{"id":3205,"date":"2011-08-27T15:42:40","date_gmt":"2011-08-27T21:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3205"},"modified":"2011-08-31T09:47:14","modified_gmt":"2011-08-31T15:47:14","slug":"sociologists-flummoxed-by-las-vegas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3205","title":{"rendered":"Sociologists Flummoxed by Las Vegas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently the American Sociological Association had to relocate its annual meeting to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. <\/a><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 Vegas, said. (There is apparently a university attached to the basketball team.)<\/p>\n

But you would be wrong. You don’t know academics:<\/p>\n

Lisa Dawn Wade<\/a>, 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\u2019s assessment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much here,\u201d Wade said, \u201cand I feel like I don\u2019t have the tools to process it\u2026 . 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To borrow her blog’s subtitle, she must have experienced a failure of sociological imagination.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would never have called Las Vegas “too much the real world,”\u00a0 but as Wade added in a carefully nuanced way,<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think I will suggest it as a venue for the American Academy of Religion. <\/a>These meetings are planned seven or eight years ahead, but\u00a0 you never know, a hotel workers’ strike might cause AAR to change its plans too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-3205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-PH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2171,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2171","url_meta":{"origin":3205,"position":0},"title":"‘In the Land of Pluto and Mammon’","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 16, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Gus diZerega writes a Pagan analysis of Las Vegas.","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":628,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=628","url_meta":{"origin":3205,"position":1},"title":"Painter of yuckUniversity Diaries goes\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 5, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Painter of yuckUniversity Diaries goes after kitschmeister Thomas Kinkade. It's a \"theological conundrum.\" At least, says the Los Angeles Times, he parties like an Abstract Expressionist. (Link may expire.)In sworn testimony and interviews, [ex-employees and others] recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":626,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=626","url_meta":{"origin":3205,"position":2},"title":"No marker for Wiccan veteranA\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 3, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"No marker for Wiccan veteranA Wiccan sergeant from the Nevada National Guard was killed in action in Afghanistan. Now his widow runs up against the Veterans Administration's refusal to permit a pentacle marker on the graves of Wiccan veterans, notes the Las Vegas Review-Journal (Link may expire, so I will\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12603,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12603","url_meta":{"origin":3205,"position":3},"title":"Interview with Helen Berger, Leading Scholar of Paganism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 19, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"At his blog, now called On New and Alternative Religions, Ethan Doyle While interviews Helen Berger, one of the leading American scholars of contemporary Paganism. Since completing her PhD research on the early modern witch trials in the 1980s, Berger has devoted her career to the sociological analysis of modern-day\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/helen-berger.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8053,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8053","url_meta":{"origin":3205,"position":4},"title":"Why I Am Not at the Heartland Festival.","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 26, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"All day I had been tracking the progress of the eastbound Southwest Chief, the Amtrak train between Chicago and Los Angeles. It was slightly late out of Gallup, N.M., but on time into Albuquerque. Then something happened to slow it between Lamy Junction and Las Vegas, New Mexico. The estimated\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"festivals\"","block_context":{"text":"festivals","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=festivals"},"img":{"alt_text":"Amtrack's Southwest Chief in southern Colorado. By Steve Wilson - Flickr (Wikimedia Commons)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/800px-Westbound_Southwest_Chief_-_Colorado.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/800px-Westbound_Southwest_Chief_-_Colorado.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/800px-Westbound_Southwest_Chief_-_Colorado.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/800px-Westbound_Southwest_Chief_-_Colorado.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":261,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=261","url_meta":{"origin":3205,"position":5},"title":"'Spiritual, not religious' Articles like\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 12, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"'Spiritual, not religious' Articles like this one from the Denver Post illustrate the difficulty in censusing non-mainstream religions. How many Pagans might answer \"none\" when our traditions don't appear in the menu of choices? Meanwhile, a friend is working on a sociological piece on the growth of Wicca and other\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3205"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3223,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205\/revisions\/3223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}