Page 77 - The Irony Board

Into the World

“Too many variables!”
The sociologist cries:
“It makes my research so rough.”

But among those he studies,
The conclusion has been drawn:
There really aren’t enough.

Gluckman’s formal education concentrated on the social sciences.
Group behavior, on all magnitudes of scale, presents as many
paradoxes and ironies as the subjective and objective foibles of the
individual. The refractions of self-observation are echoed in the
“participant-observer” and subcultural bias problems of sociology.
The conceptual/logical boundary errors of any descriptive-predictive
theory are the same here, of course, as they are in the “hard”
sciences.
Variables, for the scientist, are reified abstractions capable of
membership in statistically significant hypotheses. Going from
mineral to plant to animal to society one finds the list of essential
characteristics increasingly open to ambiguity and argument; thus
the sociologist’s complaint (one that Gluckman actually heard
5
expressed at UCLA ). But the variables of everyday life are equally
troubling to the people studied—in the opposite direction. Shortage
and deprivation plague the majority of mankind; whole categories of
resource are denied the urban dispossessed and the rural
impoverished. Thus the irony resulting from different points of
view.

5
Personal communication, 1984.
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