Sociology 3945: Outline--Week Six
I. Exam One
III. Status prestige... not my strength (don't even notice, for the most part).... my wife very conscious of these dynamics, even while she dislikes them intensely (why?)
A. Lowbrow and highbrow tastes--what does it mean, what does it matter? Who
cares how you dress, what kind of car you drive, what you eat and drink, what
you wear, where you live? In fact, goes even further, as we saw in the video, to include body language and personal space, and those things become a barrier to moving up in the world.
Think about Jo in "The American Dream at Groton"... remember her comments about how she saw the students at Groton when she first arrived....
Social Register created in 1887 (during biggest wave of immigration in our history... is that a coincidence?)
Philanthropy
The arts
Nouveau riche ... Social climbers... terms of disparagement: they don't really belong...
Jews at Harvard in the 1920s.... stigmatized for working too hard at their studies... "greasy"
Sernau: "It is easy to disparage prestige-seeking as foolish snobbery."
But does it have an important function in maintaining the stratification system?
And if so, how does it work?
B. Social closure (Sernau): "a way to monopolize the markers of prestige
and deny access to others"
1. Very typical of elites: exclusive schools (formal dinners at the Webb
school), clubs, neighborhoods, even churches... )
Impact on your social capital (who you know and how they can help you) and
who you marry.... upper class mother in the video: "I don't think I know
their family."
a matter of degree, as obviously the American upper class isn't a closed
group... so does this dynamic work to deny access or simply to define the
terms of access?
2. Sernau says that something similar operates at other levels of the stratification
system as well... do we all want our children to associate with and ultimately
marry "people like us?"
a. Working class/lower middle class... Maria Kefalas-- Working Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood...
1) "Bungalow morality: keeping the streets safe for lawn and order".... owning vs. renting, weeds, flowers... inordinate amount of time???
Many speak of their neighborhood as 'the last garden."
2) Standards of home-making and housework...
"I asked about a well-known community activist. 'He's my neighbor. He's terrible. He just keeps hims home in a mess. I hate him."
You need to be clean but not compulsive. "She doesn't have it totally decorated. It's nice; her house is kind of like mine. She tries to clean it; but you can tell that kids live in it"
3). Country and home: flags, the pledge of allegiance.... "This is the best country in the world." American-made cars. Immigrants should try to fit in... "They should only speak English... why should we, I, have to change the way we do things around her?" ...see p. 130
b. e.g. Elijah Anderson: "decent" values vs "street" values.
Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis... fascinating chapter on the kinds of church people attend, in relation to lifestyle, values, social status...
"shouting," gospel music... relationship of class and religion... during the depression, people who said they couldn't go because they didn't have the right clothes and income (expected to be able to support the church and certain causes)... (the widow's mite, in the Christian New Testament!)
jazz vs. blues
3. But even if it's a near universal social tendency, aren't the consequences
most striking at level of the upper class or the capitalist class? Certainly
that's what C Wright Mills, our next student of social stratification, thought, as we will see next week.