Recently the American Sociological Association had to relocate its annual meeting to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

You would think that Las Vegas was a hotel buffet of raw material awaiting the sociological investigations, “the best spot in the world to do sociology,” as a member of the department at the University of Nevada, Las  Vegas, said. (There is apparently a university attached to the basketball team.)

But you would be wrong. You don’t know academics:

Lisa Dawn Wade, assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College, said the conference was her first trip to Vegas, and she described the experience in terms that corresponded with Jones’s assessment.

“There’s so much here,” Wade said, “and I feel like I don’t have the tools to process it… . There are stories here about consumption and about leisure and about social class that are really interesting, and I just feel kind of at a loss to say anything really smart about it.”

To borrow her blog’s subtitle, she must have experienced a failure of sociological imagination.

But some UNLV faculty members found themselves disappointed by what looked to them like knee-jerk reactions from their visiting colleagues. Las Vegas, they said, is a complex and multifaceted city too quickly written off by those who don’t really understand it at all — and many of the conference attendees, they said, hadn’t even tried.

I would never have called Las Vegas “too much the real world,”  but as Wade added in a carefully nuanced way,

Wade said it might not be a bad thing if the city made its visitors uncomfortable. Academics, she noted, tend to lead “pretty cushy” lives, and spending a few days in a difficult and even disturbing environment could prompt them to think about the “real people” who call the city home — and about the fact that, in many ways, Las Vegas is just a distilled and amplified representation of the world we all live in. “There’s a little bit of Vegas in all of us.”

I think I will suggest it as a venue for the American Academy of Religion. These meetings are planned seven or eight years ahead, but  you never know, a hotel workers’ strike might cause AAR to change its plans too.