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. 160-164 and ch. Although we imagine religious belief to be a deeply private experience and personal choice, there are in fact important social determinants shaping the nature and extent of religious belief in a given society.