Seeing “Seeing Others” differently

ABSTRACT

Comments from Lorenza Fontana, Tiffany Joseph, Ali Meghji, and Ann Morning shed different lights on Seeing Others, and bring me to see the book differently. They draw a connection between its argument and my past research on worth, racism, group boundaries, ordinary universalism, and other themes. Some are particularly drawn to how I describe change as proceeding from ongoing cultural processes, even in periods of cultural backlash like the one we are experiencing now. Others are concerned with how to engage the most conservative and racist members of our society in a project of greater social inclusion and universal recognition of dignity, at a time of growing political polarization, and when social media feed miscommunication in the public sphere. Although this exchange leaves many questions open, it can and will contribute to feeding pressing reflections around some of the unavoidable challenges of our time.

KEYWORDS:

• Recognition
• dignity
• inclusion
• stigma
• narratives
• boundaries

I thank ERS for giving me the gift of these four nicely crafted essays on Seeing Others (Lamont 2023) after the book has lived in the public sphere for nine months, and generated conversations with a wide range of audiences.

Each of the comments offer a different reading and invite me to reflect on what inspired such a normative book in the historical conjuncture of 2016–22, which concluded decades of growing inequality with the Trump 2016 presidency, the Covid epidemic, and their respective aftermaths, a growing mental health crisis, and much more.

Moved by the urgency of the moment, my intent was to mobilize my sociological knowledge to give the general reader analytical tools to help them make sense of this particular social and political conjuncture, and to contribute to sustaining a sense of agency in response to the generalized morosity of the time – a view that optimism can be “an ethic, a posture toward life” in such a moments (Marshall 2024).

I experienced this call as imperative because American sociologists were not as present in the public sphere as we should have been during these difficult years, as compared to psychologists and economists particularly (Arlie Hochschild’s and Suzanne Toren’s (2017) influential Strangers in their Own Land was one of the few sociology books that stood out at the time). The situation has been improving as of late, with the publication of several high-profile trade books by writers ranging from Matthew Desmond and Eric Klinenberg to Allison Pugh, Jessica Calarco, and others.

Another objective was to encourage the general public to be more critical of concepts such as individual grit, flourishing, nudging, and tribalism (seeing these notions as based on individualism, anti-cultural behavioralism, or a notion of human nature that can only be speculative). More generally, after stepping down from the presidency of the American Sociological Association in 2017, I was determined to promote social science research concerned with collective and cultural/structural solutions as alternatives to empathy, meditation, and other individualist/psychological remedies. The alternative I had in mind was a focus on social resilience grounded in cultural repertoires, narratives, and institutions, which I had written about in the context of a long-lasting interdisciplinary collaboration (see the Successful Societies program).

As pointed out in Tiffany Joseph's essay (2024), Seeing Others (Lamont 2023) builds directly on my previous research on how symbolic boundaries based on shared definitions of worth feed social boundaries manifested in resources, networks, and space. In various publications, I have examined how group boundaries can be made more fluid and crossable, and inclusion bolstered, through changes in criteria of evaluation, and how this can feed into stigma reduction. This is why I would refute the claim that Seeing Others (Lamont 2023) is a bit pollyannish: it draws on detailed studies of how representations of groups have changed in the past, to result in a reduction of stigma (in particular Clair, Daniel, and Lamont 2016 on the case of people living with HIV-AIDS, African Americans, and people labeled obese), and how such changes can happen again. As described by students of cultural production and diffusion (including Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014; Lamont et al. 2016), such cultural changes operate through the continuous cumulation of production, evaluation, and diffusion of narratives at the micro and meso levels (by individuals, groups, networks, or institutions), through daily contacts and interactions with others, media of all sorts, and policies.

Of course, as Joseph points out, inevitably, for every social movement, there is a backlash – counter-movements such as the ones we are experiencing today, against trans people, immigrants, women, and various racialized and marginalized groups – in the context of an increase in the popularity of MAGA ideologues in the United States, and other far-right politicians and thinkers in Europe and elsewhere. However, while Joseph suggests that such backlash makes change “nearly impossible”, I am far more optimistic. There is a cultural tug-of-war to be sure, but challenges to exclusion are multifold and are expressed continuously through all spheres of cultural production and diffusion. This all adds up, sometimes slowly, but certainly continuously since WWII (Bloemraad et al. 2019).

Moreover, even if the public sphere has become more polarized than it was prior to the emergence and dominance of social media, it has also become more democratized. This is the result in part of organizations such as Patreon, whose creator Jack Conte I interviewed for Seeing Others (Lamont 2023), where he expressed the view that the Patreon platform has made it possible for many musicians and other cultural producers to gain direct access to their audience, without having to conform to gatekeeping standards imposed historically by traditional radio stations. Resy, Substack newsletters, open access publishing, as well as Yelp and Goodreads reviews (to name only a few), are among the many relatively new outlets that now enable expressions of opinions and creativity that feed into a more diverse public sphere. This context breeds more openness and makes political outcomes less overdetermined, dependent as they are on the participation of all those who now can contribute to feeding the public sphere (even as platforms also create new constraints).

As Ali Meghji points out in his essay, change agents certainly include sociologists who participate in “recognition chains” (Meghji 2024). While he points out the challenges of “reaching out across the political aisle”, he asks about whether and how we can help transform the views of the stigmatizers – for instance, white working-class people who experience downward mobility and view the gains of racialized groups as causing or even cementing their loss. How can we convince them that their dignity is not in a zero-sum relationship with other groups? Is this best accomplished through participatory research or other alternative approaches? The answer proposed by contact theorists, which I adopt in my book (among other answers), consists in increasing contacts, which can foster understanding where people “come from”, and how their lives are shaped by their life conditions. A great many non-profits oriented toward fostering social change now have as a mission to produce precisely this kind of change, through the diffusion of narratives and other means (examples include the Ford Foundation and the JPB Foundation).

For its part, the essay by Ann Morning (2024) also connects Seeing Others (Lamont 2023) to my previous work on anti-racism in the US, Brazil, and Israel (see the coauthored 2016 Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma in the United States, Brazil and Israel, which considers the types of affronts that stigmatized groups experience in different national contexts, and how they respond to them, often in efforts to maintain their dignity). As Ann notes, the notion of “ordinary universalism” is most salient in the chapter on how Gen Z shows the way toward a new collective myth of social inclusion, which I suggest is slowly replacing the faltering American dream for this group, as they experience the latter as ever more out of reach. But it is also present in Chapter 4 which discusses the importance of fostering a plurality of criteria of evaluation as an alternative to a single hierarchy based on the socioeconomic criteria of success associated with neoliberal scripts of self. I note that Ann’s comment implicitly makes a connection between her important recent book, An Ugly Word (Morning and Maneri 2022) on racism in Italy, to our coauthored paper published in 2002 on how “ordinary” Muslim immigrants in France think about various “kinds” of differences between ethno-racial groups (Lamont et al. 2002). This theme is fully developed throughout her own published work and has gained well-deserved influence in our discipline.

To return to the theme of the possible overoptimism of Seeing Others (Lamont 2023), I should note that Ann Morning wonders whether Seeing Others does not underestimate the extent to which Gen Z are committed to the American dream, and particularly to the hedonistic treadmill of consumption. The book contains footnotes that qualify my position on Gen Zs and rejections of the American dream. That the book draws on interviews conducted with college students certainly does not allow one to generalize to the Gen Z population as a whole. One thing is clear: there is a paucity of information concerning working class Gen Zs who only have a high school degree. In research in progress, in a comparative project with British colleagues (Andrew Miles and Hilary Pilkington, University of Manchester), I am now analyzing how this group pursues recognition through politics, with the specific objective to develop a more comprehensive understanding of where this important group is heading as they aim to define our future.

Finally, Lorenza Fontana’s essay converges with that of Ann Morning in her focus on how I understand the imperative of creating hope, agency, and social change (Fontana 2024). I believe this theme holds their attention because so much sociological research is concerned with documenting constraints, structural determination and what is not possible, often at the expense of comprehending openings and opportunities – although recently, scholars such as Michael Sauder have turned their attention toward the important topic of “luck”. This focus is refreshing in a context where academics often equate intellectual acuity with the ability to unveil interests, false consciousness, and hidden scripts, or to display critical acumen. Downplaying or overlooking openings is an unforgiveable analytical blind spot given that so much of the dynamics of social life are made of agentic moments (albeit shaped by constraints and scarcity).

To conclude, I want to underscore my appreciation for the engagement of the four authors with my work. Their essays certainly made me “feel seen”, as each author skillfully captured the spirit of my book. I also want to single out the unconventional stylistic decision that Lorenza Fontana made in shaping her essay, where she used what she learned from my book to reflect on various episodes that took place in her private life in the weeks following her reading of Seeing Others – to offer a thought-provoking description of how my analysis raised her awareness of the role of change agents and the power of recognition chains to shape our world. She goes as far as proposing a “rule of the unicorn” to capture all the unconventional energy that goes toward producing new solutions and creating social change. As with the essays by the other contributors, she succeeded in making me see Seeing Others (Lamont 2023) differently. What else can an author ask for?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).