Barry Schwartz (sociologist)
Barry Schwartz (January 19, 1938 – January 6, 2021[1]) was an American sociologist.
Career
Born in
Academic focus
Since the early 1980s, Schwartz has dedicated almost all his research to the problem of collective memory. His work affirms the perspectives of both realism and constructionism. However, Schwartz's realism is self-evident, for it denies any assertion that individual and collective memories are “constructed,” i.e., selectively reported, muted, or otherwise distorted, unless one possesses a plausible estimate of the past “as it essentially (not ‘actually’) was.” On the other hand, estimates of the past become even more plausible when the sources of their exaggerations, omissions, and other distortions are identified. For Schwartz, therefore, realism’s premise is modest: the meaning of events vary ceaselessly, and often significantly, but in the average situation that meaning is more often forced upon the observer by an event’s properties than imposed by observer’s categories of thought, sensitivity, worldview, or interests. Because the properties of past events are always inferred from incomplete information, reality cannot uniquely determine perception, but this does not mean that observers’ perceptual frames count more than reality in the remembering of most events most of the time. If the case were otherwise, memory and history would have no survival value. Accordingly, the following issues are encompassed within Schwartz's academic focus: the extent of collective memory's variation between and within generations; memory as an antidote to distorted history; reality as a limit to constructed memories; memory as a source of unity and conflict; the continuity of memory in the face of social change, and the enduring need of individuals to find orientation and meaning for their lives by invoking, embracing, rejecting, revising, and judging the past.[citation needed]
Special Areas
Collective Memory
Schwartz's effort to reconcile realism and constructionism is most evident in his collective memory studies, which include books and articles that trace
Sociology of Knowledge
Collective memory scholarship is a branch of the broader field of the sociology of knowledge. Schwartz’s contribution to the latter arises from the French tradition, notably,
Social Psychology
Barry Schwartz's
Summary
The path of Barry Schwartz's work runs from interactional social psychology to cognitive sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and collective memory. The last, major, phase cannot be inferred from the first but is inextricably connected to it.
Selected bibliography
- Queuing and Waiting: Studies in the Social Organization of Access and Delay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
- The Changing Face of the Suburbs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. (Editor. See final chapter: "Images of Suburbia: Some Revisionist Commentary and Conclusions.")
- Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1981
- George Washington, The Making of an American Symbol. New York: Free Press, 1987. Richard E. Neustadt Award, 1988; Finalist, American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, 1990. Paperback edition: Cornell University Press, 1990.
- Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lincoln Group of New York Award, February, 2001; Lincoln/Barondess Award, New York Civil War Roundtable, February, 2001.
- Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in the Late Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
- “Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks,” Social Psychology Quarterly 72 (June 2009): 123–142.
- The Memory Problem: Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past. Co-editor: Mikyoung Kim. (U.K.Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010).
References
- ^ Dr. Barry Schwartz
- ^ Schwartz, Barry. 1991. "Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington." American Sociological Review 56: 221–236.
- ^ Schwartz, Barry. 2005. “The New Gettysburg Address: Fusing History and Memory,” Poetics 33: 63–79.
- ^ Schwartz, Barry. 2013. “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: History and Memory” (Introductory Chapter) and “The Past in the Present” (Respondent Chapter), in Tom Thatcher, ed. Keys and Frames: Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. Leiden, Netherlands: SBL/Brill Series, Semeia Studies.