ABSTRACT
Society is our immediate everyday reality, yet we understand no more of it merely by virtue of living in it than we understand of physiology by virtue of our inescapable presence as living bodies. The history of [social science] has been a long and arduous effort to become aware of things hidden or taken for granted: things we did not know existedother societies in distant places and times, whose ways of life make us wonder about the naturalness of our own; things we know of only distortedly-the experiences of social classes and cultures other than our own; the realities of remote sectors of our own social structure, from inside the police patrol car to behind the closed doors of the politician and the priest; things right around us unreflectingly accepted-the network of invisible rules and institutions that govern our behavior and populate our thought, seemingly as immutable as the physical landscape but in reality as flimsy as a child’s pantomime.
