Day 1The Sociological ImaginationPrivate troubles vs public issues · Where biography meets history · Why this discipline exists
Day 2Durkheim and Social FactsThe sociology of suicide · Anomie · Integration and collective conscience
Day 3Weber and RationalizationThe Protestant Ethic thesis and its critics · The iron cage of bureaucracy · Verstehen
Day 4Marx's Sociological LegacyClass and conflict theory · Alienation · Ideology and material base
Day 5Fieldwork and EthnographyParticipant observation · Geertz's thick description · Reflexivity and field ethics
Day 6Goffman's DramaturgyFront stage and back stage · Impression management · Face-work
Day 7Deviance and LabelingWho defines “normal” · Labels as self-fulfilling · Stigma
Day 8The Power of the GroupA sociological reading of conformity · How group boundaries get drawn · In-groups and out-groups
Day 9The GiftMauss's three obligations · The Kula ring · Why gifts bind harder than trades
Day 10Ritual and Collective EffervescenceRites of passage · Turner's liminality and communitas · Modern secular rituals
Day 11Social StratificationHow class is measured · What mobility data actually show · Elite reproduction
Day 12BourdieuCultural capital · Habitus · Distinction and the sociology of taste
Day 13Social NetworksThe strength of weak ties · Structural holes · Small worlds and contagion
Day 14Organizations and InstitutionsInstitutional isomorphism · Loose coupling · Bureaucratic pathologies
Day 15The Social Construction of GenderSex and gender · Doing gender · Divisions of labor and care
Day 16Race and EthnicityConstruction and boundaries · Situational ethnicity · Classification systems compared
Day 17Education and ReproductionWhat schools actually sort · The hidden curriculum · Credential inflation
Day 18Urban SociologyThe Chicago School · Neighborhood effects · Gentrification
Day 19Cultural RelativismThe Boasian revolution · Where relativism ends · Ethnocentrism
Day 20KinshipWhy anthropology obsesses over kinship · Alliance theory · The logic of kin terms
Day 21Witchcraft and RationalityAzande witchcraft · A coherent alternative causality · The rationality debate
Day 22Purity and DangerPollution and classification · The structure of food taboos · Dirt as matter out of place
Day 23Debt and MoneyThe barter myth · A moral history of debt · The social life of money
Day 24Seeing Like a StateWhy legibility schemes fail · Mētis · Zomia and the art of not being governed
Day 25The Original Affluent SocietyHow long hunter-gatherers actually worked · Sahlins's case and its revisions · The Dawn of Everything vs linear progress
Day 26The Consumer SocietyConspicuous consumption · Sign-value · Taste and distinction today
Day 27Media and AttentionAgenda setting · The pseudo-environment · The platform society
Day 28Digital AnthropologyFieldwork in online communities · Algorithmic culture · Digital labor
Day 29Migration and MobilityBeyond push-pull · Transnationalism · The second generation's two worlds
Day 30The Secularization DebateWill religion disappear · A secular age · Religious economies
Day 31Social MovementsThe collective action problem · Resource mobilization · Framing
Day 32Trust and Social CapitalBowling alone · Bridging vs bonding · The dark side of social capital
Day 33Risk Society and ModernityBeck's risk society · Giddens on disembedding and expert systems · How institutional trust holds
Day 34The Sociology of ScienceMertonian norms · Laboratory life · A sociological reading of the replication crisis
Day 35Anthropology of Technology and AIThe social shaping of technology · Ethnographies of algorithms · AI and the meaning of work
Day 36Can We Trust Social Science?The measurement and causality problem · WEIRD samples · Quant vs qual, and the field's self-scrutiny