Abstract
The first part is an autoethnographer’s account of a madcap journey through America's disciplinary institutions, ranging from a Mennonite colony and prison to the counterculture and mental hospitals, and on to political organizations and universities. Using Goffman’s distinction between front stage and backstage as a metaphor, the author is an embodied and embedded eyewitness—covertly conducting institutional ethnographies (Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945]). With a backstage perspective, this rogue researcher pierces the front-stage veneer of social-control institutions. The second part is an audacious revisionist history of American sociology, a confounding counter-narrative that demystifies mainstream sociology’s hegemonic tale of self-congratulation. The author narrates and deciphers the successive sociological generations of the founders, scientific professionals, Sixties' insurgents, and the new, poseur public sociologists. The article concludes with a renewed vision of a populist sociology.
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