Misery and Company: Sympathy in Everyday LifeIn a kind of social tour of sympathy, Candace Clark reveals that the emotional experience we call sympathy has a history, logic, and life of its own. Although sympathy may seem to be a natural, reflexive reaction, people are not born knowing when, for whom, and in what circumstances sympathy is appropriate. Rather, they learn elaborate, highly specific rules—different rules for men than for women—that guide when to feel or display sympathy, when to claim it, and how to accept it. Using extensive interviews, cultural artifacts, and "intensive eavesdropping" in public places, such as hospitals and funeral parlors, as well as analyzing charity appeals, blues lyrics, greeting cards, novels, and media reports, Clark shows that we learn culturally prescribed rules that govern our expression of sympathy. "Clark's . . . research methods [are] inventive and her glimpses of U.S. life revealing. . . . And you have to love a social scientist so respectful of Miss Manners."—Clifford Orwin, Toronto Globe and Mail "Clark offers a thought-provoking and quite interesting etiquette of sympathy according to which we ought to act in order to preserve the sympathy credits we can call on in time of need."—Virginia Quarterly Review |
Contents
The Social Character of Sympathy | xii |
Sympathy Giving Forms and Process | 24 |
Framing Events as Bad Luck Sympathy Entrepreneurs and the Grounds for Sympathy | 78 |
The Socioemotional Economy Social Value and Sympathy Margin | 126 |
Sympathy Biography and the Rules of Sympathy Etiquette | 156 |
Interpreting Deviance The Sympathetic Response | 192 |
Sympathy Microhierarchy and Micropolitics | 224 |
Epilogue | 250 |
Research Strategies | 259 |
References | 279 |
| 297 | |
| 302 | |
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Common terms and phrases
African American asked bad luck believe beneficence blame Bulstrode cards chapter characters claim co-worker cognitive create described deviant divorced elderly Eliot empathy everyday example expect family members feel sorry feeling rules Field notes freewriting friends gender George Eliot George Herbert Mead giving sympathy Goffman gratitude grounds for sympathy Hispanic Hochschild hurt husband instance interaction Interview Irish American Italian American Juan Carvajal judge label married micropolitical middle-aged Middlemarch mother Neediest Cases Appeal obligation Oliver North one's other's parents pathy percent person plights problems reactions receiving sympathy recipient reciprocity relationship respondents role Scheff situation social actor social capital society socioemotional economy sociology someone spouse story sympa sympathetic sympathizee sympathy biography sympathy displays sympathy entrepreneurs sympathy giving sympathy logic sympathy margins sympathy scores sympathy sentiment sympathy-worthy tion trouble victims vignette WASP white woman women worker York