Book Review of Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance by Howard Becker

Tea and Sympathy

Outsiders. Studies in the Folklore of Deviance.
by Howard S. Becker.
Complimentary Press. 179 pp. $5.00.

Outsiders, Howard South. Becker's study of deviance, is by and large an insider'southward view. Becker belongs to the group of sociologists, usually chosen "interactionists," who examine social behavior from the viewpoint of the histrion. To the interactionists, the master information of social psychology are the individual'due south own interpretations of the situations that confront him—whether he is an ordinary, respectable denizen or i of the wayward or morally halt. To investigate deviance, and so, Becker turns to the deviants themselves, and to their enterprising "discoverers," the various sober citizens who define what is deviant and what is not.

The effect of assuasive individuals to speak for themselves—which is far from being a mutual sociological practice—is to enable them to emerge from behind the screen of public clichés and ignorance. This is what Oscar Lewis did in The Children of Sanchez for the deviant group known every bit the poor. As R. S. Baker noted several months ago in COMMENTARY, it is what a record-recorded autobiography, The Fantastic Guild, did for drug addicts. (Becker, incidentally, conducted the interviews from which The Fantastic Guild was assembled.) And information technology is what Becker does in Outsiders. The method of using "autobiographical" information is an exciting 1, and Outsiders is an fantabulous example of the fascination such material exerts. Becker has the further distinction of beingness one of the few sociologists upwards to now who has attempted to develop a general sociological theory on the basis of this material.

Becker sets his report within a adequately simple scheme. His main indicate is the suggestive notion that deviance, like beauty, lies in the center of the beholder—or, as is sometimes the example, in the fiat of the lawmaker. Deviance is neither absolute nor patently recognizable. Nor, Becker argues, is it easily accomplished. It is the result rather of a series of many choices, for, like successes, deviants accept careers also. And like about everyone else, they also vest to individual cultures (sub-cultures in sociological parlance) that teach and sustain them, and in item aid the deviants in offsetting the conventional morality to which most cannot help merely remain sensitive.

Becker makes these full general observations physical in the intriguing example studies that class the core and all-time part of Outsiders. He examines two deviant groups, ane criminal (marijuana smokers), the other merely eccentric (trip the light fantastic toe musicians), and by judicious use of direct quotations, presents the career patterns and cultures of both. These quotations, it should exist emphasized, constitute Becker'south bones data; they are not used as mere examples. The quotations from interviews do not appear in Outsiders, as in well-nigh sociological works, like patches of rich Faulknerian prose in a parched exegetical wasteland. They are the material with which Becker sets out to make a coherent picture of two deviant worlds. This he does with bang-up sophistication and care.

What, and so, are marijuana smokers and dance musicians like?

In the get-go identify, they are like anybody else—and so they learn to be different. In something of a how-to-do-it chapter, Becker explains that there are three phases through which an individual must pass to become a successful marijuana user. First he must acquire the proper method of smoking. "Accept in a lot of air, you know," one interviewee tried to explain, "and. . . I don't know how to describe it, you don't fume it similar a cigarette, you draw in a lot of air and get it deep down in your system and and then keep it there." And then he must larn to perceive the effects of proper technique. But to most novices the furnishings of being high are quite frightening, so the last phase in successful marijuana employ is learning to savor the effects one has learned to perceive. As an experienced user explained of the apprentices:

They think they're going to continue going upward, up, up till they lose their minds or begin doing weird things or something. Yous accept to like reassure them, explicate to them that they're not really flipping or anything, that they're gonna be all correct.

These quotations evidence clearly that becoming a marijuana user is very much of a social action. As the novice moves from step to footstep, Becker explains, the group helps him develop the justifications which he will need in order to neutralize in his ain listen the legal (and social) disapprobation of his behavior. Justifications range from arguing that marijuana is less harmful than other more common vices—alcohol, for instance—to insisting that it actually has beneficial furnishings—like creating a stiff appetite. Just it is not and then much these justifications that readapt the conventional outsider'south conception of the drug, as it is "the company of other users." As Becker suggests, a man rarely becomes a deviant without a grouping to help him.

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The dance musician passes through a different kind of deviant career, and accordingly has a different kind of culture. First of all, he must deal with the demands of his parents (or his married woman) to take a conventional life—a day job and steady pay. If he cannot somehow quiet these demands, for himself at least, he will leave off being a musician. If he tin, he faces a 2d decision: whether to play for others (and money) or for himself (and art). His choice in this respect largely determines which musical cliques he belongs to, the kinds of jobs he will have, and the type of success at which he aims.

See, if you play commercial similar that, you lot can get in with these cliques that have all the good jobs and you lot can really do well. . . . You can count on making that golden every week and that's what counts.

Whether his choice is money or art, the trip the light fantastic musician invariably regards the audience as an enemy and the client rather than himself as the "outsider." The post-obit comment by a young Jewish musician, "who definitely identified himself with the Jewish community," reveals this hostility in a particularly graphic way.

When you sit on that stand up there, you experience then different from others. Like I can even empathise how Gentiles feel toward Jews. You see these people come up and they look Jewish, or they have a fiddling bit of an accent or something, and they ask for a rumba or some damn thing like that, and I just feel, "What damn squares, these Jews," just like I was a goy myself.

The dance musician responds to those pressures of his work which make him feel different by being different. His culture teaches him a private linguistic communication and unconventional dress and behavior. Musicians "have to talk a special language, apparel different, and wear a different kind of glasses. And it just doesn't mean a damn thing except 'we're different.'"

After reading these chapters on marijuana smokers and dance musicians, one can merely conceive of them, and by implication of deviants in general, as being quite normal, and not at all touched past any distinctive madness or distress. They presumably are neither monsters, nor thwarted noble savages, nor fifty-fifty grist for a social worker'south factory, but human beings who are happy and miserable in the usual degree and mixture. The bizarreness of their behavior lies mainly in the tourist-similar perspective of the "outsider."

Becker seals off this untypical, ane might say deviant, view of deviants past avoiding any investigation of the reasons they come up to behave as they do. Showing how reasonable their behavior is from their point of view, he seems to assume information technology is reasonable from everyone'due south signal of view, and needs no causal explanation. But is Becker's own perspective sufficient?

The trouble in brief is that Becker has used every bit his major examples two extremely balmy forms of deviance. Neither smoking marijuana nor being a trip the light fantastic musician is individually debilitating; nor is either a social threat (notwithstanding, in the case of marijuana smokers, official policy, some members of the far right, and middle-grade critics of Lenny Bruce). The non-causal approach he has taken in analyzing these types of deviance and the general conclusions he has fatigued are hardly adequate to more severe forms of waywardness, to juvenile delinquency, say, or drug addiction.

Deviants at this cease of the calibration cannot exist viewed merely as "normal" though eccentric individuals. Their beliefs often is socially dangerous and ofttimes personally subversive. Moreover, as The Fantastic Social club reveals, the drug addict'southward behavior is too pathological in the sense that it is compulsive rather than deliberately chosen. To say that such types of deviance prevarication in the centre of the beholder may be minimally truthful, but the statement'due south relativistic implications are completely misleading. Society sometimes has an splendid reason for seeing certain acts as deviant—to protect its own well-being. In regard to such behavior, an agreement of its causes is obviously important, for, if possible, the acts should be prevented. The betoken is—which an analysis of dance musicians and marijuana smokers does not advise—some deviants really are "different."

Becker is properly anxious to refute the mental attitude (odious when held by officials) that deviants per se are a kind of sport or monster who accept only a distant kinship to ordinary man beings. Outsiders in contrast sees deviance equally a normal part of life. The book's important sociological and human lesson is that the mode a man becomes and stays a deviant is the way he becomes and stays anything else. Just the part of the story Becker leaves out, in this otherwise admirable study, is that to be a deviant is sometimes a terrible and terrifying way of being considerately unlike virtually anyone else.

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Source: https://www.commentary.org/articles/harris-dienstfrey/outsiders-by-howard-s-becker/

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