Being An Outsider

One of my strengths as an individual is that I have a very diverse range of interests meaning I often find myself in a wide variety of settings and I am able to somewhat easily adapt to many different situations. This made choosing an outsider site fairly challenging for me, as there are fewer places I can think to go where I am very clearly out of place. This also made field work a little easier for me because I felt as though I could be slightly more impartial. Due to the fact that I am a part of so many different groups I don’t feel that I am completely an insider in any one of them. I feel as though this was beneficial when trying to be objective in my observations.
For my outsider location I chose to attend dinner at a family friend’s

This is a place where I feel comfortable and where I feel like I fit in most. This is a place I spend a lot of my time normally and where many of my friends also spend their time. I arrive in the basement of the UMC and enter the small hidden cavern that is Radio 1190. Despite the fluorescent lighting the environment is very cozy. The room is small and you can definitely tell you’re in a basement, but not in a bad way. The walls are lined with CD’s and the furniture is old and falling apart. As I take a seat on one of the sofas I am greeted my mostly familiar faces. It’s normal to sit quietly and do work or talk to whoever else is in the room with you. I found myself doing more of the latter. This is a place where I feel comfortable speaking my mind and joking around. Topics of discussion that came up were things like music, upcoming events, social issues, as well as whatever was happening in people’s personal lives. Body language was very relaxed; people were sitting on sofas or on the floor. The boy sitting next to me had his feet kicked up on a coffee table. I felt very relaxed because I was with friends and people that I have a lot of interests in common with and similar values to. It is common for people to be dressed very casually or for people to be wearing things that outsiders might consider weird. Colorful hair, piercings and eccentric outfits are not out of place showing how deviance is

Deviance is directly related to status not only in that status determines what is deviant (Tuggle and Holmes 1997: 172) but also that deviance impacts status in different ways. In a social setting such as a golf club, deviance is discouraged and looked down upon. Being deviant would lower your status. In a social setting such as the radio station deviance is embraced and encouraged, it’s possible that your status will even be higher if you are more deviant. Within different groups not only is deviance relative to their individual beliefs but the view of deviance itself is different. We are usually conditioned to think of deviance as bad but within different groups deviance can also be perceived as