Gary Schwartz

The Language of Adolescence: An Anthropological Approach to the Youth Culture

This paper examines the youth culture as a cultural system. It proposes that the model of the youth culture as a contraculture does not point to many of the most distinctive properties of the adolescent subculture. In order to appreciate the differences between adult and adolescent orientations to social reality, we mustlook at the meanings that peer-group norms have for adolescents. From this perspective, the youth culture is a genuinely independent subculture: The socialcategories inherent in the adolescent status teminology provide the members of this age-grade with their own world view, life styles, and moral standards.

Beyond conformity or rebellion : youth and authority in America

By the late 1970s, drugs, blue jeans, rock and roll, and sexual precocity appeared to be all that remained of the cultural ferment of the 1960s. In this classic new study of high school-aged youth in the eartly 70s, Gary Schwartz reveals subtle yet significant changes in the style of deviance in adolescent culture. He argues that a new sort of peer-group pluralism emerged from the counter-culture movement of the 60s, a deviance defined less by persistent violations of the law than by disengagement from traditional images of success and civic responsibility.

Teaching Styles and Performance Values in Junior High School: The Impersonal, Nonpersonal, and Personal

This paper examines three contrasting teaching styles in a middle-class junior high school. Previous conceptions of teaching styles have tended to focus on the ways in which the teacher organizes the specifically academic tasks and goals of the classroom. The school culture defines the transition from elementary to junior high school in terms of those capacities that enable individuals to reach high levels of performance. Thus, teachers think of junior high school students as autonomous, responsible, and self-motivated persons. Yet, in reality, junior high school students are still in the process of learning how to transform the meaning of previously childish needs and concerns into distinctly early-adolescent forms of behavior. Confirmation of their emergent identity as an early adolescent depends, in part, on the appropriate recognition from the teacher. Teachers are confronted with a conflict between the performance expectations of the school culture and the developmental needs of early adolescents to integrate expressive, peer-oriented behavior into classroom activities. The way in which the teacher responds to this tension delineates the nature of her or his teaching style.

Sect Ideologies and Social Status.

In this penetrating study of urban religion, Gary Schwartz examines the nature of the relationship between religious belief and the social order. He shows how a persons experience in the social hierarchy shapes his response to competing religious ideologies and, in turn, how commitment to a particular sect ideology colors his attitude toward mundane affairs. The author studied and compared a Pentecostal group and a Seventh-day Adventist group in preparation for this work. The question which stimulated the investigation can be stated as a paradox. In the Adventist case, why should persons who firmly believe that God is soon to destroy the world work so diligently and against formidable odds to improve their own secular fortunes? In the Pentecostal case, why should persons who believe that God is available for direct aid in every human contingency not use this power for their own advancement? In theorizing about the relationship between an individuals position in the socioeconomic system and his sect affiliation, Mr. Schwartz asserts that the specifically ideological component of a creed resides in the ways in which believers conceptualize the meaning of secular problems. The study as a whole attempts to reveal what makes a special set of beliefs attractive to a person grappling with certain secular exigencies, and how these beliefs affect his view of secular matters. It develops a model of a religious ideology applicable to any study of the relationship between cultural symbols and social structure.

Participant Observation and the Discovery of Meaning1

Judging from the prevailing canons of methodological respectability in the social sciences, high scientific status is accorded to those investigators who operationalize the entire process of data collection and present their material in quantitative form. By and large, participant observers fail to meet these standards, although some would overcome this ’’defect’ by conceiving of field data in terms of the frequency distribution of behavioural events (Arensberg and Kimball i g68 ; Zelditch i g6g ; Becker 1958). The behavioural event refers to what specific actors did and said on a particular occasion. From this perspective, the problematic aspect of field work concerns how often particular types of behavioural events occur under a given set of environing circumstances. This casts the participant observer’s data in a form which makes it amenable to intersubjective verification. Seen this way, participant observation imitates the strategy of ’hard’ data methodologies. It gives the field worker an ’objective’ grid upon which he can evaluate the validity of discrepant interpretations of social reality. Whether he relies on his own observations of interpersonal events or on the reports of his informants, the field worker strives, in Zelditch’s (1969, p. i 5) words, to discover ’what truly occurred’. In a similar vein, Howard S. Becker (1958) urges the participant observer to distinguish carefully between what was actually said and done on a particular occasion and the various interpretations his informants give to that event. By treating an actor’s visible deeds as the evidence that confirms the validity of his words, the field worker, according to Becker, can differentiate between ideological responses to a situation and the norms that, in fact, regulate behaviour in it. A simple enumeration of behavioural events often enables the participant observer to estimate the fit or disparity between ideal norms and real behaviour in a social system, providing that his sample of events is not merely fortuitous. ’