Kai T. Erikson offers a clear statement of the traditional role of the sociologist:
According to an honored tradition of scholarship, sociologists are people who study the general outlines of society, the "laws" governing social life, while historians are people who study those special moments in the past which have shaped the character of a given age or tempered the course of future events (Erikson vii).
Erikson argues that this distinction between the work of the sociologist and the historian has been popular for some time but is not a good distinction when applied to a given piece of research. He sees the distinction as artificial because human events do not arrange themselves in such a fashion. Erikson offers his own analysis of a period of time in American history, the era of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, and much of what he says about sociology and historical study can be applied to other works, such as the book by Karen Halttunen on a somewhat later era in American history, the mid-nineteenth century, in Confidence Men and Painted Women.
Erikson describes the concept of deviance and deviant behavior, which he applies to the Puritans (or some of the Puritans) and which can be used to analyze what Halttunen says about middle-class culture in the nineteenth century. Erikson defines his terms at the outset, and especially he notes that as a sociologist he looks at these issues in a different way:
Behavior which looks abnormal to the psychiatrist or the judge. . . does not always look abnormal through the special lens of the sociologist; and thus students of the new science should be careful to understand that even the most aberrant forms of individual behavior may still be considered normal from this broader point of view (Erikson 3).
One of the interesting aspects of the sociology of deviance, as Erikson notes, is that the deviant behavior can itself contribute to a sense of belonging and a sense of commu...