Sociological Imagination, Reality, Institutions

Question 1

The sociological imagination

Answer 1

• coined by C. Wright Mills
• the ability to connect your personal, intimate experiences with seemingly impersonal/ remote historical forces
• turn private problems into public ones
• intersection of biography with historical forces

Question 2

Making the familiar strange

Answer 2

by probing into the reifications of certain behaviors or concepts and asking: what’s the purpose of that? why do we do that? under what conditions do we do that?
- this idea is the focus of sociology

Question 3

Making the strange familiar

Answer 3

• identifying aspects we see foreign and finding similar aspects in our cultures
• ex- Dutch people in Amsterdam eat mayonnaise with fries like ketchup

Question 4

Concept of sociology

Answer 4

• questioning everyday/ commonsense explanations for why we do certain things
• focus on modern developing societies
• make familiar seem strange

Question 5

Concept of cultural anthropology

Answer 5

• focus on the cultures of less developed societies

- making strange seem familiar

Question 6

Reality

Answer 6

• product of ongoing social interaction where knowledge of the world and behavior become reified
• it’s arbitrary and abstract
• if we define situations as real, then they and their consequences become real

Question 7

Radical thesis

Answer 7

the way the social world is in a given time and space isn’t inevitable, natural, or necessarily optimal

Question 8

Social Institutions

Answer 8

• complex group of interdependent (dependent on eachother) positions/ ties that perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time
• not monolithic because we have the power to change them through interactions and how we define them
• shape every aspect of our behavior

Question 9

Grand narrative

Answer 9

• forms your social identity

- the sum of all individual stories/ relationships between pairs of individuals