorithmic culture · Digital labor
Day 29
Migration and Mobility
Beyond push-pull · Transnationalism · The second generation's two worlds
Day 30
The Secularization Debate
Will religion disappear · A secular age · Religious economies
Day 31
Social Movements
The collective action problem · Resource mobilization · Framing
Day 32
Trust and Social Capital
Bowling alone · Bridging vs bonding · The dark side of social capital
Day 33
Risk Society and Modernity
Beck's risk society · Giddens on disembedding and expert systems · How institutional trust holds
Day 34
The Sociology of Science
Mertonian norms · Laboratory life · A sociological reading of the replication crisis
Day 35
Anthropology of Technology and AI
The social shaping of technology · Ethnographies of algorithms · AI and the meaning of work
Day 36
Can We Trust Social Science?
The measurement and causality problem · WEIRD samples · Quant vs qual, and the field's self-scrutiny