User talk:2603:9000:AA06:A099:B824:AC3:7188:C0F7

I would like to add additional material to the stub for Stanford Lyman. He was my dissertation supervisor at the new school and a lifelong acquaintance from 1975 until his death in 2003. I don't appear to be able to submit this because my IP location appears to be blocked. Can I send this material to someone who can assist me in adding it to the stub? Cecil Greek emeritus Prof. of sociology University of South Florida cgreek@usf.edu

2603:9000:AA06:A099:B824:AC3:7188:C0F7 (talk) 12:25, 10 June 2020 (UTC)Stanford M Lyman Early Life and Education The son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, his father named 3 of Stanford's male siblings after other major American universities (Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, the latter served as US ambassador in South Africa during the period of Nelson Mandela's release from prison and was director of a State Department program responsible for helping Jewish populations emigrate from the Soviet Union). Lyman's family ran a small grocery in a black neighborhood in San Francisco where many of the residents received jobs building ships that help the United States win World War II. A graduate of Washington High School in San Francisco, Stanford had a number of friends of Asian background, leading to his lifelong interest in the histories and sociologies of Japanese and Chinese Americans. Lyman personally witnessed the internment of Japanese Americans that took place along the West Coast of the United States after Pearl Harbor and the beginning of World War II.

Stanford attended and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a BA, MA and PhD (in 1961) from the institution. At Berkeley he studied with some of the most significant sociologists of that generation, including Herbert Blumer, Reinhard Bendix, Kingsley Davis, Seymour Martin Lipset, Philip Selznick, Tamotsu Shibutani and Kenneth Bock. Kingsley Davis directed his dissertation that described the history of Chinese-American communities in San Francisco. If you read Lyman's work carefully you can find both criticism and homage of the work of his graduate professors.

Teaching Career Over the course of his career Lyman taught at the University of British Columbia, Sonoma State University, University of California San Diego, the New School for Social Research and Florida Atlantic University. There he held the Robert Morrow Chair in social science. Over the last 10 years of his career developed a number of public lecture series sponsored by the university's extension office and often spoke to audiences of 1000. He never used notes (for or PowerPoints) at these speeches or in any of his course lectures.

A Sociology of the Absurd

Along with Marvin Scott, Lyman created a theoretical model generally referred to as the sociology of the absurd. However, the book they produced together is titled A Sociology of the Absurd, and Lyman always argued that there could be other absurdist sociologies which might appear in the future. One such theory was developed by one of his students, Cecil Greek along with Caroline Kay Picart, known as Gothic Criminology. Lyman coined the term Gothic Sociology to describe aspects of his work and demonstrated that a Gothic approach had been taken by both Max Weber and Robert Park in their sociologies. Building on sociology of the absurd, Lyman and Scott also reevaluated 1960s radicalism in The Revolt of the Students, and tied their work into the symbolic interactionist tradition of George Herbert Mead and dramaturgical approach of Erving Goffman in The Drama Of Social Reality. When asked about this writing partnership, Lyman's response was that he actually wrote nearly everything and that Scott was primarily a reader who would ask questions of the first draft material. Many of his nearly 30 books and dozens of essays were written in one draft, with a pencil, and never edited by his publishers.

Sociology of Religion

While Lyman was not a sociologist of religion per se, his work The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil combined historical, theological, psychological and sociological analysis in discussing each of the classic sins of Pope Gregory: greed, sloth, envy, anger, jealousy, pride and gluttony. (A personal aside: Lyman often admitted that writing the chapter on gluttony made him very hungry!) Lyman felt drawn to discuss these religious topics because he long argued that sociology had replaced religion as the explanation for the current state of human societies: theodicy, which explains the ways of God to humanity and why the human condition often leads to suffering, had been replaced by what he labeled as sociodicy, the explanation of the ways of humanity to humanity, as human suffering is often the result of social conditions and sociological factors such as class structures, racism and political domination.

Works with Arthur Vidich Lyman co-authored two books with colleague New School for Social Research Prof. Arthur J. Vidich, one on the continuing legacy of Herbert Blumer and the other a history of American sociological theory. The focus of the volume on Blumer was to demonstrate that symbolic interactionism was not only a micro approach to sociologically analyzing reality, but was equally important as a macro perspective on issues such as public opinion, group politics and the modern nation state. In American Sociology: Worldly Rejections Of Religion And Their Directions they traced the secularization of the initial religious impetuses that created American sociology at universities such as Harvard, the University of Chicago, Yale, etc. making it unique from its European counterparts. During this same time., Cecil Greek was at the New School working on a dissertation under the direction of Stanford Lyman, resulting in publication of The Religious Roots of American Sociology, focusing on the social gospel movement and its fundamental relationship to early American sociology.

Works on Race Relations Lyman's work on race relations includes The Black American in Sociological Thought and Chinese Americans. In the Black American, Lyman reviews the major sociological and psychological works that have purported to describe the African-American experience such as the race relations cycle of Robert Park and Gunnar Myrdal’s classic work on the American dilemma. However, he argues that these theoretical attempts have never described the real lives of African-Americans as they were not actually based on the history and experiences of a people who endured slavery, the systematic destruction of reconstruction promises based on removing the badges and incidences of slavery as promised by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Resulting in the Jim Crow era and the continuing struggles of the civil rights movement and the post-civil-rights era.

Lyman was referred to as the father of Asian American studies and in his work Chinese Americans documents the history of how a group managed to survive despite more than half a century of being treated as illegal aliens ineligible for citizenship. He pointed out the contradiction of misdirected praise for Asian American families’ ability to deter juvenile delinquency; family units were not allowed to reunite, and multiple generations of Sojourner father and sons lived in America while mothers and sisters remained in China. In his writings on Japanese Americans he described the social psychological characteristics that were seen as attributable to each immigrant generation: the Issei, Nisei, Sansei, Yonsei and Gosei. 2603:9000:AA06:A099:B824:AC3:7188:C0F7 (talk) 12:25, 10 June 2020 (UTC)