Everything (really) by Erving Goffman. A beautiful synthesis is [1] which I might recommend over the original material (sacrilege!) if you were only going to read one thing.
We (as Western Civilization, maybe) have still (imo) not come to terms with the bounty that is William James. I had negligible interest in religion, but if you're into the weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, and deep thought, I cannot recommend [2] enough. I read it over the course of a year, annotated the margins like the faithful annotate their holy texts (do they do that?) and many evenings still open a page, read randomly, and ponder.
I had never really considered what an institution really was, or how it came to be, or what was implicit / assumed in interacting with it. This classic prompted much fruitful imagining [3] although it's the most difficult reading of them all.
Given your tastes, you may have slogged through a bunch of philosophy and hated it. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that this is super fun and easy to read and gives you most of the same nutrients [4] as certain schools, and has obvious contemporary relevance besides.
This scratches a proximate itch [5].
I'm a little sheepish bc all of these (except for maybe [5]) are deep classics and are, in a sense, obvious for that reason. And yet I have a PhD in a related field and never actually _read_ any of them, so maybe they won't be obvious to you either :)
Everything (really) by Erving Goffman. A beautiful synthesis is [1] which I might recommend over the original material (sacrilege!) if you were only going to read one thing.
We (as Western Civilization, maybe) have still (imo) not come to terms with the bounty that is William James. I had negligible interest in religion, but if you're into the weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, and deep thought, I cannot recommend [2] enough. I read it over the course of a year, annotated the margins like the faithful annotate their holy texts (do they do that?) and many evenings still open a page, read randomly, and ponder.
I had never really considered what an institution really was, or how it came to be, or what was implicit / assumed in interacting with it. This classic prompted much fruitful imagining [3] although it's the most difficult reading of them all.
Given your tastes, you may have slogged through a bunch of philosophy and hated it. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that this is super fun and easy to read and gives you most of the same nutrients [4] as certain schools, and has obvious contemporary relevance besides.
This scratches a proximate itch [5].
I'm a little sheepish bc all of these (except for maybe [5]) are deep classics and are, in a sense, obvious for that reason. And yet I have a PhD in a related field and never actually _read_ any of them, so maybe they won't be obvious to you either :)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Reader-Charles-Lemert/dp/1557...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive...
[5] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/alien-phenome...