Joe Gusfield at UCSD
2016; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1007/s12108-016-9328-7
ISSN1936-4784
Autores ResumoIt is both a sad exercise and a pleasure to reflect on Joe Gusfield's legacy because it requires both remembering him and saying goodbye again.He seems so present in what I write, he remains a part of my life.But certainly, the period of talking with him about his life and ideas over lunch, or discussing the proper intellectual development of the UCSD Sociology Department is now over.So, there is now good reason to keep these parts of his life in memory through print.Joe Gusfield was a dear friend, and my husband, Bennett Berger, and I spent a great deal of time with Joe and his wife, Irma.We went to baseball games, argued about books, danced in their living room, drank to discuss drinking, enjoyed Joe's bad puns and good jokes, celebrated anniversaries, participated in seminars and colloquia together, and doted on and complained about children.We seemed to do almost everything together.Irma even took some of my classes.I was a great admirer of Joe's work, so being around him was important to me.Irma discouraged us from getting too deeply into ideas at parties, but we still talked.I subtly tested all my new early ideas out on him.In return, Joe gave me drafts of his papers to read, and recommended papers and books for me to study.We talked in our homes, and we talked in our offices or the hall.It was heaven for me.His sense that knowledge was performed and materially embodied fit well with Latour's approach to science studies, so when Bruno was visiting, the conversations were both deeper and full of laughter.But Joe had a greater understanding of the power of performance in political processes that appealed to me, so I watched in his conversations with Latour to see how each explored performance in distinctive ways.In the Sociology Department, he built an intellectual culture which I admired then and appreciate more today.He felt it important to support a vigorous and dynamic form of qualitative sociology that was based on studies of cognition, culture and history.Joe hated orthodoxy, and wanted to make sociology a more sophisticated and dynamic field enriched by other disciplines, making fun of arguments about the boundaries of Sociology as performances of power.He not only championed interdisciplinarity, but
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