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Anthropology and Social Theory
CULTURE, POWER, AND THE ACTING SUBJECT
By Sherry B. Ortner DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3811-6
Chapter One
Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture
Anthropologists are turning in increasing numbers to the study of modern American society. When I was in graduate school in the sixties it was virtually unheard of to get the blessings of the department (not to mention a grant) to do American fieldwork. The only project in my era to get such backing was a study of American drag queens (Newton 1972), and one could argue that this was only because drag queens were seen as very exotic and "other."
This essay is part of a larger project on the cultural construction and social experience of class in the United States. Its point of departure is the relative absence of a discourse of class in hegemonic American culture. This does not mean that class is never mentioned or addressed, for of course it is. But it means that other categories of social difference are much more prominent, including especially race and ethnicity, and these are taken to be much more significant in defining who one is and what one's life possibilities will be. Obviously I need to define what is meant by class; I will survey a range of approaches and definitions in a later section of the chapter.
In terms of theoretical inspiration, this essay is most closely tied to the Birmingham school of cultural studies, with its emphasis on interpreting representations, discourses, and ordinary language as elements of the hegemonic processes that sustain systematic inequalities. I begin with an overview of the place of "class" in anthropological studies of the United States, showing how, until the late 1980s, class was largely (though not entirely) absent from that literature. In the following section, I survey a range of theoretical positions on class, as well as some of the realities of class in the United States (e.g., high rates of social mobility) and of American ideology (e.g., the cult of the individual) that combine to mute class discourse as such.
I then turn to the central argument which is that, although class goes largely unspoken in American social life, it is not actually discursively absent. Rather it is displaced into culturally more salient discourses, and specifically for purposes of this essay, discourses of gender and sexuality. I proceed to develop this argument through a critical interpretation of such discourses, as found in three arenas: ethnographies of working class communities; ethnographies of high schools; and some of the fiction of Phillip Roth. In all three cases I show that representations of gender and sexuality are heavily, if cryptically, "classed." The implications of this go in two directions. On the one hand we come to see one of the places where class is, in a sense, discursively hiding. On the other hand, we come to see that, if discourses and practices of gender and sexuality are carrying a secret burden of class meanings, this lends a degree of what I will call "surplus antagonism" to such relations.
Finally in the conclusion I will return to reflect upon the cultural and ideological processes we will have seen at work in these interpretations.
Point of Entry: Class and Culture in America
I begin with a consideration of the ways in which class as a problem has and has not appeared in social science discourse in the United States. Specifically, I focus on the presence of class in ethnographies (rather than in survey studies), because-for me, still-the ethnography provides the "thickest" form of information. The first thing that strikes an anthropologist reading the ethnographic literature on America, written by both sociologists and anthropologists, is the centrality of "class" in sociological research and its marginality in anthropological studies. Sociologists may argue intensely over the meanings and implications of class, but there is no doubt that it is a meaningful category of discussion for them. Given that until recently the sociologists virtually "owned" America as a research domain, even for ethnographic research, most of the ethnographic work by sociologists was in one form or another concerned with class. The sociologists' concern with class also extended into the work of the one anthropologist to conduct a major ethnographic study in the United States before World War Two, W. Lloyd Warner. In the monumental Yankee City project (beginning with Warner and Lunt 1941) Warner both accepted the sociological emphasis on class and transformed it with his "emic," anthropological perspective. I will say a bit more about Warner below; he merits a paper himself but cannot be discussed in any detail here.
Other than the Yankee City project there were scattered anthropological forays into American community studies before the seventies, but anthropologists did not come into the ethnography of America in a major way until that decade. The difference of focus between the sociologists and the anthropologists is breathtaking. The anthropologists studied the marginal areas of society: street gangs (Keiser 1969), retirement communities (Jacobs 1974), and ethnic groups (mostly Jews [e.g., Myerho 1978; Kugelmass 1987]). They sought out "classic" anthropological topics like kinship (Schneider 1980; Neville 1987), ritual (Errington 1987), and "coming of age" (Moatt 1989). They did general community studies focusing on "friendship" and "individualism" (Varenne 1977). All of the abovementioned works are excellent studies, and we learn a great deal from them about the workings of many parts of American society. But with a few exceptions before the eighties-Rockdale (Wallace 1972) is really the only one that comes to mind-they did not bring class into analytic focus at all. The entire section on "social structure" in a 1975 reader on the anthropology of American culture-The Nacirema (Spradley and Rynkiewich 1975)-consists of entries concerning "totemism," "caste," "social race," ethnic relations, social identity formation in high schools, and urban networks. A second reader (Arens and Montague 1976) similarly has a section called "Social Strategies and Institutional Arrangements"; it includes entries on coffee drinking, friendship, moonshining, poker, astrology, volunteer firemen, and healthcare-seeking behavior. I do not mean to ridicule these concerns; the ethnography of the minutiae of everyday life can be very revealing. Nonetheless there is a tendency to avoid almost any kind of macrosociological analysis, let alone to make class a central category of research.
Besides for the most part ignoring class, anthropological studies of the United States have had a chronic tendency to "ethnicize" the groups under study, to treat them as so many isolated and exotic tribes. This is true even for studies of what are clearly class-defined groups-longshoremen (Pilcher 1972) or construction workers (Applebaum 1981). The major exception to this tendency before the eighties is found in ethnographies of African American communities (e.g., Hannerz 1969, Stack 1974). These studies attempt to work out various compromises between, on the one hand, the classic anthropological desire to see the cultures of these communities as having a certain authenticity in their own terms (i.e., the "ethnicizing" move) and, on the other, the recognition that African Americans are not simply another interesting ethnic group, but rather operate within a larger structure of racial inequality and a larger cultural hegemony.
Yet studies of black communities implicitly continue the tradition of working around the (class-)edges of American society. Only since the late 1980s have we seen anthropologists-who are, after all, overwhelmingly white and middle class-take the bull by the horns and tackle both the American white middle class as such and the complex dynamics that reproduce the American class structure. I would mention only two such studies here. One is Katherine Newman's study of the experience of middle-class families whose primary wage earners lose their jobs (1988). Newman explores the sudden and novel experience of powerlessness undergone by middle-class people in these circumstances, and the ways in which they are forced to deal with themselves and the social universe under these conditions. Another study is Penelope Eckert's ethnography of a suburban high school near Detroit (1989). Eckert studied the social groups of high school-"jocks" and "burnouts." She is particularly conscious of the class factors underlying these social categories and groups. Her book most closely resembles Paul Willis's landmark work, Learning to Labor (1977), and although it is not as powerfully written, it nonetheless has the real advantage of looking at both the (largely middle-class) jocks and the (largely working-class) burnouts as mutually constituting one another within a single social universe.
So what is class? There is, to say the least, no single answer. The debates among sociologists (joined as well by some economists, political scientists, historians, and others) take place along several major axes. There is first of all a split between the so-called bourgeois theorists and the Marxists. Broadly speaking, bourgeois theorists in one form or another treat class as "stratification"-as a set of differential positions on a scale of social advantage-rather than as a set of fundamentally conflictual relations. Marxists, by contrast, work from a theoretical model in which classes are not merely sets of differentially successful people but are derived from the specifically exploitative form of production that is capitalism, and are inherently antagonistic.
Further cleavages are visible within each camp. The bourgeois theorists tend to split among themselves between those who think class should be defined by objective indicators (such as income, occupation, and education), and those who think class should be defined in terms of how the natives themselves create social rankings, that is, in terms of something like "status." A good example of the first is Lipset's and Bendix's classic study, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (1957), which treats class as almost entirely equivalent to occupation. A good example of the second is Coleman's and Rainwater's Social Standing in America (1978), which is entirely concerned with how people define and rank "status." There are further divisions within these ranks, and also certain mixings and matchings: the objectivists tend to ask in their last chapter how their objective indicators line up with native categories; those who emphasize native categories or "statuses" tend to ask in their last chapter how these line up with objective indicators like income or education.
The Marxists have their own splits. As Erik Olin Wright puts it, there are scholars who are interested in "class structure," as against the scholars who are interested in "class formation" (1985:9-10). Wright himself falls largely on the "class structure" side, concerned with the ways in which capitalism is or is not functioning the way Marx thought it did or should, and the implications thereof. Some of the major issues here include the implications for capitalism (as well as for Marxist theory and social transformation) of the growth of the salaried middle class, of different forms of the state, and of different modes of relationship between state and economy. The "class formation" thinkers, for their part, are primarily concerned with the problem of how and why classes (normally, the working class) do or do not come to be self-conscious political actors. This camp in turn seems to be undergoing further splits: On the one hand, we have a kind of austere structural approach to the question of class formation, as seen in Anthony Giddens's The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (1973). Giddens is concerned with the "variables," in a sociological sense, that do or do not facilitate such coming to awareness. On the other hand there is the historical sociology camp, deriving much of its inspiration from E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1966). Here the argument is that we should stop looking at what the working class has only infrequently done, which is become conscious of itself as the vehicle for revolutionary social change. Instead we should look at the extraordinary range of ways in which it has formulated and expressed a distinct identity and a distinct relationship to the rest of society (Katznelson and Zolberg 1986, Somers 1989).
Let me approach this range of theoretical and methodological perspectives obliquely, by restating the problem for the present chapter. It is well known that American natives almost never speak of themselves or their society in class terms. In other words class is not a central category of cultural discourse in America, and the anthropological literature that ignores class in favor of almost any other set of social idioms-ethnicity, race, kinship-is in some ways merely reflecting this fact. Paul Fussell speaks of the discourse of class in America as being under a "taboo" (1983). And in an ethnographic study of a chemical plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the British sociologist David Halle found that the plant workers defined themselves as "working men" and "working women," but did not see themselves as members of a "working class" (1984: chapter 10). In those rare instances in which they used class terms at all, they described themselves-as the vast majority of Americans do-as "middle class."
At the same time it is clear that class is a "real" structure in American society, whether it is recognized in folk discourse or not. Part of this reality is what is described in the classic Marxist account of differential relations to the means of production: some people own most of the major systems of the production of wealth in America, while others produce that wealth yet garner for themselves only a small part of its value. Another part of the reality of class is one that is increasingly talked about in neo-Marxist discussions about the salaried middle class: power (administrative, regulatory, etc.) over other people's lives, whether one owns a piece of the means of production or not (Poulantzas 1974; Vanneman and Cannon 1987). And part of it, discussed most directly in studies of African Americans and other poor minorities, has to do with discrimination, prejudice, stigmatization, and pain. Indeed, if one asks which aspects of the reality of class are displaced into the discourses of ethnicity, race, and gender, they are really largely the second two dimensions just noted. That is, if Americans can be said to have a discourse of class at all, it is, like that of both Marx and the bourgeois theorists, an economistic one: Americans have a discourse of money. What are not represented by the folk, and only fragmentarily represented by the class theorists, are both the power and the pain of class relations.
It is important to note here that I take the position that class is not the only such "objective" structure of domination, that it is no more or less real than a number of others, and that it should not be construed as more fundamental. Further it is not distinguished from other such structures as being somehow more "material"; all structures of domination are simultaneously material and cultural. Nonetheless it is real in the sense that one can speak of its existence and its constraints even when it is not directly articulated in folk discourse. In fact, as I shall argue in this essay, it does appear in folk discourse (no "reality" could fail to do so), but not in terms that we would immediately recognize as a discourse "about class."
But if the constraints of class are real, so too, apparently, are the high rates of social mobility in the American system. There are literally hundreds of studies of mobility, done at different times and with different assumptions over the course of the twentieth century, but the statistical findings seem to be relatively consistent with one another, and I will begin with the ones provided in Lipset's and Bendix's classic Social Mobility in Industrial Society (1957). The authors conducted an exhaustive survey of mobility studies and came up with the following figures: The average for upward mobility (narrowly defined as a shift from manual to nonmanual labor) runs around 33 percent, with a range from 20 percent to 40 percent. The average for downward mobility runs around 26 percent, with a range from 15 percent to 35 percent (p. 25, and chapter 2 passim). These rates are quite high. They mean that, on average, one out of three male Americans (only males were studied) will personally experience upward mobility in his lifetime; on average, one out of four will personally experience downward mobility. And, although this is an old study, it was revisited in the mid-1980s by Robert Erikson and John Goldthorpe, with both newer data and more advanced methods. Their figures remain in the ranges found by Lipset and Bendix (1985:12).
(Continues...)
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