Role of the Sociologist

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. .

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unen refers to a certain segment of the society of the mid-nineteenth century, that segment consisting of confidence men and painted women, as being considered a major threat to the rest of society. Those behaviors identifying the confidence man and the painted woman would be deviant behavior. These people were matched on the opposite end of the spectrum by the puritanical reformers who saw the deviants as hypocrites and who warned others about the evils of such people, and the Erikson danger of deviant behavior developed at a time of change when change itself was feared if it went too far: The problem of hypocrisy symbolized by the confidence man and the painted woman arose out of a crisis of social identity faced by these men and women who were on the move both socially and geographically (Halttunen xv). In such a fluid society, people were asking questions about their own identity, and it is in such questions that both deviance and conformity arise as individuals measure themselves against some conception of proper behavior. It seems clear that for the conformist, the perceived evil of the deviant is actually a benefit to a degree as an example to others of what will happen to them if they do not conform. Halttunen descri

Category: Psychology - R