Howard Becker

Howard S. Becker nous a quittés voilà quelques jours. Tout le monde le connaissait et l’aimait en France, un peu comme un vieux sage, débordant d’humour, qui nous abreuvait d’un fonds inépuisable d’histoires, et qui nous mettait en contact avec des temps mythiques pour la sociologie, le Chicago d’après-guerre, la Californie des années 1960. Le CEMS avait un lien particulier avec Howie. Il avait accepté de nous rejoindre, il y a une dizaine d’années, avec cette façon qu’il avait de ne pas trop s’attacher aux institutions, tout en manifestant, dans le même temps, de l’intérêt pour l’accent mis sur l’enquête dans notre laboratoire. Il nous avait rejoints alors que nous préparions un séminaire EHESS qui a eu lieu tous les lundis, du 11h00 à 13h00, de septembre à fin novembre 2013, à l’époque au 190 Avenue de France, dans la Salle du Conseil. J’ai retrouvé l’annonce de « Relire la sociologie de Chicago : ville, race, profession ». « Ce séminaire sera consacré à la relecture de textes, classiques ou moins connus, de la tradition sociologique de Chicago. Il requiert de la part de ses participants de lire l’anglais et de s’engager à lire ces textes pour les discuter. Le parcours que nous avons imaginé commencera avec la naissance de l’écologie humaine, autour de Robert  E. Park et Roderick D. McKenzie. Nous lirons des extraits de thèses des années 1920, pour rendre compte de certaines des dynamiques urbaines repérées par les chercheurs de l’époque. Les méthodes de l’analyse de cas, de l’usage de documents personnels et de l’histoire de vie seront également examinées, sur les thèmes de la délinquance, du « vice » et du crime. Quelques textes seront consacrés au problème des relations raciales, et traiteront en particulier du « problème » des communautés « noire » et « chinoise ». On pourra prendre Black Metropolis de St. Clair Drake et Horace Cayton et des articles sur les Chinatowns ou sur le cas hawaiien comme exemples de cette littérature. Nous enchaînerons sur les études sur l’organisation du travail et les carrières professionnelles dans le groupe qui gravitait autour d'Everett C. Hughes – en examinant les manières d’enquêter qui y étaient engagées. Puis nous évoquerons le tournant des études sur la déviance à la fin des années 1950, en continuité et en rupture avec les recherches sur la délinquance à Chicago. Ce sera l’occasion de présenter et de discuter quelques éléments de recherche sur la sociologie d’après la Seconde Guerre mondiale à Chicago et de réexaminer des hypothèses d’histoire de cette supposée Second Chicago school… » Le séminaire faisait salle pleine. Howie et Dianne arrivaient juste avant le commencement et du haut de ses 85 ans, la mémoire intacte, avec la gentillesse qui était la sienne, Howie nous régalait d’histoires vécues sur ses promenades de gamin sur le El, le métro aérien, sur les talents de plombier de Ray Gold qui lui avaient permis de rassembler son corpus de données sur les concierges, sur l’animation qui régnait entre jeunes chercheurs qui gravitaient autour de Hughes et qui, sans le savoir, révolutionnaient la sociologie du travail, des métiers et des professions. Ou encore il nous dressait des portraits d’Erving Goffman, chambrait un peu quand nous prenions un peu trop au sérieux tel ou tel article oublié et nous faisait comprendre comment le tournant des années 1960 des études sur la déviance s’annonçait déjà. C’était un bon et beau moment.

Farewell, my friend.

Daniel Cefaï,

Paris, août 2023

***

► Sociologue

► Membre associé du CEMS

♦ A lire le portrait de Howar Becker dans The New Yorker : Adam Gopnik, « The Outside Game : How the Sociologist Howard Becker Studies the Conventions of the Unconventional », The New Yorker, January 12, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/outside-game

Publications : quelques livres

♦ Thinking Together: An E-Mail Exchange and All That Jazz

An electronic book of the email correspondence of musicians and sociologists Howard Becker and Rob Faulkner during the years they were writing their book for the University of Chicago Press called Do You Know. . .? The Jazz Repertoire in Action.

The e-book is published by The Annenberg Press and available from Amazon, the Apple Store, and other places that handle e-books.

A paper version of the exchange is published by and available at Questions Théoriques (of course, without the links to almost 300 songs Howie and Rob mention that are included in the electronic version).

♦ What About Mozart? What About Murder?

Many people think the object of sociological research and theorizing is to simplify our understanding of social life by finding the underlying laws that govern its operation. I think, contrariwise, that the object is to find out the nature of, and make a place in our thinking for, everything that observably contributes to producing the results I’m interested in. Each chapter uses specific cases, mostly work I’ve done and reported on in the past, which exemplify one or another way of doing that and explaining how I did it. The specific cases have an interest of their own, but the emphasis is on what’s to be learned from them about this way of working, and how to do it fruitfully.

♦ Tricks of the Trade

Most books on research methods advise you to state your problem clearly, and then pick the best available method for investigating it. Tricks of the Trade, taking a different approach, advises you to continually revise your problem and your way of investigating it as the research continues. It describes a large number of “tricks” that help you do that more or less painlessly.

♦ Outsiders

Outsiders is the clearest, if not quite the earliest, statement of the “labeling” approach to the study of deviance, the idea that deviance is not a quality of a bad person but the result of someone defining someone’s activity as bad. The idea is illustrated in two chapters on musicians and two on marihuana smoking.

♦ Art Worlds

Art Worlds says that art works do not result from the activity of a single artist, but from the coordinated work of a network of cooperating specialists: people who make musical instruments or oil paints or theatrical costumes as well as musicians and composers, painters, and actors, playwrights and directors. And that they manage to do that successfully because they share some ideas and conventions about how the work should be done.

♦ Telling About Society

Social scientists share the work of telling about society with playwrights, novelists, photographers, statisticians, cartographers, and ordinary people, all of whom have some ideas on the subject to express from time to time. Telling About Society explores what’s common to all these endeavors and how they vary depending on the nature of the social organization the telling takes place in. It suggests the surprising conclusion that every way of telling these stories is perfect—for someone in some situation, although never for all people everywhere.

♦ Writing for Social Scientists

Down-home advice on how to avoid the problems of writing that plague students, professors, and everyone who wants to tell what their research has taught them about society. Plenty of advice, plenty of illuminating stories, all designed to make writing more fun and less of a pain. (Some people tell me that just putting the book under their pillow at night cured all their problems, but I don’t believe them.) This new edition brings the chapter on computers up-to-the-minute and comments on length on new developments in academic life that have made writing problems worse than they used to be.

♦ Art From Start to Finish

A handful of specialists from a variety of fields—everything from music to economics—met to discuss the question of when, if ever, is an art work finished. Surprisingly, they agreed that’s it more fruitful to think of art works as continually changing—whether from physical deterioration, editorial changes, differing interpretations, or audiences with new ideas, all of which make the art work something different than it had been. I collaborated with Robert R. Faulkner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to turn the results of our discussion into what I think is a lively and provocative book.

♦ Paroles et musique

This book presents French translations of a number of my papers about art and related subjects. And there’s a special bonus—a CD of me playing the piano in duets with bass player Benoit Cancoin (you can’t get this CD anywhere else!) And yes, that’s me in the porkpie hat on the picture on the cover!

♦ Propos sur l’art

More essays on art and related matters in French translation.

♦ Un sociologue en liberté: Lecture d’Howard S. Becker (by Alain Pessin)

Un sociologue en liberté: Lecture d’Howard S. Becker is the only full-length analysis of my ideas about a lot of things, done by a French sociologist who knew my work better than I do. Unfortunately for all of us, Alain Pessin died too young, although he left behind a substantial body of work.

♦ L’art du terrain: Mélanges offerts à Howard S. Becker (edited by Alain Blanc and Alain Pessin)

In the United States we call a collection of papers written by scholars to honor one of their own a “festschrift.” In France, it’s called a “mélanges,” and this one was organized for me by two good friends in France. If I say so myself, the papers are pretty interesting, and are by some of the really good sociologists working in France now.

♦ Boys in White

Boys in White reports on a major field study of students at the University of Kansas Medical Center, circa the late 1950s. It’s very detailed and may be somewhat out of date. But people who keep in touch with these things tell me that, for all the minor cosmetic changes in medical education, things are pretty much the same. I don’t know myself. The book introduced the idea of a “perspective” as a technical term referring to the mixture of shared ideas and actions that characterized what we and others called “student culture.” It also made a determined effort to make all the evidence that field work produces available to the reader.

♦ Making the Grade

My colleagues and I continued our exploration of student culture in this overly ambitious study of the home campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. We had fun, learned a lot, and developed the idea of the “grade point average perspective,” emphasizing the way everything that students wanted out of their college experience had to be purchased with the currency of academic grades. Whether it was entrance into a professional or graduate school, important positions in campus organizations, or even desirable dates, it all had to be paid for with good grades. That surprised a lot of people, and surprised us too, but that’s the way it was. And, despite all the talk of “grade inflation,” the way it continues to be.