VARIETY
Edith Kurzweil
CIRCUS IN MADRID
"You didn't come to Madrid for a conference," said Jose Antonio
Guimbernat, my friend and President of the Spanish Commission on Human
Rights, when looking at the five-hundred-page program of the meetings of
the International Sociological Association (ISA), "you came to attend a circus."
But even the Ringling Brothers have no more than five or seven rings at a
time. The sociologists who came to the congress, which met between July
9th and 13th, had to choose among one of forty-two working groups, five
thematic symposia, twenty ad hoc committees, and business meetings - dur–
ing each of the five daily sessions which convened between 9 a.m. and 10
p.m. Or they could get together with members of "Other Associations." Each
of these "entities" met between four and eight times. Over 4,500 persons
were listed on the program - anywhere from one to six times - although no
more than 3,000 of them actually showed up. And another 4,000 to 5,000
people came, many of them students and faculty from Madrid and other
Spanish universities.
Sociology was a discipline
non grata
under the Franco regime, and now
that the Congress was being held in Madrid the organizers were full of praise
for their countrymen, not only for having set up the discipline but for having
convinced the ISA to hold the Congress in Spain. In fact, this was only the
first indication that national pride would compete with overarching interna–
tional
aims.
These aims were undercut by the fact that the forty-five pages of
names at the end of the five-pound program tome did not note any way of
contacting the people one wanted to see. There was no register that listed
where anyone stayed, nor how one could get in touch with friends. One ran
into them accidentally or not at all, and one socialized or talked "business"
with whomever one happened to encounter upon walking from one of the
four buildings of the medical school to another, or while milling around the in–
formation booth or standing in line to buy a fan, a much-wanted souvenir, or
a cup of coffee.
After a while, preoccupation with physical comfort got the upper hand.
We talked of ways to avoid the long treks on asphalt in over 100-degree
temperatures under the beating sun and tended to settle for a "cool" room
rather than a "hot" topic: one single lecture hall had air-conditioning. And how
