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269 Farmer Zuckerman, as this book’s editors playfully remind us, was astonished to read the words “some pig” on a spiderweb in the barn on his farm. So in E. B. White’s classic children’s story, Charlotte’s Web, farmer Zuckerman thought his pig must be a miracle and decided not to kill him for market. His wiser wife, Edith Zuckerman, recognizing skill and care when she saw them, replied, “Some spider.” In this extraordinary volume, the editors and authors apply a keen Edith Zuckerman–like eye to family and work life in America and beyond. Over the years, in my office at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Center for Working Families, at conferences, over dinners, on hikes, over email, I’ve learned about many of these books’ cutting-edge ideas from the amazing vantage point of a teacher. Let me just say a word about that. Many of these former students have shared arresting stories from their research all over the globe, alerted me to “must-read” books, proposed new ideas, and altogether enlarged my mind and soul. If Charlotte were weaving a message in her web about teachers, it would say “Learn.” And if she were weaving a message in her web about students, it would say “Teach.” It has often been easier for me to discover a solution to problems in student research projects than to untie the tiresome knots in my own. But teaching isn’t about correcting mistakes. For me, teaching has been far more like a collaborative treasure hunt. Virtually without exception the students I’ve worked with have come to me with brilliant core ideas. My job was to find and point. Sometimes the treasure was abbreviated in a breathless last paragraph. Sidelined in a footnote. Frozen in overly abstract language. Abducted by another thesis entirely. Sometimes it was front and central to begin with. Maybe the wisest teaching words I’ve said have been “There it is!” or “No, you aren’t crazy.” Or simply, “Great! Go into detail.” So, to me, teaching is not about getting rid of the bad stuff but discovering the buried gems. Ideas, I believe, are formed early in life—not by our genes certainly, but by early family experiences—and whatever Afterword Arlie Russell Hochschild v race, class, gender, sexuality, or national issues are embedded in them. Early family life shapes empathy, and empathy turns out to be the real jewel in the life of any researcher. There again, the main job of a teacher—certainly the initial job—is to recognize what a thinker has feelings about, and to follow them to their own unique contribution. So we have to rethink the usual view that “teachers teach” and “students learn.” To these editors, these authors, and my other students , my deepest thanks for all you have taught me. In a recent conversation, Anita Garey and Karen Hansen spoke with me about their project to “bring the family back in.” The field of the sociology of the family has, they believe, been chipped away—part of it going to migration studies, other parts to the fields of class, race, sexuality, and gender, and still others to consumption studies—leaving the field of the family in a state of theoretical incoherence. It’s almost as if the field had outsourced parts of its tasks to other specialties and hadn’t asked itself what it now was. In the tradition of George Homans’s classic piece, “Bringing the Men Back In”—itself a critique of hyperstructuralists—Karen and Anita argue for a central place for studies of families. This is a powerful idea, and the essays here offer important leads in developing it. But if we are to bring the family back in, as the editors urge, it can’t be the “same” family of theoretical yesteryear—not the family as passive reflector of economic waves (à la Marx), nor the family as a system of hierarchical roles (à la Parsons), nor the family of postmodernism (a different theory for each family.) To bring the family back in, we need to invent a whole new vocabulary to describe exactly what, these days, we see. The family is a shock absorber of many trends originating outside itself—volatile capitalism, a widening class gap, shrinking government aid, immigration and globalization, to mention a few. As each set of trends is absorbed, new tensions emerge—between immigrants and settlers, rich and poor, white and non-white...

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