Name Tamotsu Shibutani | ||
 | ||
Born 1920 California, United States of America Occupation Professor of Sociology University of California Santa Barbara Notable work Society and Personality (1961) Books Improvised news, Society and Personality, The derelicts of Company K, Social Processes: An Introduction to Sociology | ||
UC Berkeley
Contents
Tamotsu Shibutani (15 October 1920 – 8 August 2004) was a Japanese American sociologist working on the tradition of symbolic interactionism.
Biography
Born in 1920, Shibutani majored in sociology and philosophy at UC Berkeley. He was heavy influenced by W. I. Thomas, George Mead, Freud, Dewey and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. He developed a deep interest in racial discrimination, especially against Japanese immigrants in central California, form an early age.
Shibutani was sent with his family to the Tule Lake internment camp in 1942 during World War II. In 1942, Shibutani started to work for Dorothy S. Thomas who was conducting one of study about wartime incarceration for the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study.
After the war, Shibutani started doctoral work in sociology at the University of Chicago. He studied with Louis Wirth, Everett Hughes, and Herbert Blumer. He also studied the work of George Herbert Mead. After Shibutani finished his doctoral studies in 1948, the University of Chicago offered him a job to study and teach sociological pragmatism there for three years. Then he took a job at the University of California at Berkeley. While at Chicago and Berkeley, He published two influential books: Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (1966) and The Derelicts of Company K: A Sociological Study of Demoralization (1978). Shibutani became a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 2004, Shibutani died at the age of 83 in Santa Barbara, California. Shibutani made great contributions to the field of sociology, especially in the tradition of Symbolic Interactionism.