Sherry B. Ortner shifts her attention from the Sherpas of Nepal to her Newark classmates
High-school yearbooks are endlessly rich sources of anthropological data. Almost all the
classic elements are there: ritual (the prom committee and the football team), costume (from bow ties to Jheri curls), and language (“2 Cool 2 B 4gotten”).
So it seems apt that Sherry B. Ortner, one of the most prominent anthropologists of her generation, was once the 17-year-old editor-in-chief of the Legend, the yearbook of Weequahic High School, in Newark, N.J., Class of 1958.
For more than 30 years, Ms. Ortner kept her distance from Newark. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Chicago, did long stints of fieldwork among the Sherpas of Nepal, and wrote several landmark essays on anthropology and gender.
Around 1990, however, Ms. Ortner began to search for a way to study the operation of social class in the United States. She considered revisiting one of the classic sites of early-20th-century American ethnography -- perhaps Muncie, Ind., the subject of Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd’s 1929 Middletown. “But I decided,” she says, “that I didn’t want to do a conventional localized ethnography, sitting in a, quote, community.” She feared that it would be difficult to provide much historical or political depth if she worked in that mode.
Then one day, it struck her: She could study the lives of the people she had first documented as yearbook editor during the Eisenhower administration. The project would allow her not only to write a thick description of a particular time and place, but also to trace social processes through subsequent decades by examining what became of her cohort in adulthood.
She set out to track down her 304 classmates -- not an easy task in the years just before the advent of the World Wide Web. She eventually gathered basic data about 246 of them, and conducted long interviews with approximately 100. The resulting book -- New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (Duke University Press, September) -- describes how the fears and aspirations of Ms. Ortner and her classmates were shaped by often unconscious beliefs about class, gender, and ethnicity.
The book does not treat people in the Class of ’58 as the helpless objects of social forces, however. Ms. Ortner consistently emphasizes the large and small ways in which her classmates have reshaped culture to their own ends. As in her books about the Sherpas, she divides her attention equally between the question of how human selves are culturally created and the question of how those selves in turn create new cultures.
The Book Party
Ms. Ortner is spending the summer in a sunlit house she and her husband bought recently in Ocean Grove, N.J., not far from the Asbury Park beaches where her Weequahic friends once spent summer afternoons. She is a disarmingly straightforward scholar, with a friendly, efficient air that makes it easy to imagine her at the helm of the Legend. She has sand-colored hair and an accent that carries traces of midcentury Newark. Once a week or so, she makes the trek to Columbia University, where she is a professor of anthropology, but she prefers to spend summer days here, watching her husband, Timothy D. Taylor, an associate professor of music at Columbia, tend their small garden.
On her desk in Ocean Grove is a stack of RSVP’s from her Weequahic classmates. (The neighborhood’s name is officially pronounced “Wee-KWAY-ic” but is commonly reduced to “Weekwake.”) In a few weeks, she will hold a party to which she has invited everyone she interviewed for the book, and she is nervous about their reactions.
In a “Letter to the Class of ’58" that opens the book, she tackles that anxiety with characteristically direct wit: “This is an academic book. Many of you may have hoped for something lighter and more readable. What can I say?”
Ms. Ortner promised to protect her informants’ confidentiality, and devised an elaborate system of shifting pseudonyms to make it as difficult as possible for people to be identified. Even the yearbook photographs on the book’s cover, except for Ms. Ortner’s own picture, are computer-manipulated blends of multiple Weequahic students.
Despite those assurances, a small number of classmates declined to participate at all. “A few said they hated Weequahic, they hated high school, they just didn’t want to connect with it again,” she says.
That lingering sense of trauma did not surprise Ms. Ortner. Even though the Weequahic of the mid-1950s was a relatively peaceful place where high-achieving students were honored -- or at least not spat upon -- it was still, like every high school, a hothouse for social anxiety and subtle sadism.
“High school was enormously constraining,” she writes. “If there was ever, in Weber’s phrase, an iron cage of social and cultural expectations, social and cultural categories, rules and regulations, all with seemingly dire consequences for their violation, this was it. ... One academically successful girl had all her grades lowered for one cycle of one semester for cutting school one day, destroying her chance to graduate in the top 10 of the class.” And actions like smoking on school grounds or dating someone of the “wrong” ethnicity were “seen as virtually disrupting the order of the universe.”
Even decades later, for some classmates, the sting endures. In a field note quoted in the book, Ms. Ortner paraphrases one of her informants as saying of another, “She was the epitome of everything that was terrible about Weequahic, a completely empty, vacuous, bitchy person with money who was somehow admired and popular.”
The Class Divide
“With money” -- those two words point to the questions that most concern Ms. Ort-ner in the book. The Weequahic of the mid-1950s was ethnically almost homogeneous, as roughly 85 percent of the graduating class was Jewish. But it was economically diverse. Their parents included attorneys, small-business owners, truck drivers, brewery workers, and longshoremen. (Roughly 73 percent of Ms. Ortner’s classmates completed college, but less than a quarter of their parents had done so.) One classmate from a relatively low-income section of Weequahic told Ms. Ortner that he and his neighbors “were the quieter, more fearful” students at the high school. “We were just that much behind.”
Ms. Ortner notes that even among college-bound students, there was an emotionally fraught divide between those who went away and those who stayed with their parents and attended public universities in New Jersey. That chasm often had more to do with parents’ income than with the students’ academic talents.
The narrator of Goodbye, Columbus, a novella by Weequahic’s most famous alumnus, Philip Roth, Class of ’50, captures the stigma that hovered in the air. “Whenever anyone asks me where I went to school,” he says, “I come right out with it: Newark Colleges of Rutgers University. I may say it a bit too ringingly, too up-in-the-air, but I say it.”
What Ms. Ortner finds most striking is that most of her classmates, especially those whose parents were relatively affluent, lack a vocabulary for talking about social class. They can talk with great complexity about gender, race, and ethnicity, but her informants are largely oblivious to -- or can speak only in the crudest terms about -- the social slights felt by people on the wrong end of class divisions.
“Class is untouched,” she says. “It’s the only thing that hasn’t had a movement. It’s just kind of smoldering there. Race relations have changed enormously since 1960, gender has changed, but class just kind of percolates along.”
One of Ms. Ortner’s goals in New Jersey Dreaming is to provide a detailed description of how people half-consciously create class as a social structure through their beliefs and everyday interactions.
Where some sociological accounts of class are, in her eyes, crudely deterministic, Ms. Ortner emphasizes her classmates’ own behaviors and choices. For example, in her account of Weequahic’s academic tracking system and its attendant inequalities, she does not lay the entire burden on guidance counselors and other school officials. Instead, using lengthy quotations from her interviews, she sketches how teachers, parents, and the students’ own social networks combined to create the mystique of “tracking.”
Inescapable Social Movements
In the book’s second half, Ms. Ortner turns to the question of how her classmates have shaped their own worlds in the years since 1958. A central theme here is that the liberal social movements of the 1960s opened up new possibilities for the entire cohort, not just for the small number who played active roles in those movements.
To take just one example, only a few of the class’s 19 African-Americans went immediately to college in 1958. But a strikingly high number completed college years later, as adults. That pattern, Ms. Ortner speculates, was probably a consequence of 1960s civil-rights activism that broadened admissions and financial aid.
More broadly, feminist social movements gave the class’s women the scope to pursue careers and to demand new kinds of respect within their marriages. That process could be painful, of course -- only 60 percent of those who married are still with their original partners.
Ms. Ortner identifies an “everyday critique” of modern capitalist culture, in which her classmates insist that friendships, not money, are what give them the deepest happiness. (That line of talk is more common among the lower-income classmates, but it exists to some degree across the board.)
She uses that insight to quarrel with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social capital, which holds that the privileges of high-status people are reinforced by their personal relationships and social networks. According to that theory, the friendships forged in, say, Ivy League fraternities are underappreciated as bulwarks of social inequality.
Ms. Ortner does not disagree with that framework, but she adds that personal relationships can often “operate in counterpoint to capital” -- and can also undercut the myth that our status and worth derive entirely from our individual talents and personal appearance.
2 Impulses Connect
Ms. Ortner hopes that New Jersey Dreaming synthesizes the two scholarly impulses that have driven her since the late 1960s. On the one hand, she attempts to carry forward the tradition of interpretive anthropology pioneered by Clifford Geertz, her mentor at Chicago -- a tradition that generally has not had an explicitly political edge. On the other hand, she hopes to apply the tools developed by Raymond Williams, the late University of Cambridge cultural theorist.
“I came back from the first trip to Nepal, in 1968, and the world was going crazy,” she recalls. “I was holed up ... writing my thesis. The world outside was going mad, and I was inside writing about Sherpas.” It was during this time that she began to study the works of Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir. Mr. Geertz, however, was not bothered by her political turn. “I never rejected what he was doing,” she says. “It’s not like I had slipped away to some other side.”
The two remain close friends, and Mr. Geertz, now a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., recently visited her in Ocean Grove to pick up a copy of the new book. “It’s an excellent book,” he says, “and it’s an interesting change to see her working on America. . . . I think it’s actually harder to work in your home culture than in a foreign one, because it’s hard to get distance. Here she is working on her own people, and not only that, her own [high-school] class, and you have to get some sort of distance so that you can see things that are normally invisible to the people who are living them. And I think she does that fairly effectively.”
Ms. Ortner is not certain what her next project will be. She has interviewed 50 children of the Class of 1958, and at one point she hoped to expand that material into a sequel to the Weequahic book. She has come to worry, however, that such a book would be too much like what she calls “talking heads” sociology, “with a bunch of unrelated people spread out all over the country, with no shared history” other than their parents’ high-school lineage. The project would involve only scattered interviews, a technique too far removed from Geertzian participant-observation, she says.
Instead, she might revisit her idea of revisiting the site of a classic American ethnography. Not Muncie, however. She would like to return to Hortense Powdermaker’s 1950 Hollywood: The Dream Factory -- Hollywood being perhaps the only workplace in the United States where grown-ups suffer the same levels of status anxiety and competitive self-presentations that adolescents face in America’s high-school hallways.
CLASS NOTES
Carol Cohen: “I was on the other side of the street [in class terms] . . . Maybe eighteen was an awkward time, but I just found that these people felt they were better than you. That’s why [when] I went back to the class reunion . . . [here she mimics one of the women at the reunion:] ‘Oh, how are you?’ [then back to her angry/caustic tone] She didn’t talk to me for four years in high school; what are you talking to me now for?”
Arthur Mayers: “Weequahic is an experience that probably most people will never be able to understand what we had when we had it. . . . The remembrance of high school for me was fantastic. I just think it’s something that can never be duplicated again.”
Marlene Keefer: “I’m more materialistic than my siblings, and my brother teases me and says that’s because I’m a product of Weequahic High School, which doesn’t bother me at all. . . . I raised my daughter to be very materialistic as well, hoping that she would want the better things in life, and find someone who could provide her with that.”
--From New Jersey Dreaming; all names are pseudonyms created by the author
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 48, Page A13
