What better place to dig into your subjects’ heads than a hair salon? As part of a research project, Montreal sociologist Barbara Thériault trades her books for a comb and a pair of scissors. Direction Halle-sur-Saale, in Germany, where she will study its inhabitants for the next few months. Haircut included.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
In April, sociology professor at the University of Montreal Barbara Thériault won a literary competition organized by the city of Halle-sur-Saale, in eastern Germany. For the next six months, she will be reporting on her host city and the daily life of its inhabitants in the local newspaper.
But really, she will be there to do sociology, with a little twist : the hairdressing salons will become its observation posts!
The idea seems far-fetched, but it stems from a deeply sociological question.
A few years ago, Barbara Thériault studied the middle classes of the former communist part of Germany, which she describes as follows: “It’s a society that values the environment. We don’t really try to stand out, to be better than the others. We want to show that we have both feet on the ground,” she explains.
There, everyone dresses the same way, wears the same shoes, wears the same hair. The sociologist has experienced this herself. When she arrived in Halle-sur-Saale, she stopped in a salon, leaving the field open to the hairdresser.
“I was walking down the street and looking at women my age and thinking, ‘My God, I’ve been turned into a [Halloise] !” laughs Barbara Thériault, running a hand through her short hair, styled in the local fashion.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY BARBARA THÉRIAULT
Barbara Theriault
Hence the idea of hairdressing salons. To explore the question of aesthetics – and taste, more broadly, which has fueled some of the greatest sociological theories – in this corner of Germany that she has been studying for years.
“Why we like, why we don’t like… These are things that seem completely natural to us, but which are also rooted in social universes”, explains the professor.
Everyday Detective
In her weekly column, Barbara Thériault presents herself as a “left-handed hairdresser”. Left-handed, because she does hair with her left hand, but above all because it’s hard to improvise as a hairdresser after ten weeks of private lessons and tutorials on YouTube.
To her surprise, the sociologist is doing quite well with a pair of scissors, apart from this client who left his chair with a hole on the top of his head (we can assure you, everyone laughed a lot about it).
People are not chilly. They trust completely. I do not know why…
Barbara Theriault
The one who learned German during her university studies takes notes, between two cuts. She observes, feeds on conversations with customers. The sociologist is a daily detective, likes to say Barbara Thériault. “It’s to be interested in others, to have your eyes open when you walk around. It is to be open to all the little enigmas of life. »
For a careful eye, the hairdressing salon – this high place of sociability which also serves as a pretext to “play inside the heads” of its subjects – is full of clues.
“When you go to the hairdresser, it’s a way of becoming a citizen of the city. Hairdressers always reproduce the same haircuts. They play an important role in daily life as a reproducer of normality,” notes the professor.
Between literature and reporting
Each week, therefore, Barbara Thériault will publish fragments of her observations in the local newspaper of Halle-sur-Saale. The goal, ultimately, is to make a book out of it.
“Sociology, I love it. I eat that. But it can be boring, ”laments the professor. His solution? The sociological soap opera, a German journalistic tradition at the intersection of literature, sociology and reporting.
“It goes through a more playful, more accessible form of writing, a way of doing sociology that is more relaxed,” explains Ms.me Theriault. But who has all the seriousness and the method of sociological research: “I always have sociological questions that inhabit me. »