Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life

Abstract

Sociologies of everyday life generally earn their stripes in one of three ways. Some works develop novel frames of reference that cast familiar realities in a new light. A second group shines a critical light on day-to-day injustice and its consequences. A third group employs familiar frames to make sociological sense of contexts and/or experiences with which most sociologists are unfamiliar. The three leading essays in Jeffrey Nash’s Personal Sociology: Finding Meanings in Everyday Life fall into the latter camp. The volume is actually a collection of Nash’s essays and research reports, a number of which have been published in whole or in part during the course of a long and varied career. Nash has eclectic tastes. His topics range from a comparison of the treatment of race in popular comedy series separated by thirty years to a provocative comparison of the morality of pro-life groups versus groups advocating animal rights. There is also an essay in support of a more personal form of sociological rhetoric and research. Only a superficial survey of Nash’s eight essays would be possible in the space of this review. Instead, I shall review the three essays that open this collection in order to convey Nash’s sociological sensibility. The first essay concerns the world of barbershop singers who sing old-fashioned tunes with extraordinarily tight harmonies. Nash establishes his credentials as a barbershop singer by providing a brief guide to how the distinctive harmonies of barbershop singing are produced. Though this guide is incidental to his sociological interests, readers may learn about a musical folk art that is far more complicated and difficult to master than many audiences recognize. Nash seems quite at home in the distinctive social relations and interactions that constitute the barbershop milieu. Barbershop singing groups mainly attract a membership of white men, most of whom are from middle-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds. Like many other forms of group singing, for example the high school choral group portrayed in the television musical drama Glee, barbershop singing can be a competitive activity both among groups who vie with one another at various conclaves and within groups as well. Nash might have made more use than he does of the sociology of conflict here. But conflict is not his main concern. Instead, he pays special attention to an implicit disjunction between two antithetical cultural identities. On the one hand there are the cultural identities and norms of men from middleand lower-middleclass backgrounds. Male identities here discourage displays of softer emotions such as heartbreak or longings for others. Such feelings may make a man from the middle class appear weak or vulnerable. Hence, when such feelings arise, they are best kept to oneself. On the other hand, sentimentality is at the very heart of both the lyrics and music of what distinguishes barbershop singing as a genre. Men who might be unsentimental in their everyday worlds here wear their barbershop hearts on their sleeves. Though Nash alludes to studies in the sociology of masculinity as well as Bourdieu’s concept of habitus during the course of describing this curious disjunction of social worlds in which the same men participate, he sidesteps some intriguing sociological questions. How do barbershoppers make sense of the music they sing? Perhaps they sing for the musical experience alone. Or perhaps, to borrow Goffman’s dramaturgical model, like actors they play a role when singing and revert to their everyday identities when they leave the stage. In any event, there is food for thought here for sociologists of everyday life as well as cultural sociologists. Nash’s second essay takes us into the dramatically different life-world of amateur youth group wrestling. Though he acknowledges the participation of a small number of young women, his main theme is the way social norms channel undisciplined aggressive male impulses into highly skilled and well-executed maneuvers intended to overcome an opponent or avoid a loss according Reviews 467