The Sociology of Harry Potter: 22 Enchanting Essays on the Wizarding World
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Harry Potter Publishing Rights © J. K. Rowling
The Sociology of Harry Potter:
22 Enchanting Essays on the Wizarding World
Copyright © 2012 Jenn Sims
Zossima Press
Hamden, CT
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ISBN-13 978-1-936294-18-3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Why a Sociology of Harry Potter?
- Jenn Sims
Chapter 2 - Definitions: An Introduction to Sociology
- Rachel LaBozetta
Part I - Society
Chapter 3 - Social Space
“It’s the best place for him”
The Magical Uses of Space
- Florence Maätita, Marcia D. Hernandez, and Kristen Kalz
Chapter 4 - Technology
“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain!”
The Social Shaping of Technology in the Wizarding World
- Sher Ratnabalasuiar
Chapter 5 - Social Networks
“Who’d want to be friends with you?”
An Analysis of Friendship Networks at Hogwarts
- Katie Christie
Chapter 6 - Social Structure & Personality
“I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even stopper death”
Pedagogy of the Half-Blood Prince
- Jelena Marić and Jenn Sims
Chapter 7 - Crime
“Or dear Bellatrix, who likes to play with her food before she eats it”
Why We Need Death Eaters
- Jenn Sims
Part II - Social Institutions
Chapter 8 - Economy
“I expect your parents will go hungry for a month to pay for that lot”
Reciprocity, Recognition and Moral Worth in the Wizarding Economy
- Daniel R. Smith
Chapter 9 - Family
“You have never treated Harry as a son”
The Politics of Motherhood in the Wizarding World
- Tanya Cook
Chapter 10 - Health Care
“She’d have been locked up in St. Mungo’s for good”
Magical Maladies and Medicine
- Dustin Kidd
Part III - Groups & Identity
Chapter 11 - Prejudice
“ ‘Said Hufflepuff: I take the lot and treat them just the same’”
The Magical Illusion of Inclusion
- Alice E. Nuttall
Chapter 12 - Stigma
“Filthy half-breeds, Mudbloods, and disgusting little squibs”
Social Stigma in Wizarding Britain
- Ty Hayes
Chapter 13 - Group Membership
“Let the Sorting Now Begin”
Hogwarts Houses, Clubs, Secret Societies, and their Muggle World Reflections
- Drew Chappell
Chapter 14 - Boundary Work
“The whole point of the tournament is international magical cooperation”
Resisting a Unified Wizarding Collective Identity
- Mya Fisher
Chapter 15 - Collective Memory
“A thought that still haunts me”
Using A Magical Lens To Study Collective Memory and Cultural Trauma Among Muggles
- Shruti Devgan
Part IV - Stratification
Chapter 16 - Gender
“Or She”
Gender (In) Equality In Wazarding Social Institutions
- Meredith Railton
Chapter 17 - Race
“Wanagoballwitme?”
Inter ‘Racial’ Dating at Hogwarts
- Jenn Sims
Chapter 18 - Species
“An owl OR a cat OR a toad”
Animals as Substitutions in the Wizarding World
- Anna Chilewska
Chapter 19 - Sexuality
“You’ll never know love or friendship, and I feel sorry for you”
Voldemort As A Queer Child
- Grainne O’Brien
Part V - Beyond the Veil
Chapter 20 - The Internet
“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open”
Fan Fiction as a Forum for the Sociological Imagination of the New Millennium
- Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Chapter 21 - The East
“A world that’s entirely our own”
Indian Response To The British Wizarding World
- Ravindra Pratap Singh
Chapter 22 - The World
“Either must die at the hands of the other”
Religious Reactions To Harry Potter
- Leo Ruickbie
Hogwarts Department of Sociology
Other Books of Interest
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis: Views From Wake Forest
The Hidden Story of Narnia
Why I Believe in Narnia
C.S. Lewis Goes to Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis and Philosophy as a Way of Life
C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement
Mythopoeic Narnia
Speaking of Jack: A C.S. Lewis Discussion Guide
Harry Potter
The Order of Harry Potter
Harry Potter and Imagination
Repotting Harry Potter
The Deathly Hallows Lectures
Hog’s Head Conversations
The Sociology of Harry Potter: 22 Enchanting Essays
Harry Potter Still Recruiting: An Inner Look at Harry Potter Fandom
George MacDonald
Diary of an Old Soul and The White Page Poems
George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs
In the Near Loss of Everything: MacDonald’s Son in America
A Novel Pulpit: Sermons From GM’s Fiction
Through the Year with George MacDonald: 366 Daily Readings
Shadows and Chivalry: C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald
Poets and Poetry
Half Blood Poems: Inspired by the Stories of JK Rowling
In the Eye of the Beholder: The Romantic Poets
The Cat on the Catamaran: A Christmas Tale
Remembering Roy Campbell
Miscellaneous
Through Common Things: Philosophical Refelections on Pop Culture
Above All Things: Essays on Christian Ethics and Pop Culture
Spotlight: A Close-up Look at the Twilight Novels
Virtuous Worlds: The Video Gamer’s Guide to Spiritual Truth
The Iona Conspiracy
ENDNOTES
Why a Sociology of Harry Potter?
Jenn Sims
Given the global popularity o
f J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, it was inevitable that scholars from all academic disciples would analyze, criticize, and theorize about the story, its message, and “Pottermania.” Naturally, literary scholars acted first. Books like Beacham’s Sourcebooks For Teaching Young Adult Fiction: Exploring Harry Potter[i] were hot off the presses before Prisoner of Azkaban could settle in on the New York Times best seller list. Other analyses of the series as a work of literature, such as The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon[ii], quickly followed suit. These, and subsequent books by John Granger and Travis Prinzi, offered an intriguing look into Ms. Rowling’s craftsmanship as well as others’ efforts at interpreting the underlying messages and themes of the story.
The arts and social sciences took a little longer to take note of Harry. In 2004, Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts[iii] was published; and two years later came The Psychology of Harry Potter.[iv] Interdisciplinary books such as Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter[v] then sought to bring together the different academic perspectives, such as cultural and media studies, with literary and social science analyses. However, within this vast collection of Harry Potter analysis, of which the books I have named are but a sampling, there are only a few disparate chapters that attempt a sociological analysis of the wizarding world. Sociology is the systematic study of human social groups and interactions. According to C. Wright Mills (1959: 15) viewing the world through a sociological lens, which he called using the sociological imagination, provides “understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with the larger social realities.” So a few years ago, I decided that it was time to focus the sociological imagination on the wizarding world.
And yet… The absence of sociological scholarship on Harry Potter is not the only reason that I wanted to organize this book. I enrolled in my first sociology course in the Spring of 2001, about the same time that my sister, tired of my pretentious anti-establishment refusal to read the popular novels, sat down in my bedroom one day and read Sorcerer’s Stone aloud to me. Since those simultaneous events over ten years ago, my love of sociology and my love of Harry Potter have both grown exponentially – but more importantly, they have grown together. No matter what I was currently studying in my sociology courses - class inequality, education, identity management - I always found myself relating it to some aspect of the Harry Potter book I was currently reading (or rereading!). Conversely, no matter which Harry Potter book I was (re)reading or movie I was (re)watching, I couldn’t help but filter it through the lens of the theories and research I was learning in my undergraduate, masters, and now doctoral sociology courses. I feel that sociology has helped me to more deeply appreciate and love Harry, and that Harry has helped me to become a better sociologist. More than just wanting The Sociology of Harry Potter because philosophy and psychology, our cousin academic disciplines, had their turn, I wanted to produce this book to share with others the joy that the coupling of sociology and Harry Potter has been to me.
Outline of Chapters
For this volume, I selected chapters that I hoped would represent the breadth of sociological topics of interest, from classic foci like economics, groups and social stigma to more contemporary topics like the social construction of technology and trauma memory. The book is organized into five sections: Society, Social Institutions, Groups and Identity, Stratification, and Beyond the Veil. Following this Introduction is Chapter 2, by Rachel LaBozetta, which introduces the main themes and concepts of the discipline using material from the wizarding world as examples. This is an excellent crash course for anyone who is unfamiliar with sociology.
The first section of the book consists of five chapters examining different aspects of wizarding society. Chapter 3 is by Florence Maätita, Marcia D. Hernandez, and Kristen Kalz. Maätita et al examine the social uses and users of space in the wizarding world. Focusing on Harry, Maätita et al. analyze the construction and function of his “safe spaces” and demonstrates how differing views regarding how he should use a space lead to users contesting the space.
In Chapter 4, Sher Ratnabalasuriar discusses the social construction of technology. Her thesis, that technology emerges out of culturally particular social forces and interactions, is made clear via examination of differential magical and Muggle transportation and communication technology. Furthermore, by drawing parallels between devices and gadgets that are found in the magical and Muggle worlds, Ratnabalasuriar provides us a way to see, as Arthur Weasley attempts to do, how the technologies one currently uses are embedded in a particular time and space.
Chapter 5, by Katie Christie, presents the results of her quantitative research study on friendship networks at Hogwarts. Using social network analysis, Christie tests for homophily among friendship groups and the hypothesis that Harry is the central social actor within his grade.
In Chapter 6, Jelena Marić and I describe how the social structure of a society affects an individual’s life opportunities, trajectories and outcomes and vice versa. Using Severus Snape as a case study, we examine how his early life circumstances and experiences shaped his teaching pedagogy. By looking at the intersection of his social structure and personality we can understand his choices and decisions, and how they affected the larger social structure of the wizarding world.
Chapter 7 introduces Durkheim’s theory of crime and punishment along with Bourdieu’s notion of the logic of fields. It is here that I put forth the seemingly backwards hypothesis that the wizarding world would in fact not be better off without the Death Eaters.
The second section of the book contains three chapters discussing social institutions.[vi] Daniel R. Smith explains the morality of economic consumption in Chapter 8. Smith demonstrates that the ideas surrounding purchasing commodities, from food to brooms, shapes what a given society judges as morally worth having. Comparing the purchasing patterns and expectations of Harry, Ron, Draco and Dudley as exemplars of (ir)responsible and (non)respectable consumption, he reveals the relationship between the social order and the moral order of wizarding society.
Chapter 9 looks at wizarding families by focusing on the construction of the role of “mother.” Here Tanya Cook contrasts Lily Potter, Molly Weasley and Narcissa Malfoy with Petunia Dursley and Bellatrix Lestrange to reveal the wizarding world’s sociocultural expectations of what a good mother is/does. Moreover, in critiquing the behaviors of Hagrid and Sirius, Cook shows that “mothering” is neither specific to women nor simply synonymous with caring for one’s own or other children.
In chapter 10, Dustin Kidd examines institutionalized spaces such St. Mungo’s, professions such as Healer and Mediwizard, and the magical pharmaceutical industry to analyze the wizarding health care system. Kidd also elaborates upon wizarding attitudes towards illness, sickness and disability and illustrates how both Harry and Voldemort can be seen as “disabled” wizards.
The third section of the book contains five chapters regarding groups and identities. In Chapter 11, Alice Nuttall exposes the “illusion of inclusion” in the wizarding world. Interrogating the ideas about and treatment of Hufflepuffs, students who struggle with magic and Squibs, Nuttall shows that the wizarding world is no less prejudiced than the Muggle world. What’s more, through her discussion of Squibs we heartbreakingly observe that it is not just others who devalue certain groups but some within those very groups themselves have internalized the negative views from the larger society and consequently consider themselves “no use” to wizardkind.
Coined by Erving Goffman in 1959, the classic sociological concept of stigma is introduced in Chapter 12 by Ty Hayes. Hayes applies Goffman’s framework to the wizarding world to help us understand the lives of Muggle-borns and werewolves and the various efforts of these, and their non-stigmatized counterparts, to navigate an often hostile social environment.
Chapter 13, by Drew Chappell, examines the structure and function of different types of social groups in the wizarding world. Through analysis of Hogwart
s Houses, Quidditch teams, and various other clubs and secret societies, Chappell demonstrates the importance of group membership for personal development, interpersonal interactions, and society (magical and Muggle) as a whole.
In Chapter 14, Mya Fisher explains group “boundary work” by focusing on the events of the 422nd Quidditch World Cup and the reconstituted Triwizard Tournament. Regarding the latter, Fisher compares the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students’ stay at Hogwarts with Muggle students’ study abroad experiences, concluding that bringing students together across boundaries is not a quick and easy process, though it is well worth the effort.
Chapter 15, on collective memory and trauma, is by Shruti Devgan. In this chapter, Devgan discusses how traumatic memories, far from being simply a factual objective recording of the past, are socially constructed at the group level and are intricately tied to group identity. She then looks at several memory-related creatures, tools and techniques used in the wizarding world that have the potential to allow Muggles new language to communicate about collective trauma memories.
Stratification is addressed in the fourth section. In Chapter 16, Meredith Railton discusses gender. However, rather that scrutinizing the attributes of individual female characters or the “(anti)feminist” messages their inclusion and plot details convey like most gender analyses of the wizarding world, Railton takes a step back and looks at gender within several wizarding institutions, concluding that Muggles have a lot to learn from their magical counterparts.
Interracial relationships are the topic of Chapter 17. While Muggles in Great Britain exhibit a low rate of interracial marriage, mixed race couples in wizarding Britain are very common – if one uses the Muggle definition of race. In this chapter, I look at various couples at Hogwarts and beyond, revealing that the differential social construction of race in magical and Muggle Britian is revealed when one considers who is / is not considered to be interracially dating in each.