What makes people tick? and what makes a society tick? and is a theory useful for understanding?

an interview with Peter L. Berger

Silke Steets

pp. 7-25

in: The social construction of reality, Human Studies 39 (1), 2016.

Abstract

The interview took place on February 5, 2016 in Boston. I was there to discuss the outline of a planned research project on “cognitive minorities” with Peter L. Berger. In this project (to which Berger refers to in some of his answers), I intend to study social groups whose definition of reality differs significantly from their social environment. More precisely, I want to compare how religious people (Evangelicals) in a distinctively secular city (Leipzig) construct and maintain their worldview and how this works the other way around for a group of seekers and agnostics (Unitarians) in a heavily religious place (Dallas, Texas). The term “cognitive minorities” was coined by Berger in his book A Rumor of Angels(1969) and can be used to apply a knowledge-sociological framework in such an urban and religious studies project.—The interview, however, touches aspects from Berger’s whole carrier as a sociologist, starting from his student days at the New School in New York and ending with...