So You’ve Provincialized the Canon. Now What?

Abstract

Sociologists are engaging in a long-overdue reckoning about the place of the traditional canon in social theory courses and pedagogy. Instructors are revising their syllabi to include a more diverse set of authors while “provincializing” classics that have long been taught as universal. We confront the question of how to teach contested canonical works after an instructor has committed to this work. We argue that progressive reforms to theory syllabi can raise new problems associated with teaching “canonical” works and propose one way to address them with a flexible recipe designed to resolve tensions between pedagogical imperatives. An extended example from our experience teaching Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is employed to illustrate our proposal. Our aim is to contribute to an ongoing disciplinary dialogue that will maintain theory’s central place in sociology’s identity while constantly asking what, and whom, it is for.