The following piece will be, for some CHUD Forum readers and posters, far too long. The conventions of many internet threads simply do not allow for lengthy posts. Sometimes I adhere to such conventions and sometimes I don't. Just skim or scan--or just don't read the following--if it is too long. Or, again, moderators should feel free to delete the post. For those who do carry on---I wish you happy reading from Tasmania Australia.-Ron Price
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SERENDIPITOUS SOCIOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
We all grow old and live in a matrix of groups, networks, institutions and communities. This matrix is the substance of sociology. The student of sociology, even though sensitized to how a person’s life is embedded in groups, can be guilty of serious omissions and patterned distortions when he or she comes to write their autobiography. The introspector and retrospector in sociological autobiography, though, can give us rare access to inner experience from their position of aloof detachment or passionate engagement.
Beginning with Herbert Spencer’s two volumes in 1904, sociology has left us very few intellectual autobiographies. Monopolistic access to my own inner life has found many grooves and at least one or two of these are found in my patterned distortions away from sociology toward religion. I hope the time has not yet come, as Virginia Woolf said it quite easily can, when I may have forgotten far more of significance than I can remember. Certainly I am far from the position Heinrich Boll, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1972, was in when he wrote that “not one title, not one author, not one book that I held in my hand has remained in my memory.” But as I write this memoir of mine the words of the psychologist Alfred Adler can ring in my ears if I bring myself close to his voluminous writings: “It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The autobiographer is both the ultimate Insider and the ultimate Outsider in applying scientific understanding and insight to the self, the interplay of sequences of status-sets, role-sets and intellectual development. What results is not so much a condensed description than a step toward elucidation. I feel as if I have just made a start in the first quarter-century(1984-2010) of my attempt at autobiography. After five decades(1963-2010) of dipping in and out of sociology I have become more than a little conscious of sociology’s hermeneutic influence as I go about writing my autobiography. Often when sociology’s influence did appear it was accidentally, serendipitously.
From my memoir emerges a picture of a Bahá'í, a man who was a teacher and lecturer for 35 years, a father and a husband now for thirty-five, a pioneer for five decades, a man who aims to provide as piercing an insight into his own life and times and with as much muscular confidence that remained by his late middle age and the early years of his late adulthood. He maintains as much etiquette of expression and diplomacy as he has been able to cultivate over his lifetime; along the way he takes no prisoners and writes sparingly about those who caused him discomfort in varying degrees. He makes little to no attempt to manufacture an image, although he sometimes feels indulgently avuncular as an author. Readers will learn something of the furies that screamed through his life until medications softened his edges by his sixties. These same readers will also learn something of the seraphic intimacy which he discovered along the way in many of life’s interstices.
A passing glance at some of the models of my final published memoir on the internet, at what may well become a large format book might lead readers to expect one of those high-calorie low-fibre coffee-table volumes. But I should make it clear now that my memoir-autobiographical work is not of that ilk. My memoir is a substantial series of tomes, some five of them now. It aims to carry a great deal of insight into which I have sunk a considerable burden of time and effort. Whether I achieve this insight to which I refer, whether any one reader carries away a greater understanding of life as a result of some interplay between my words and that reader’s mind—time will tell. This memoir’s down-side is that it is no easy read on the train or anywhere where said readers lacks space to spread the book. As I write these words I think my work is best read on the internet in bits and pieces. I have written millions of words on the internet and the time has not yet come to blow my cover, so to speak, and give readers access to all 2600 pages in a simple soft or hard cover.
I would like to think that readers might be able to feel as if they are actually breathing the air, witnessing the action and hearing the voices of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people at the immense quantity of meetings I attended and conversations in which I took part during the four epochs that are the mise en scene of this work. Sadly, I think that readers will have to do a good deal of juggling mentally and fill in much of the background situations by isolating my life and trying to integrate the material I provide about my community and my society as cogently as they can. Perhaps if some clever biographer uses facts from my seemingly less important diary and the many entries in my many-volumed work entitled Pionerring Over Four Epochs, he or she will provide readers with a much clearer understanding of the progression of activity that surrounded my life and my community in the last sixty years of my life(1953-2013) and of the first century of the Formative Age of the Bahá'í Faith. My letters, essays and poetry might also be useful in this regard to elaborate on the myriad of details that go into a life, any life but, in this case, my life.
“The life of man is the life of a moving being,” wrote Alfred Adler, “and it would not be sufficient for him to develop body alone. A plant is rooted: it stays in one place and cannot move. It would be very surprising, therefore, to discover that a plant had a mind; or at least a mind in any sense which we could comprehend. If a plant could foresee or project consequences, the faculty would be useless to it. What advantage would it be for the plant to think: 'Here is someone coming. In a minute he will tread on me, and I shall be dead underfoot'? The plant would still be unable to move out of the way. All moving beings, however, can foresee and reckon up the direction in which to move; and this fact makes it necessary to postulate that they have minds or souls.” I have lived in 37 houses and two dozen towns. Movement has been the story of my life until these years of late adulthood when I move mostly in my head, vicariously as it is sometimes said.
We live in an auto/biographical age that uses the personal narrative as a lens onto history and the contemporary world. In every medium, cultures are permeated and increasingly transformed by auto/biographical narratives, productions, and performances of identity. The proliferation of auto/biographical practices and the seriousness with which the academy is considering them testify to significant developments in this field. Auto/biography studies are firmly on the academic map in Canada and Australia where I have lived during the last 66 years, nearly 50 of which have been as a pioneer-traveller for the Canadian Baha'i community. Auto/biographical genres now permeate such varied disciplines as anthropology, medicine, education, history, philosophy, psychology, and the visual and performing arts. There is also a steady groundswell of these sub-disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities in conferences, essays, collections of essays and monographs dedicated to auto/biography in Canada and Australia.
Auto/biographical practices offer a productive angle on questions of Baha’i identities, in part because they complicate easy assumptions about identity, community and religion. I have been reading such life-narratives since the 1950s and the list of available stories is now enough to keep people happily occupied for many a cold winter evening if they can pull themselves away from their televisions and if, of course, if biography and autobiography are among their reading proclivities. Biographical and autobiographical practices introduce internal multiplicity into the equation of what is a life, what should I do and where do I want to go in my own journey. The personal, family, and community stories quite frequently confirm or resist or, at the very least, critique what counts as the notion of what it means to be a Bahá'í.
Reading Baha’i auto/biography as a shifting configuration of cultural analysis, characterized mainly by relations, for instance, between contexts of production and reception, form and content, but also themes, places, individuals and communities, has resulted for me in the creation of a groundwork, a framework, for the examination of my own life. And an unexamined life is, as Socrates emphasized some 25 centuries ago, not worth living. The Bahá’i community has for some time seen the potential of discoving bio/autobiographical material, modes of analysis and questions for discussion and material to invigorate the whole field of the study of the individual and the community as it presents itself to the wider world. For the two centuries of Baha’i history offer to readers an incredible journey.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Sociological Lives: Social Change and the Life Course, Vol.2, editor, Matilda White Riley, Sage Publications, London, 1988.
Ron Price
16 March 1997 to 4 July 2010
2100 words
------------------------------------------------
SERENDIPITOUS SOCIOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
We all grow old and live in a matrix of groups, networks, institutions and communities. This matrix is the substance of sociology. The student of sociology, even though sensitized to how a person’s life is embedded in groups, can be guilty of serious omissions and patterned distortions when he or she comes to write their autobiography. The introspector and retrospector in sociological autobiography, though, can give us rare access to inner experience from their position of aloof detachment or passionate engagement.
Beginning with Herbert Spencer’s two volumes in 1904, sociology has left us very few intellectual autobiographies. Monopolistic access to my own inner life has found many grooves and at least one or two of these are found in my patterned distortions away from sociology toward religion. I hope the time has not yet come, as Virginia Woolf said it quite easily can, when I may have forgotten far more of significance than I can remember. Certainly I am far from the position Heinrich Boll, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1972, was in when he wrote that “not one title, not one author, not one book that I held in my hand has remained in my memory.” But as I write this memoir of mine the words of the psychologist Alfred Adler can ring in my ears if I bring myself close to his voluminous writings: “It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The autobiographer is both the ultimate Insider and the ultimate Outsider in applying scientific understanding and insight to the self, the interplay of sequences of status-sets, role-sets and intellectual development. What results is not so much a condensed description than a step toward elucidation. I feel as if I have just made a start in the first quarter-century(1984-2010) of my attempt at autobiography. After five decades(1963-2010) of dipping in and out of sociology I have become more than a little conscious of sociology’s hermeneutic influence as I go about writing my autobiography. Often when sociology’s influence did appear it was accidentally, serendipitously.
From my memoir emerges a picture of a Bahá'í, a man who was a teacher and lecturer for 35 years, a father and a husband now for thirty-five, a pioneer for five decades, a man who aims to provide as piercing an insight into his own life and times and with as much muscular confidence that remained by his late middle age and the early years of his late adulthood. He maintains as much etiquette of expression and diplomacy as he has been able to cultivate over his lifetime; along the way he takes no prisoners and writes sparingly about those who caused him discomfort in varying degrees. He makes little to no attempt to manufacture an image, although he sometimes feels indulgently avuncular as an author. Readers will learn something of the furies that screamed through his life until medications softened his edges by his sixties. These same readers will also learn something of the seraphic intimacy which he discovered along the way in many of life’s interstices.
A passing glance at some of the models of my final published memoir on the internet, at what may well become a large format book might lead readers to expect one of those high-calorie low-fibre coffee-table volumes. But I should make it clear now that my memoir-autobiographical work is not of that ilk. My memoir is a substantial series of tomes, some five of them now. It aims to carry a great deal of insight into which I have sunk a considerable burden of time and effort. Whether I achieve this insight to which I refer, whether any one reader carries away a greater understanding of life as a result of some interplay between my words and that reader’s mind—time will tell. This memoir’s down-side is that it is no easy read on the train or anywhere where said readers lacks space to spread the book. As I write these words I think my work is best read on the internet in bits and pieces. I have written millions of words on the internet and the time has not yet come to blow my cover, so to speak, and give readers access to all 2600 pages in a simple soft or hard cover.
I would like to think that readers might be able to feel as if they are actually breathing the air, witnessing the action and hearing the voices of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people at the immense quantity of meetings I attended and conversations in which I took part during the four epochs that are the mise en scene of this work. Sadly, I think that readers will have to do a good deal of juggling mentally and fill in much of the background situations by isolating my life and trying to integrate the material I provide about my community and my society as cogently as they can. Perhaps if some clever biographer uses facts from my seemingly less important diary and the many entries in my many-volumed work entitled Pionerring Over Four Epochs, he or she will provide readers with a much clearer understanding of the progression of activity that surrounded my life and my community in the last sixty years of my life(1953-2013) and of the first century of the Formative Age of the Bahá'í Faith. My letters, essays and poetry might also be useful in this regard to elaborate on the myriad of details that go into a life, any life but, in this case, my life.
“The life of man is the life of a moving being,” wrote Alfred Adler, “and it would not be sufficient for him to develop body alone. A plant is rooted: it stays in one place and cannot move. It would be very surprising, therefore, to discover that a plant had a mind; or at least a mind in any sense which we could comprehend. If a plant could foresee or project consequences, the faculty would be useless to it. What advantage would it be for the plant to think: 'Here is someone coming. In a minute he will tread on me, and I shall be dead underfoot'? The plant would still be unable to move out of the way. All moving beings, however, can foresee and reckon up the direction in which to move; and this fact makes it necessary to postulate that they have minds or souls.” I have lived in 37 houses and two dozen towns. Movement has been the story of my life until these years of late adulthood when I move mostly in my head, vicariously as it is sometimes said.
We live in an auto/biographical age that uses the personal narrative as a lens onto history and the contemporary world. In every medium, cultures are permeated and increasingly transformed by auto/biographical narratives, productions, and performances of identity. The proliferation of auto/biographical practices and the seriousness with which the academy is considering them testify to significant developments in this field. Auto/biography studies are firmly on the academic map in Canada and Australia where I have lived during the last 66 years, nearly 50 of which have been as a pioneer-traveller for the Canadian Baha'i community. Auto/biographical genres now permeate such varied disciplines as anthropology, medicine, education, history, philosophy, psychology, and the visual and performing arts. There is also a steady groundswell of these sub-disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities in conferences, essays, collections of essays and monographs dedicated to auto/biography in Canada and Australia.
Auto/biographical practices offer a productive angle on questions of Baha’i identities, in part because they complicate easy assumptions about identity, community and religion. I have been reading such life-narratives since the 1950s and the list of available stories is now enough to keep people happily occupied for many a cold winter evening if they can pull themselves away from their televisions and if, of course, if biography and autobiography are among their reading proclivities. Biographical and autobiographical practices introduce internal multiplicity into the equation of what is a life, what should I do and where do I want to go in my own journey. The personal, family, and community stories quite frequently confirm or resist or, at the very least, critique what counts as the notion of what it means to be a Bahá'í.
Reading Baha’i auto/biography as a shifting configuration of cultural analysis, characterized mainly by relations, for instance, between contexts of production and reception, form and content, but also themes, places, individuals and communities, has resulted for me in the creation of a groundwork, a framework, for the examination of my own life. And an unexamined life is, as Socrates emphasized some 25 centuries ago, not worth living. The Bahá’i community has for some time seen the potential of discoving bio/autobiographical material, modes of analysis and questions for discussion and material to invigorate the whole field of the study of the individual and the community as it presents itself to the wider world. For the two centuries of Baha’i history offer to readers an incredible journey.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Sociological Lives: Social Change and the Life Course, Vol.2, editor, Matilda White Riley, Sage Publications, London, 1988.
Ron Price
16 March 1997 to 4 July 2010
2100 words
