Moreover, the teaching assistants and I intend to take attendance periodically throughout the semester to ensure that your attendance is adequate to understand the material. I want to leave time for your questions and concerns at the end of each class session, and I hope to open things up for discussion periodically during the semester. Although it is difficult to ask questions and participate, thoughtful and energetic participation will enhance your enjoyment of the course, and likely also improve your performance. The first of these is a general textbook, offering a detailed treatment of basic sociological ideas, and touching on a variety of different themes in the discipline. The goal of an ethnography, one might say, is to inform the reader about the peculiarities of a particular culture or social grouping and to draw the reader into an understanding of that milieu by making the experience of it as rich and as vivid as possible.
Ethnographers aim to render the strange familiar.
Not all sociologists are ethnographers, but all the social sciences rely on the kind of careful, detailed collection of information about groups, institutions, and cultures that ethnographers provide. Individuals are the basic units of society. Karl Marx offers the paradigmatic critique of Smith's ideas by stressing the pervasiveness of conflict and exploitation in social relations, rather than simple exchange. To many, the problem of race is the most sinister and pervasive problem in contemporary America. Mama Lola, pp.