ISA, Gothenburg, Sweden
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- Published on Tuesday, 13 July 2010 09:53
- Written by Erik
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I'm at ISA, the world congress of the International Sociological Association, that meets every four years, this time in Gothenburg, Sweden. It's very strange to sit in the same room with some 4,000 sociologists. They tend to be middle-aged men with slightly unkempt hair, keen eyes, and bags slung across their shoulders. What's creepy is that I'm one of them. What would happen if the air suddenly was sucked out of the room and the world's sociologists all perished? Would the world 1) get an awful lot better; 2) get an awful lot worse; 3) stay about the same?
I talked about my "performing international relations" ideas, and it went really well, I thought. The panel was on "performances of power" so I didn't have to justify the theater part of my project. A lot of people came up to me afterwards and had comments. "Is it going to be a book?" "When is it coming out?" One professor from Japan insisted that I must be deeply influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. "You even look like him," he said. There you go, I thought, another guy with unkempt hair.
Being back in Sweden is strange too, not least since I'm here as a Taiwanese. It's so unbelievably green and there is so much space. More than anything Swedish society, and the Swedish state, provide ontological security to its people. Everything you see before you makes such perfect sense. Death, worry and strife are completely banished. Sweden, I always think, is just like paradise, and just like paradise, it's also horrendously boring. But this time around I surprise myself by missing it all very much.