Write a paper on one of the following questions.  Papers should be five to seven pages in length, printed in roughly a 12-point typeface, double-spaced with one-inch margins, and stapled.  (No folders or binders please.)  Make sure to include page numbers, by using the pagination utility of your word processor.  Clearly indicate which question you are answering.

There is no single "correct" answer for any of the questions below.   They are intended to be fairly wide open, so you can show how well you know the texts and can interpret them.

Your paper should be well-organized.  Although you are asked to consider a number of subsidiary questions in each case, your paper should nonetheless be focused and coherent—built around a few major points or themes.

You should offer a clear thesis statement and fashion your essay as a whole in a way that further elucidates and defends that thesis. Your paper must also demonstrate that you’ve read the material carefully and understood it in some depth.

You will probably want to include formal citations whenever you draw particular information or quotations from the text.  In that case you may use footnotes, endnotes, or simplified references in the body of your paper, like this (Addams, p. 55).  Feel free to cite other relevant works, if you are familiar with them; it is expected, however, that you can (and generally should) answer the following questions solely on the basis of the assigned reading.

1.  Jane Addams wrote, "The social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation" (Twenty Years at Hull-House, chapter 5).  Select two or three writers we have examined in the past two segments of the course (from Addams to Butler) and explain how this notion of the social as reciprocal relation appears in their work, what significance it has for each writer, and how the work of each writer (in this respect) compares and/or contrasts with that of the other(s).

2.  Consider the following remarks by Erving Goffman:

• "At such times the person's face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter" ("On Face Work," p. 7).
• "While it may be true that the individual has a unique self all his own, evidence of this possession is thoroughly a product of joint ceremonial labor . . ." ("The Nature of Deference and Demeanor," p. 85).
• "An environment, then, in terms of the ceremonial component of activity, is a place where it is easy or difficult to play the ritual game of having a self" (Ibid., p. 91).
• "A final peculiarity in the ceremonial life of mental hospitals is that individuals collapse as units of minimal ceremonial substance and others learn that what had been taken for granted as ultimate entities are really held together by rules that can be broken with some kind of impunity" (Ibid., p. 94).

3.  Carol B. Stack places great emphasis throughout All Our Kin on her claim that Black family life is not "disorganized."  Why does she regard it as important to make this argument?  How does she try to make the case for this argument, and does she succeed?  (You might consider whether the work of W. I. Thomas has any historical relevance to Stack's empirical, theoretical, or political concerns.)

4.  Write an essay on one of the items indicated below (each a pair of theorist and film).  Whichever you choose, discuss the ways in which the principal ideas of that theorist help one understand the film; the ways the film helps one grasp the meaning and import of the theorist’s ideas; or the ways the film leads one to qualify the ideas of the theorist (or some combination thereof).  You will need to examine in detail the film as well as work of the theorist read in this class , offering specific examples of how the one responds to or illuminates the other.

a)  Talcott Parsons / Death of a Salesman
b)  Erving Goffman / Breakfast at Tiffany's
c)  Judith Butler / Paris is Burning