Staff Profile

Brian Lande, M.A. – Research Fellow

Brian Lande is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Urban Ethnography.

Growing up in Montana after spending his childhood in Philadelphia, PA, where he was home schooled, Brian earned a B.S. in psychology, a B.A. in philosophy, and an Honors degree, at Montana State University, Bozeman. Transitioning from the rural to the cosmopolitan, Brian earned his M.A. in Sociology in 2004 from the University of California-Berkeley. Brian is in the final phase of his dissertation research and is on track to receive his Ph.D. from Berkley in June 2008. Brian is a Fulbright Scholar and will be spending 2007-2008 in Sweden.

Brian’s interests are in the role of the body in social life particularly in regards to social perception and action. He is also interested in violence as social practice and its transformational role in culture and power. He has been exploring this theoretically and empirically through research on military, police, and martial arts training. Recent focus has been put on rethinking representational and received views of culture and considering the role of the body-acting-in-its-world, particularly in regards to institutionally variant practices of violence. Conceptually he is interested in comparing fields of “Violence Work.” Worlds of violence work constitute life worlds in which the skilled practice of violence is part of the way in which persons inhabit their world. Violence is part of the taskscape that leads to a processual unfolding of activity and experience in these worlds.

Consistently his view of human nature is founded in paradigms of embodiment, practice, perception and meaning. While this yokes together phenomenology, interactionism, and social psychology, his view is also strongly informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and thus does not preclude a strong belief in what Durkheim called “Social Facts.” Rather, like Bourdieu, he situates the lived body in objective social fields from which bodies have different histories and possibilities for action. In this sense of the mutual relation of body and world Brian’s perspective on social being can best be described as ecological, focused on whole persons in their environment (Lave, Gibson, Bateson, and Ingold have been especially influential to him).

Another long running interest of Brian’s has been the sociology of science. As Brian’s research on violence work began mapping the tacit yet collective pedagogy of martial bodies, it became apparent that the same dialectic of visual and corporeal mastery was at work in the cultivation of the social scientists skill at her craft. He has since become interested in studying sociology as a community of practice in which students, by increasingly being engaged in practice, are enskilled with a sociological habitus. The sociological episteme, in addition to categories representations, thus consists of the “doings”—the tacit knowledges, habits, machines, activities—that constitute sociology as a domain of practice.

As Brian is finishing writing his Ph.D. in Sociology at Berkley he is also a Deputy Sheriff in the Lake County Sheriff Department in California. Brian has worked actively with Lt. Colonel Mike Tooley of the Montana Highway Patrol on a paper titled “Community Norms, Media, and the Law
A New Perspective on Positive Attitudes in Policing.”