Never before have I considered the concept of a sociologist making
observations on their studies from the outside until reading Dorothy Smith’s
piece. She explains it best, here; ‘Even to be a stranger is to enter a world
constituted from within as strange. The strangeness itself is the mode in which
it is experienced.’ At the time I found this idea very strange in itself
because I couldn’t relate to her understanding and claim of how people were
studying societies from outside them when at the same time, they were living as
a part of them. Reading along further I could identify more with what she was
saying because she focuses on the very specific and individual intricacies of
society. She uses the example of passing a family of Indians while riding the
train as she sees them through the window and how it was all relative to her
perspective from her life’s experiences up to that point. Being that she hasn’t
lived a lifestyle similar to theirs, she doesn’t believe that it is possible
for her to fully understand their society.
I
especially loved her idea of educators in our society teaching girls as they
grew up how they would be at a disadvantage and why, by our construction of
society as they were growing up. What a world that would be. Maybe I’m putting
words in her mouth but she put it as; ‘A sociology for women would offer a
knowledge of the social organization and determinations of the properties and events
of our directly experienced world.’ And that’s how I took it.
Sociologists
have been suggested to change how they study. To not ‘impose a conceptual
framework that extracts from [other societal modes] what fits with ours’, to
live amongst them and develop and understanding from the inside out rather than
the outside in. This is not the ultimate solution though, because these
interactions are only yet the product of our past societal constructions.
Dorothy explains how women’s experiences allow them the ability to see the
concern of how modern sociologist’s claim they are about the world when they
display an ambiguous understanding of women’s experiences.
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