Ortner, Distinción en Escuela Media en USA PDF

01 Ortner (JG/d) 1/5/02 2:38 pm Page 115
ARTICLE
graphy
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 3(2): 115–148[1466–1381(200206)3:2;115–148;023662]
‘Burned like a tattoo’

High school social categories and ‘American
culture’
■ Sherry B. Ortner
Columbia University, USA
ABSTRACT ■ This article is part of a larger ethnographic and

ethnohistorical project on social class in the US, as tracked through the lives
of my own high school graduating class, the Class of ‘58 of Weequahic High
School in Newark, New Jersey. In this article I focus on the underlying logic
of high school social/prestige categories, and on the durability of those
categories over the course of the 20th century. I argue for the centrality of
both social class and what Americans call ‘personality’ in the production
and reproduction of those categories. I go on to suggest that the durability
of the high school social categories may be explained by the fact that their
underlying logic is nothing other than the logic of hegemonic ‘American
culture’ as a whole.
K E Y W O R D S ■ class, distinction, US high schools, prestige

classifications, individualism, American culture
I began drafting this article four months after the shootings at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colorado. The shootings left one teacher and 14
students dead, including the 17-year-old gunmen Dylan Klebold and Eric
Harris, who committed suicide. The shootings set off a spate of searching
public attention to many aspects of the event – the easy availability of guns,
the responsibility of parents to know what their children are doing, the
116 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
security systems of schools, and the role of the internet in fueling homicidal
fantasies, to name a few. But there was one more theme that is specifically
relevant to the task at hand. It was captured best in a story in the New York
Times entitled ‘Two Words Behind the Massacre’. The two words were ‘high
school’.
It is hard to overstate the significance of high school for the American
cultural imagination. Peter Applebome, who wrote the New York Times
piece, called it ‘something that is burned like a tattoo into the memory bank
of most adults’ (1999: 1). David Denby, writing shortly afterwards in The
New Yorker about teen movies, called the leading social figures of the
American high school scene ‘a common memory, a collective trauma, or at
least a social and erotic fantasy’ (1999: 94). Camille Paglia described clique
formation in high school as ‘a pitiless process’ (quoted in Applebome, 1999:
4). Japanese ethnographer Keiko Ikeda writes of the ‘hell of the critical gaze’
of students vis-à-vis their peers, and quotes among others Frank Zappa and
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. on the power of high school in their imaginations. The
Vonnegut quote is worth repeating in full:
High school is closer to the core of American experience than anything else
I can think of . . . . We have all been there. While there we saw nearly every
form of justice and injustice, kindness and meanness, intelligence and
stupidity, which we were likely to encounter in later life. Richard Nixon is a
familiar type from high school. So is Melvin Laird. So is J. Edgar Hoover. So
is General Lewis Hershey. So is everybody. (quoted in Ikeda, 1998: 15)
To all these I can add a few more, picked up in the course of working on
this article.
Amiri Baraka: The life of emotion, which is historical, like anything else, gets
warped in high school I’m certain now. (1997: 41)
Anna Quindlen: [writing about the TV show ‘Survivor’] . . . the whole thing
sounds . . . no scarier than high school. (Although in the last analysis, nothing
is scarier than high school). (2001: 74)1
Why is the high school experience ‘tattooed’ into the memory of so many
Americans? The intensity is no doubt overdetermined, but some of the
quotes above indicate at least one of the reasons: that social life among the
students in the school involves being relentlessly judged and evaluated, day
after day. It is Ikeda’s ‘hell of the critical gaze’ – or, if one is successful in the
high school social system, then the pleasure of that gaze – that seems to leave
such enduring memory traces.
The judgmental process in turn is articulated through a set of evaluative
social categories – the popular kids, the ‘jocks’ (athletic stars), the
‘nobodies’, etc. These categories are the focus of this article. While the
Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 117
students tend to think that the categories are based primarily on what
Americans call ‘personality’ – individual traits and qualities – many social
scientists (e.g. Hollingshead, 1949; Gordon, 1957; Eckert, 1989) have
argued that they are founded mainly on social class. I argue instead that they
cannot be reduced to either the folk emphasis on personality or the objec-
tivist emphasis on class, requiring rather the intersection between the two
axes of difference. I go on to discuss the fact that versions of these social
categories have been found in most high schools in most parts of the country
for virtually the whole of the 20th century, which leads me to suggest a
relationship between the ‘deep structure’ of the categories and the always
questionable entity called ‘American culture’.2
This particular article is part of a larger ethnographic and ethnohistori-
cal project on social class in the United States, as tracked through the lives
of my own high-school graduating class, the Class of ’58 of Weequahic High
School in Newark, New Jersey. First, then, some background on the various
components of the project, and my role as a ‘native ethnographer’.
The place and the project
Newark, New Jersey is a commercial and port city across the Hudson River
from New York City. In the 1950s it had a population of about 500,000,
mostly middle and working class. It was very mixed in racial and ethnic
terms, with almost every immigrant ethnic group one could imagine, as well
as a growing population of African-Americans moving up from the South
for work.
The city had five or six public high schools, located in different neigh-
borhoods. For those not familiar with the American educational system, the
public high school is indeed ‘public’, that is, supported by taxes collected by
local authorities and channeled back to the schools. Other than children of
elites, who have traditionally gone to private schools, the vast majority of
adolescents in the US in the 1950s attended public schools; outside the major
urban areas, they still do.3 The schools usually have a four-year curriculum,
which consists of a mix of academic and practical/vocational courses, the
relative weight of the academic or vocational side being related to the class
mix of the student population in a given school – the more middle class, the
more academic the school, the more working class, the more vocational. In
addition, high schools have always had enormous numbers of so-called
extra-curricular activities, including a variety of clubs, the school newspaper,
debating societies, and so forth. They also had, and have, teams for virtu-
ally every sport, which compete against teams from other nearby high
schools. Sports are very central to the life and the identity of most schools
(but not all, as we shall see).
118 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
The site of this study, Weequahic High School, is located in what was
then a mostly middle-class neighborhood in the southwest corner of
Newark (see Figure 1). The name of the school, pronounced Wee-QUAY-
ic or, when spoken rapidly, Week-wake, is taken from the Native American
group called Weequahic that inhabited the area when the first European
settlers arrived, part of the larger Lenape tribal group that occupied parts
of New York and Pennsylvania as well (Kraft, 1986). The population for
the study is, as noted, my graduating class, the Class of ’58, which I define
as including everyone who appeared in the yearbook, plus one member of
the class who left early and whose picture did not appear. This is a total of
304 people.
The project involved, first of all, finding as many members as possible of
the Class of ’58, a fascinating process of detective work which I have
described elsewhere (Ortner, n.d.a). When I began the project in the early
1990s, 14 people were known to have died. This left a total of 290 people
who were potentially discoverable. Of these I found all but about 40, which
left 250 possible subjects for the project. Of these, 50 or so refused to partici-
pate, leaving about 200 participants. I first mailed out questionnaires, and
wound up with 200+ completed questionnaires (the + comes from the fact
Figure 1 Map of southwest Newark, New Jersey (USA), showing Weequahic

High school between the Hillside border and Newark Airport. The New Jersey
Turnpike and Port Newark are to the east of the airport, and New York City is to
the northeast.
that I was able to fill in questionnaires on some of the non-participants from

other sources of information). I then traveled around the country and inter-
viewed about 100 of these people in depth.4 I spoke to most of the remain-
ing 100 on the phone, more briefly, but still enough to learn something more
about their lives than simple demographic data.
Initially I had a lot of trepidation about doing the project as, not immune
to the memory-tattoos noted earlier, I had very mixed feelings about high
school and the class/cultural milieu I felt I had escaped from. Yet I quickly
found myself fascinated by the diversity of people’s lives, and drawn in at a
personal level by people’s graciousness and openness. Many people were
initially guarded in the interviews, for a wide variety of reasons: my level of
‘success’; discomfort with the interviewee role, especially in relation to
someone with whom they had a shared history; concern that information
would get around within a social world to which many still had some con-
nection, either in practice or in their imaginations. Yet most people also very
quickly opened up, telling fascinating stories and saying amazing things,
confirming for me once again both the pleasure and the power of ethnog-
raphy. (For more on the fieldwork, see Ortner, 1997.)
Some brief demographics on the Class of ’58 (hereafter occasionally C58)
now follow. The gender composition of the class at graduation was 48 per
cent men and 52 per cent women. The racial/ethnic composition of the class
was 82 per cent white/Jewish, 6 per cent African-American, and 11 per cent
from an assortment of other groups (including one person of unknown eth-
nicity). The striking thing about these figures is of course the radical ethnic
imbalance. Weequahic appears to all intents and purposes as a ‘Jewish
school’, which immediately raises the question of the representativeness of
the study. Although this article as a whole is largely concerned with cap-
turing the logic of the high school social taxonomy, one of the rather satis-
fying (to me) payoffs of the analysis will be to resolve/dissolve the problem
of ‘representativeness’ in the course of the analysis.
Finally, with respect to the class composition of the Class of ’58, the class
at graduation would be described by most ordinary observers as basically
‘middle class’. But this is only because the American folk conception of the
middle class includes all but the extremely rich and the extremely poor. In
fact, there was quite wide socio-economic variation at Weequahic, in terms
of both income (from very ‘comfortable’ – a native category – to very poor),
and occupation (from a substantial ‘business-professional class’ that
included educated professionals and successful owners of large businesses
to an equally substantial class of manual laborers). Using parents’ (usually
fathers’) occupations as the simplest and most accessible markers, and using
the American folk model of a three-tier class system (upper, middle, and
lower), the class composition of the natal families of the Class of ’58 falls
out as follows (known N = 205):
120 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
■ Business/professional class (BPC)5: 55 individuals, or 27 per cent

■ Middle class: 92 individuals, or 45 per cent
■ Working class: 58 individuals, or 28 per cent
I realize that there are all sorts of contestable elements in this table, most
of which derive from the ways in which it erases the conflictual nature of
‘class’ in the Marxist sense. I tackle these issues at greater length in the book
(Ortner, n.d.a). For now, however, the main point of providing the table is
to give some specificity to the point that there was significant range of both
income- and occupationally-defined class in the Class of ’58, variation that
forms the ‘real’ backdrop to the conceptual ordering of the high school
social universe.6
Memories and categories
To return to the intense feelings that high school provokes for many, even
most, Americans, Weequahic was no different in this respect. One of my
stock questions in the interviews was how people ‘felt about Weequahic’.
A small number of people could not remember having had strong feelings
one way or the other. The vast majority, however, had very strong feelings
indeed, pro or con. In order to convey not only the substance but the tone
and texture of people’s views, I employ here a representational strategy
that I discuss more fully elsewhere (Ortner, n.d.b.) under the rubric of
‘critical documentary ethnography’. This approach involves presenting,
with little commentary from me, long strings of quotes from field notes or
transcripts of interviews. (There are actually many more than those pre-
sented here that would support my points; I have had to restrain myself
owing to space constraints.) Many of the quotes are individually powerful
and striking, but in addition, by being piled up in this way, they resonate
with and compound one another. First, then, the negative feelings about
Weequahic:
Derek Goethe:7 [from the field notes] He said he emphatically does not want
to participate in the project, he feels no connection to Weequahic, he went
to a reunion and it was ‘all the same bullshit’, all the clicks [the native pro-
nunciation of ‘cliques’], making him feel uncomfortable.
Susan Kleinman: I hated it, simple, I hated it. I couldn’t get away from it fast
enough. I was not one of the people who enjoyed the whole situation, I don’t
think the education was so wonderful or what it could be.
Lila Lohman: I had a lot of difficulties in Weequahic because I was made fun
of because I was so heavy . . . Terrible, terrible experiences.8
Michael Feldman: I think it was one of the most painful times of my life
. . . I felt socially isolated, well, except when I was doing sports, but I felt
out of it, inferior, and it was a horrible, horrible time.
Alan Kaduck: I wasn’t comfortable there. . . . It wasn’t a great experience
for me.
Judith Cherny: It was awful. I never have known [such] a bunch of snobs
in my entire life.
Linda Kirschner: I’m really the wrong person to ask about high school since
I count those three years as the worst of my life.
Stuart Marcus: I am really glad you are doing this [study] since I had such a
crappy existence in high school.
But although many people hated it, even more people’s responses ranged
from quite positive to totally ecstatic:
William Smallwood: Weequahic was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Marcia Schaefer: I thought it was probably the best high school to go to in
America.
Helaine Barish: I think it was so terrific and so complete that everybody took
it for granted.
Francine Rosenblatt: Weequahic High School was wonderful for me. . . .
Weequahic was a family, it wasn’t a school. . . . Weequahic was a state of
mind; it was not a school. . . . Did I love Weequahic? Yes.
Charles Lurie: I really thought it was great.
Arthur Mayers: Weequahic was an experience that probably most people will
never be able to understand what we had when we had it. Educationally,
socially, athletically, I mean it was just an outstanding high school with an
outstanding group of teachers. . . . The remembrance of high school for me
was fantastic. I just think it’s something that can never be duplicated again.
Robert Schimmer: I look back on it now as the greatest time in my life,
because I have a lot of nostalgia for that time.
Judith Gordon: I loved Weequahic. Yeah, I had a great high school era. . . .
It was just fun. It was really fun.
Larry Kuperman: My high school years were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.
Needless to say, these kinds of strong feelings are not randomly distrib-
uted. Rather they are closely tied to one’s position in the high school social
system. (When I say ‘high school social system’, I mean the peer system
122 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
among the students. In this context, the educational functions of the school,
and relationships with teachers, are simply a kind of backdrop for the
students’ social dramas.) Although in reality this system is a ‘habitus’ in the
fullest sense, that is, a lived world of dispositions, practices, and relations
(hence of course all the emotional intensity), in the present article I look only
at its conceptual underpinnings, the system of social categories through
which students evaluate themselves and others.
The labels for the categories vary from school to school, but the basic
types remain surprisingly constant. There are the popular kids, often the
class officers; the athletic stars or ‘jocks’; the cheerleaders and twirlers, who
perform at the sporting events and are the female counterparts of the jocks;
the ‘nerds’, ‘geeks’, and ‘eggheads’, terms for socially awkward (but some-
times very smart) students; the ‘hoods’, ‘druggies’, and ‘burnouts’ – the most
alienated students; the ‘prom queens’ (beautiful/popular girls) on the one
hand and the ‘sluts’ (supposedly sexually promiscuous girls) on the other;
the ‘average citizens’ and the ‘nobodies’, whose main distinction is that they
do not fit into the high or low categories and are rarely noticed by those
above them (see Figures 2–6) (Palonsky, 1975; Schwartz and Merten, 1975;
Varenne, 1982; Canaan, 1986; Eckert, 1989; Chang, 1992).
What is by now striking about this system is its extraordinary durability.
The system as we know it seems to have begun to take shape early in the
20th century.9 It remains remarkably consistent throughout the century,10
for different parts of the country and different ethnic mixes. US public high
schools have gone through major transformations and continue to do so, in
relation to changes in larger American configurations of class and race;
nonetheless, for many schools and many parts of the country, some version
of this often cruel system of categories is still in operation. The high school
jocks and freaks, the cheerleaders and sluts, the popular kids and the
nobodies keep coming, year after year. How can we understand this?
I will suggest that the system of high school social categories is built
upon a ‘structure’ in more or less the old-fashioned Lévi-Straussian (e.g.
1966) sense. This is to say that it is based on an underlying logic which,
however much the visible shapes of social life have changed in the past
century, and especially since the Second World War, nonetheless continues
and endures like the underlying grammar of a language. The structure is
composed of two cross-cutting axes, one of which is a version of ‘class’
(including a variety of kinds of capital), and one of which is a version of
individual qualities or, in the common parlance, ‘personality’. Before
getting to an examination of the underlying structure, however, there are
several questions that have to do with the actor’s point of view, that is, the
point of view of the Class of ’58 during the high school years. I have argued
elsewhere that social class is largely unacknowledged or actively denied in
many contexts of American self-representation.11 The first question, then,
Figure 2 Some ‘popular kids’. The officers of the graduating Class of ’58,
from the graduation yearbook.
Figure 3 One each of the jocks, twirlers, and cheerleaders of the

Class of ’58, from the graduation yearbook.
124 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
Figure 4 Some ‘eggheads’. The Math Team of the Class of ’58, from the
graduation yearbook.
Figure 5 Some ‘ordinary citizens’. Some members of the Prom (Senior Formal
Dance) Committees of the Class of ’58, from the graduation yearbook.
is whether the Class of ’58 recognized any sort of class factor at all. The
second is, if they did recognize the operation of a class factor, how did they
see it or understand it? In order to answer these questions, and before
coming back to the system as a whole, I must make a rather long detour
through the question of whether and how the Class of ’58 did or did not
‘see class’.
Figure 6 Some guys in the style of ‘hoods’, ca. 1953–54, from the albums of the
author. The lower left hand photo shows a local girls’ custom of the era, adding
‘captions’ clipped from newspapers and magazines to photos.
Reading class
One of my other stock questions was whether people remembered ‘class’ or

‘social divisions’ at Weequahic. A number of people either denied the
presence of class, denied its significance, changed it into something else, or
were simply puzzled by my question. Here is a mixed set of these kinds of
answers:
126 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
Walter Markowitz: Money didn’t mean anything in high school, everybody

was equal.
Joseph Finkel: None of us were rich . . . we all pretty much had the same
economic standing, and I never thought about it at all. Not at all.
Larry Goldman: [sbo: ‘Did you remember class divisions in high school?’]
Well, only between us and the Gentiles. And anyway, they weren’t so different
from us, most of them hung out with Jewish kids.
Robert Schimmer: [sbo: ‘We were talking about social classes in high school.’]
At Weequahic High School? Were there many social classes at Weequahic
High School?
Lewis Friedland: [from the field notes] He said that he didn’t feel any social
barriers between different groups. He himself was friendly with everyone. He
was even friendly with the ‘hoods’, the guys who hung out in front of ‘Sid’s’
[the hot dog place across the street from the school].
James Altschuler: [from the field notes] He was not conscious of social
divisions in high school. He was too busy working in his father’s store.
Yet at another level, class was ‘read’ all the time. For many social scien-
tists and persons in the street, the simplest marker of class is occupation.
But as kids and even as teenagers C58 classmates did not seem to know
much about what each other’s parents did for a living; if they did, they did
not really use that information to classify each other. Class-by-occupation
came up in the context of only one interview. The student was talking about
an American History class, in which the teacher, Mrs Sadie Rous (her real
name), was actually teaching about the class structure of the US:
Franklin Bodnar: [whose father was an auto mechanic] We were talking

about socio-economic things [in class] and that was one of the biggest turn-
offs in high school. [sbo: ‘Somebody said something to you?’] Yes, in the
class, as a comment. . . . Something about, ‘Oh, blue collar?’ And somebody
said, ‘Did [your father] ever get out of elementary school?’
Similarly, interviewees rarely invoked the interior furnishings of houses.

Although C58 kids did of course enter each other’s homes, to a great extent
their lives with each other took place in public spaces: the high school itself;
its surrounding playgrounds, lawns, and playing fields; the wider neighbor-
hood of parks, stores, Dairy Queens, and the like. The insides of homes,
their furnishings and goods, not to mention the lifestyles of classmates
parents and siblings, were largely outside the students’ knowledge. At this
level, then, students rarely had an idea of one another’s resources except in
cases of obvious wealth or obvious poverty. For example, one of the major
dividers between high- and low-capital families was whether they rented or
owned their own homes, but this was invisible to outsiders.
Of necessity, then, reading class involved drawing on a variety of more
public indicators. One of the major, if not the major, markers of class differ-
ence for many classmates was geographic location. There was first of all an
awareness of the difference between students at Weequahic, still in Newark,
and students whose families had moved to the suburbs. Here are two of
several quotes about this:
Dorene Bressler: The people at Columbia High School, which was in the
suburbs where the people who had money lived, were of a different social
class than I was, and I felt inferior to them. And I remember once in
chem[istry] lab with Charles Rosenberg talking about how he went up to
Columbia to date some girls and how much better they were than we were.12
Louis Spiegel: The Weequahic people kinda thought that the people who lived
in South Orange and Maplewood and West Orange, that these were the rich
people. We used to take drives to Wyoming Avenue [in South Orange] during
Christmas season and look at the lights and say, ‘Boy, these are rich people.’
More immediately relevant were the more local variations – where one
lived within the larger Weequahic neighborhood and what grammar school
one went to. (Again, for those unfamiliar with the American system,
grammar or elementary schools usually comprise grades 1 through 8. They
are smaller than the high schools and based in sub-neighborhoods that
together compose a larger high school district. There were five grammar
schools within the Weequahic district.) The grammar schools and their
related sub-neighborhoods formed a very extensively used code for reading
and expressing class differences within the Weequahic section. Here are
several from a longer set of quotes along those lines:
Lynn Marans: [from the field notes] First thing she said was how cliquey high
school was. She went to Bragaw [one of the lower status grammar schools]
and definitely felt left out of certain groups. . . . In retrospect she realized
there was an economic difference between the groups although at the time
she wasn’t aware of it.
Jerome Kriegsfeld: I grew up actually where Clinton Hill is so it was out of
[the core Weequahic] neighborhood. I always envied those that grew up there
because that was the crème de la crème, and I wasn’t really in that area. [sbo:
‘Yeah, a lot of people had that feeling, like they were on the fringe.’] I was
on the fringe, yeah. All right, look, that’s reality.
Aaron Martin: Coming from Bragaw you know we were always concerned
about the other people, the people from Chancellor [Ave School], Maple [Ave
School], etc. . . . I think as a group we were the quieter, more fearful . . .
128 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
people. . . . We were just that much behind. . . . It took a lot of years to get
past that.
Meredith Siegel: The kids that came from Maple and Chancellor definitely
were perceived as the 90210 [the posh section of Beverly Hills] of television.
. . . When you said Louise Goldstein and Ira Traubman, she is perceived in
my mind 40 years later as Chancellor, and he is perceived as something else,
a nice regular guy.
Judith Cherny: There were them that has and them that didn’t . . . You know,
there were the ones [that lived on certain streets] . . . I just found that they
were the in-groups, and if you were from money at that time, I mean, there
were ones that went and did, and other ones that couldn’t.
Paula Friedlander: [from the field notes] And then there was a real difference,
she said, between the kids who went to Maple/Chancellor and the kids who
went to the other grammar schools, she was very conscious of it when she
went to junior high school, where these other kids came in. ‘Even though they
were Jewish, there were subtle differences between them and us.’
Weequahic High School’s most famous alumnus, novelist Philip Roth,

also went to Chancellor Ave School. In Operation Shylock he memorializes
it by having a character (the ‘other’ Philip Roth) show how much he knows
about the ‘real’ Philip Roth by invoking Chancellor Ave School: ‘But it goes
back, Philip, all the way back to Chancellor Ave School’ (1993: 183). The
character then sings a fragment of the school song. And here I make the
required confession: I came from a BPC (Business Professional Class) family
and went to Chancellor too.
But there were other ways of reading class. Some classmates read the
differences at least partly in racial and ethnic terms. Recall Larry Goldman
above who answered the question about ‘class divisions’ as ‘only between
us and the Gentiles’. Here are two other examples, both of which slide back
and forth between class and race/ethnicity:
Gloria Traberman: [from field notes] Gloria said she felt ‘underclass’ in high
school, ‘not as much as the Christian kids or black kids, but compared to the
rich kids, I never even felt white’.
Robert Schimmer: There were some kids who came from families with more
money. . . . And there were some kids, most of the kids, I guess they came
from families, uh, middle class, whatever you want to call that. And there
were some kids who were less fortunate, they were nice kids. And then there
were the black kids in the class, I always assumed [they] came from poorer
families, because let’s face it, that was a fact in those days.
Next, there were consumer goods. For girls, this category largely focused
on clothes. And within the category of clothes in the 1950s, cashmere

sweaters were virtually iconic of wealth:13
Edith Fromkin: It was hard to go to a school where they wore cashmere
sweaters on a regular basis, instead of to a party or something.
Jacqueline Golum: Well, in Weequahic I certainly wasn’t a ‘have-not’, but
certainly wasn’t a ‘have’. [And there were certain girls] and they always
had cashmere sweaters and whatever.
Susan Kleinman: How much did I have in common with those kids? I
wasn’t interested in charm bracelets and cashmere sweaters.
Susan Wolkstein: Weequahic was a very materialistic group, and I didn’t
fit in, I knew I didn’t fit in. And that was hard. And I remember, Joan
Rubin and I were good friends, we were friends for a long while until she
died. And, lots of times we would sort of laugh, you know, the . . .
cashmere sweaters that we didn’t have, and the others had, and whatever.
. . . Her thing [was], don’t be ‘Weequahic-ish’. . . . You don’t want to be
Weequahic-ish, that’s not a good [attitude].
Boys occasionally talked about clothes as well, but the markers of wealth
were more variable. In the following case consumer goods (a new car) and
other things that were only affordable by the well-off (here, a maid) are
wrapped within a story of more general class slights:
Franklin Bodnar: [Roger and I] went in jointly on a [project] for [extra
credit in a science class]. [But] it was getting to be nice weather and he
decided, well, I could buy all the equipment to build all this stuff. He left
me alone in his basement and he said, ‘Why don’t you finish it up, Franklin.
I’ll give you all the money.’ And he came from a fairly well-to-do house-
hold, and to add insult to injury, one gal who I really always wanted to
ask out for a date. . . . is the one he took out in his brand new car at that
time. And you know, I come to his house, the maid answered the door and
she says, ‘Oh, Roger’s gone; he says go work in the basement.’
And finally for some, both boys and girls, it was just plain money:
Michael Brown: [from field notes] He said he felt pretty much of an outsider
at Weequahic . . . there were lots of cliques and he didn’t have the financial
means to fit in.
Thelma Heller: I think economically [my parents] were on the lower end of
the economic scale which I was very sensitive to, all the years I was growing
up. I think it made a difference . . . it made a difference.
Dorene Bressler: There are a lot of definitions of social class, maybe . . . but
growing up, it was how much money you had.
130 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
Davita Reingold: Weequahic was a very cliqueish place to be. [sbo: ‘Did you
feel it was cliqueish in terms of money, or just . . . ?’] Oh, money! Money.
Money was a big issue.
Why is class more visible to some than to others? First, most of those to
whom class was not just visible but almost tangible were from the lower
end of the economic spectrum. Looking up from below, it was often very
visible indeed.14 At the same time, people from higher class positions
occasionally noticed class differences and/or their own privilege for a
variety of reasons: snobbery at one end (e.g. one woman kept talking about
people who were just ‘very fine’), left politics on the other (e.g. the
American History teacher, Mrs Rous). And finally, a very common factor
in a heightened awareness of class came from either physically moving into
the neighborhood from another place, or from the experience of a decline
of fortune in the family:15
Meredith Siegel: I started out living on Chancellor Ave, and started school at
Maple [a high end school]. And when I was in third grade we moved to
Bragaw . . . I remember very well walking down the street with Tamara
Silberman . . . and somebody saying to her in front of my house, ‘Are you
slumming?’
Claire Adelsohn: [from field notes] She said going to Weequahic was a huge
shock, in the sense that although where she grew up everyone owned their
own home and seemed to be comfortable, nonetheless when she got to
Weequahic she definitely felt shut out, people had a lot more money and
looked down their noses at her.
Milton Bernstein: [from the field notes] I think the reason [the economic
differences implied by different grammar schools] was particularly meaning-
ful to Milton was because he moved from one of those other grammar school
districts to Chancellor in 5th grade or so.
In sum, we have seen throughout this section how any political language
of class, or even any reference to labor/occupation, is virtually absent from
the native discourse. Instead there is, as Bourdieu (1984) has stressed, a
language of ‘distinction’, drawing on codes from the everyday world:
clothing, streets, neighborhoods, grammar schools, money. Yet to empha-
size these things is not to fall into an exclusively consumerist, and uncriti-
cal, reading of class. Rather, consumption must always be seen as the visible
surface of capitalism, the conversion point between objectivist (‘etic’)
plotting of class locations and relations, and subjective (‘emic’) perceptions
of economic difference that are experienced and acted upon in people’s
everyday lives.
It should be noted that many classmates tended to treat class differences
as a binary phenomenon: ‘the haves and have-nots’, ‘them that went and
did and others that couldn’t’, or – when translated into ethnicity – ‘us and
the Gentiles’. Even the grammar school code tended to operate in a binary
manner: the Chancellor/Maple crowd and everyone else. In fact, I would
suggest that, despite the culturally dominant tripartite model of class –
upper/middle/lower – the binary model is actually the way in which class
often acts as a conceptual structure: for most purposes the socio-economic
universe divides fairly commonsensically into a binary haves/have-nots
opposition. Thus, as we return to the structure of the high school social
categories, this is the way in which I will use it for one of the axes: as a
simple binary opposition between high(er) and low(er) capital.
Deconstructing high school
Returning to the categories of high school, I will argue that there is an under-
lying logic which both holds them together and plays a role in their striking
durability. I will represent their interrelationship as a table with the left axis
defined by class in the simple binary sense of more/less capital, and the hori-
zontal axis by what I term ‘personality’. Personality is a broad category that
applies to both sexes, and that includes most prominently an engaging
and/or charismatic social style. It also includes, for both boys and girls,
‘looks’ or physical attractiveness. And finally, particularly for boys, it
includes some minimal level (and preferably more) of athletic ability. Indi-
vidual personality – the fact that a person is socially engaging, personally
attractive, and physically talented – is seen as the absolutely fundamental
condition for achieving what is for most students the ultimate social goal in
high school, ‘popularity’.
Like class, personality can be treated as having two poles. For reasons
that will shortly become clear, the poles seem best summarized by the
contrast between ‘wild’ and ‘tame’. The wild/tame distinction can refer to
the question of submissiveness or resistance to authority, which is its most
explicit ‘youth culture’ reference. But it carries other references as well: dress
and demeanor, active sexuality, and more.
The basic structure, before filling in its content, looks like this:
Personality
Wild Tame
More capital
Class
Less capital
132 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
‘Class’ includes material resources, as well as less tangible assets –

Bourdieu’s ‘cultural’ or ‘symbolic’ capital (1978, 1990), as well as something
I have elsewhere (Ortner, n.d.b.) discussed as ‘emotional capital’ – that stand
in for, or augment, or are convertible into, material capital. It is the more
objective axis of the table, but the important inclusion of non-material forms
of capital renders it something broader than money and objects.16 ‘Person-
ality’ is a more complex mix of the relatively objective and the culturally
constructed. On the one hand some people really are, within a particular
cultural and historical context, more charming, nice, athletically gifted,
beautiful, smart, etc. than others. On the other hand these qualities are
culturally constructed in at least two major senses. One is the obvious
cultural-relativism point just indicated: that what counts as beautiful,
charming, etc. is culturally and historically variable. Even being ‘smart’ –
perhaps with the kind of brilliance that gets one into the very best colleges
today – may have different meanings and implications in different times and
places. The second point is that most of these qualities can be cultivated –
constructed in the more literal sense – if one has the right amounts and kinds
of capital: looks can be fixed, clothes can be bought, athletic skills can be
trained, test skills can be honed, etc. Related to these points is that even per-
ception itself is a function not of the reality ‘out there’ but of one’s own
internalized cultural lenses. A popular boy or girl seems good looking, even
if he or she is, by other criteria, plain.
And finally, there is the intersection of the two axes. All the qualities
pulled together under the rubric of ‘personality’ are in theory the qualities
that help one beat (or not) the forces of ‘class’, the forces of one’s material
and cultural background. In the sociologese of Talcott Parsons, the personal
qualities of the individual may have a genuinely ‘assortative’ function (1959:
315).17 Looks, brains, or charm may put one in the upper half of the table
even if one is from a low capital background. Yet although this is partly
true, which is why class determinism is always partly false, one has to guard
against the folk view that personal qualities in and of themselves have power
on their own, that is, apart from capital. Not only are looks and brains
buyable, as it were, but there is also a sense in which coming from a high-
or low-capital background provides or fails to provide (in current jargon)
self-esteem, thus enabling or disabling things such as outgoingness, friend-
liness, and charisma – the stuff of ‘popularity’. I do not want to push this
point too far and risk collapsing individual ‘personality’ variation back into
class, but it is important to maintain a sense of their interplay at all times.
If there is such a thing as ‘American culture’, it is precisely the enduring
tension between these two dimensions.
Finally, then, we are in a position to see how the intersection of these two
axes produces the native social categories of the more or less generic
American high school. The categories within each box are not meant to be
ranked, but are equivalents or historical variants of one another:
Personality
Wild Tame
More capital Popular kids Jocks/cheerleaders
Class
Class officers
Less capital Ordinary citizens Hoods/sluts
Eggheads (‘nerds’) Smokers/burnouts
This is a classic four-fold table. It shows the way in which the main high
school categories are produced out of the intersection of ‘class’ differences
(more/less ‘capital’ of various kinds) and ‘personality’ differences (more/less
submissive to authority, i.e. more/less ‘tame’). The four boxes represent the
four possible combinations of these differences, although a few caveats must
immediately be entered here. First, as Hervé Varenne (1982, 1983) in particu-
lar has stressed, the categories are defined in large part from the point of view
of the people at the top: ‘nerds’ and ‘hoods’ and their related terms are
pejorative labels that are projected on others from a position of would-be
superiority.18 Second, one must always recall that the types represented in the
boxes are precisely ‘types’. Very few individual students fully fit the descrip-
tions. But the social types are important in that they structure the symbolic
universe within which everyone must operate. And finally, it must be acknowl-
edged that the boundaries are not hard and fast, and some have a tendency
to ‘bleed’ into one another. This is not just a matter of saying that the students
often evade or cross over the categories in practice, though that is true too. It
is a matter of saying that the cultural assumptions do not always divide up so
cleanly. In particular, the dominance of athletics in most American public high
schools means that, in many schools, even the category of ‘popular guys’ and
‘class officers’ may include a significant component of athletic prowess.
At this point, then, let me expand a bit further on the significance of the
terminologies in the four boxes. The discussion here refers to the general
structure as it is found across many high schools in the US. I will return to
the specific Weequahic version of it later in the article.
The upper left hand box (high capital/tame) represents what I have been
calling the popular kids. Students with more capital – who have parents with
more money or more education, or some other sort of sophisticated back-
ground – who are at the same time relatively compliant with authority
occupy this box. They tend to be the kids who are widely liked and/or
134 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
admired (at least within certain circles), who generally have good (or good-
enough) grades, and who occupy most of the class offices and seats on the
student council. Different terms for the kids in this category reflect different
aspects of their overall positionality. At the midwestern high school studied
by Hollingshead in the 1940s, they were ‘the elites’, a term that covers both
their high capital and their high prestige in the system. Hollingshead empha-
sizes the students’ ‘leadership’ but also ‘conformity’ (1949: 22). At another
midwestern high school, this one studied by Gordon in the 1950s, the kids
in this category were ‘the big wheels’, which presumably has to do with the
idea that everything rotates around them, that they are (or think they are)
the center of the high school universe. Gordon’s ‘big wheels’ have a large
component of athletic stardom, but he too makes clear that these students
exhibit ‘conformity to variously approved patterns of behavior’ (1957: 22).
Penelope Eckert’s popular boys are actually called ‘jocks’ (athletes, athletic
stars), because the jock model was so dominant in the again midwestern
high school she studied in the 1970s. Despite the term, however, it was
possible for a guy to be very popular, to be a ‘jock’ in that school, without
being an athlete; his main characteristics were that he conformed to the
‘ideal of the squeaky-clean, all-American individual . . . [he] embodied an
attitude – an acceptance of the school and its institutions as an all-encom-
passing social context, and an unflagging enthusiasm and energy for
working within those institutions’ (1989: 3).
In all of these cases, what is clear is what I am calling the ‘tameness’ of
the type in this category, the relative conformity, the willingness and even
eagerness to work within the rules, as the means of achieving the highest
prestige levels. Not surprisingly given the folk de-emphasis of class, the high
capital that underlies these categories is often invisible in the terminology,
although it was ambiguously present in Hollingshead’s ‘elites’, and also
shows up in the ‘socies’, short for ‘socialites’, the term for the most popular
kids in a high school, again in the Midwest, studied by Schwartz and Merten
in the 1960s (1967, 1975).
The upper right hand box (high capital/wild) is the space of the ‘jocks’.
These students appear to be here almost entirely because of athletic ability
and ‘personality’, but the situation is more complex than that. At least some
of the jocks, the ones who become captains and stars, tend to come from
higher capital families; their leadership and stardom come as much – I would
argue – from the self-confidence of their backgrounds as from their athletic
abilities. The box is also particularly open to upward mobility, as guys from
working class families and/or racial minorities who have the requisite
physical skills are able to ‘make the team’. Nonetheless, these boys would
not necessarily be ‘jocks’, because jocks are not merely athletes but ‘stars’,
another kind of ‘popular guy’.
Unlike the class officer/popular guy type, however, jocks are popular not
because of their relative social tameness, but precisely because of their
relative ‘wildness’, their physicality and their sexuality. Jock wildness is pri-
marily reflected in their athletic strength, skills, and prowess, and in the case
of more violent sports, their aggressive participation in that violence. But
there is always also a connotation of heightened sexuality, as reflected in
athletic uniforms/costumes which usually exaggerate their masculine body
forms, or exhibit a lot of flesh, or both. This sexuality is also partly
embodied in the term ‘jock’ itself. I am not sure of the historical derivation
of the term, but at some point the ‘athletic supporter’, the undergarment
worn by athletes to protect/support their genitals, became known as a jock-
strap, and since that time there has been an inescapable sexual connotation
to the very word ‘jock’. Finally, Douglas Foley captures an even wider range
of ‘wild’ connotations in some of the terms for jocks at the Texas high school
he studied in the 1970s: ‘studs’ (which primarily has a sexual connotation),
as well as ‘animals’, ‘bulls’, and ‘gorillas’. Here, wildness includes not only
a ‘fearless’ physicality in sports, and a ‘cool’ sexuality with girls but, as bulls
or gorillas, an almost literal ‘wildness’, in the sense of being untamable,
undomesticated, uncontrollable (1990: 52–3).
Moving to the lower left hand box (less capital/tame), its central type is
what I am calling the ‘ordinary citizens’, who probably make up the
majority of students at any standard US high school. (Hollingshead said they
made up two-thirds of the student body at Elmtown High [1949: 221].) The
general feature of those in this box is that they tend to come from lower
capital families and they are also relatively meek in personal style and
behavior. At Elmtown High in the 1940s, they were called ‘the good kids’.
Hollingshead brings out their tameness: ‘They come to school, do their
work, but do not distinguish themselves with glory or notoriety’ (1949:
221). He also indicates that they come mostly from middle and lower-middle
class families (1949: 222).
But in many schools there is no term for the ‘ordinary citizens’. They are,
as Hollingshead also says, ‘never this or never that’ (1949: 221); they are
not popular in either the class officer or the jock mode, nor are they oppo-
sitional like the hoods and greasers, about whom more in a moment. Eckert
sometimes heard them called the ‘in-betweens’ (1989: 6); in the school
Schwartz and Merten studied, there was a kind of non-category called ‘the
others’, which the authors also called ‘the conventionals’ (1975: 201). This
box also contains what were called in the 1950s the ‘eggheads’ or the ‘brain
trust’, and would today be called the ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’.19 All these terms
refer to very brainy but socially awkward boys, and here the terms refer to
their ‘tameness’ not only in the sense of school conformity, but to a kind of
(projected) asexuality. The classic nerd is visualized through metonyms that
136 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
say, all mind and no body: ‘. . . that kid . . . with the high water pants, the
vinyl pencil holder in his shirt pocket, the tortoise shell glasses with the tape
around the bridge. . . .’ (Ikeda, 1998: 16).
Finally, there is the lower right hand box (less capital/wild). These are the
students who exhibit bad behavior, bad dress, and bad attitudes. Their
position in this box, like the position of the jocks, appears to be based
entirely on their behavior and attitudes, but in fact they are often from low
capital family backgrounds. Eckert captures both the class background and
the ‘wild’ style among the ‘burnouts’ at the school she studied in the 1980s:
In the early 1980s, the stereotypic Belten High Burnout came from a
working class home, enrolled primarily in general and vocational courses,
smoked tobacco and pot, took chemicals, drank beer and hard liquor,
skipped classes, and may have had occasional run-ins with the police.
(Eckert, 1989: 3)
Other schools at other times had other terminologies. At the school
Hollingshead studied in the 1940s, they were called ‘the grubbies’. The term
calls attention to their appearance (‘they are not believed to be clean per-
sonally’) but they were also ‘trouble makers’ who have ‘no interest in school
affairs’ (1949: 221). In the 1950s and 1960s they were mostly called ‘hoods’
or ‘greasers’ (Schwartz and Merten, 1975: 200). The ‘hood’ term has
gangster associations,20 while the ‘greaser’ term has pejorative ethnic conno-
tations, referring primarily to Italian- or Hispanic-Americans who were seen
as using a lot of hair oil, or being unwashed, or both. The terminology starts
to evolve with the counterculture in the 1970s, so that the oppositional types
become defined by drug use (Eckert’s ‘burnouts’, Palonsky’s ‘hempies’) or
the all-purpose word for weird-dressing (from the point of view of the
dominant groups) countercultural types of that era, ‘freaks’ (Varenne, 1982,
1983: 246 ff.). Despite the evolution of the terminology, however, the
general characteristics of the type in this box remain the same – ‘wild’ in
terms of both school opposition and (real or imagined) heightened sexuality;
and modally lower- or working-class backgrounds.21
Each box also has a female counterpart of the male type. Among the
popular kids in the upper left hand box, the girls, like the boys, tend to come
from high capital families and to be respectful of parents and teachers. Here
we have Schwartz and Merten’s ‘socies’, and Gordon’s ‘Yearbook Queens’
and their courts (Gordon, 1957: 22), but often the girls are simply ‘the
popular girls’. In the jock box, the female counterparts in many schools are
simply the twirlers and cheerleaders (there were virtually no female sports
in the 1950s).22 The twirlers and cheerleaders, like the (upper) male jocks,
tend to come from higher capital families; like male jocks they are popular
in a ‘wild’ style, especially in terms of body-revealing costumes and move-
ments when they are performing their activities, but also a more generalized
style of sexual attractiveness in dress and demeanor. Moving to the lower

half of the table, both boxes are defined by relatively low capital, but again
we have the wild/tame distinction. In the egghead/average citizen box, the
female side consists to a great extent of the studious and/or mousy young
woman, who is a good citizen of the school but is seen as relatively asexual.
In contrast, the female side of the ‘hoods’ box contains those dreaded female
counterparts of the hoods, the ‘sluts’. ‘Sluts’ as types are the virtual embodi-
ments of sexual promiscuity; they are the negative type against which all
‘good girls’ define themselves (Schwartz and Merten, 1975; Canaan, 1986).
Having put this chart together, we must immediately take it at least partly
apart. In the first place, once again, the categories in each box are ‘social
types’, symbolic figures with a set of attributes which very few individuals
might actually match exactly, or even at all. Some class officers may have
been from poorer families, some hoods may be dropouts from high capital
families, and so forth. At the same time, many of the characteristics may not
even be real – the jocks may not be getting much sex, but they like to boast
about it; the sluttiness of young women in the lower right hand box is largely
a figment of classist and sexist imaginings (see especially Canaan, 1986), and
so forth. So to repeat: this is a symbolic system.
Second, as noted earlier, there may be a lot of blurring of the boundaries
between boxes. As we have seen, in some schools, or in some years, the jocks
and the class officers may overlap considerably; in others the class officers
and the nerds may overlap; in others the jocks and the hoods. While a
blurring of the boundary across the lower half of the table, between the
nerds and the hoods, is probably the rarest combination, one notes a certain
character type that crops up with some regularity in 1950s US films, the
nerdy hanger-on to the hoody gang.
Third, there may be people, or whole categories of people, who have a
very ambiguous relationship to the whole system. Some of the African-
American students in the Class of ’58 felt completely outside the system; the
same was true of some of the very poor white students, who attended the
school but who left immediately after school every day for what amounted
to full-time jobs, and barely participated in anything, either social or
academic. These were truly, from the point of view of those inside the
system, the ‘nobodies’.
Finally, it is probably worth repeating that to say there is a structure is
to say nothing about the ways in which students actually live it. On the one
hand, the structure is certainly constraining; otherwise it would not have the
emotional power and temporal durability it does. Thus people find them-
selves conforming to it even if they hate it, as many do. At the same time,
the real practices of students at every level and in every category are enor-
mously complex and often quite creative. That, however, is a separate
question and a separate article.
138 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
Permutations of the structure
Even though I am suggesting that most high schools over the past half
century or more have had some version of this structure (see notes 9 and
10), this does not mean that all high schools have been alike. On the
contrary, the character of different schools will vary enormously depending
on which social type is the dominant type in the local school culture, or, in
more contemporary jargon, which type ‘rules’. Probably the most common
configuration in the standard (that is, mostly white, working to middle class)
American public high school is for the jock box to be very large and influ-
ential, for jocks to ‘rule’ (see, for example, Henry, 1965; Eckert, 1989; Foley,
1990).
The rule of jocks (or of any single type) affects the character of all the
other categories. Jocks may overflow the boundaries of their box in many
ways – they may flood the class officer/popular student category, producing
complex hybrids of conformity and wildness. The ‘jocking’ of the whole
upper layer of the structure in turn tends to exacerbate the differences
between the jocks and the nerds, and to make nerd-baiting into a local sport.
Indeed the whole idea of ‘nerds’ in the negative (as opposed to ‘brainy’) sense
is almost certainly a jock invention, the jock view of non-dominant men.
For a horrendous example of a jocks-rule configuration, I refer the reader
to Bernard Lefkowitz’s brilliant book, Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and
the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb (1998). This is an account of the student
culture behind the group sexual assault of a retarded girl at Glen Ridge High
School, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, not far from Newark. Lefkowitz draws
a chilling portrait of a school, and indeed a community, in which violent,
out-of-control behavior on the part of boys from ‘good’ families was
condoned and indeed encouraged in the name of the enormous importance
of sports in the school, and a related, highly macho, construction of mascu-
linity.
Lefkowitz also makes visible the impact of jock rule on all the other social
types. Cheerleader girls enacted the worst travesties of unself-respecting
femininity. They pandered to the jock boys at the personal level; in addition
there were school rituals and events in which the official role of the girls was
to cater to and celebrate the boys and their athletic prowess (even when the
boys’ teams were not in fact winning very much, or when individual boys
were not performing very well). At the same time, to be outside this glorious
world of jocks and cheerleaders was to be the lowest of the low. Boys in the
band were not simply nerds but were called ‘band fags’ (‘fags’ is a pejora-
tive American term for homosexuals), not only by the students but by some
of the parents as well (see also Foley, 1990).
Other schools have other configurations. Working-class schools are
not exempt from this structure, but the ‘hood’ type may be much more
prominent there, as in the school described by Paul Willis in his classic

Learning to Labor (1977).23 Upper-class private schools also have the same
structure, but the ‘popular kids’ box is very large, and the schools would
have outsiders believe that virtually all of their students are good looking,
work hard academically, defer to authority, and go on to Harvard and Yale
(see, for example, Cookson and Persell, 1985).
Finally, there is Weequahic (and other very academically oriented public
schools), where some would argue that the nerd box was the strongest,
though in fact the situation was rather more complicated (as no doubt it is
in the other cases as well). Weequahic was about as different from jock-ruled
Glen Ridge High as a school could be, and indeed it was the Glen Ridge
book that finally made me realize Weequahic’s distinctiveness. Schemati-
cally, one could say that at Weequahic the whole left side of the table was
very strong – both the ‘class officer’ box of ‘popular kids’ and the ‘nerd’ box
of the studious, the shy, or the socially maladept. The jock box was very
small, as was the space of the ‘hoods’. They were low in numbers and not
very socially influential.
The strength of the whole left, or ‘tame’, side of the table changed all the
other values. For one thing, the nerds were not cut off and ridiculed, except
perhaps by a small handful of cheerleaders. In fact at Weequahic there was
no clear verbal category for these types; although the term shmoe, a Yiddish
word roughly equivalent to ‘nerd’, cropped up once or twice in my inter-
views, it was not widely employed in high school social discourse. For
another, the dominance of the ‘tame’ side of the table made jockiness slightly
ridiculous; sports were not very big at the school, and much of the outside
world thought that the phrase ‘Weequahic athletics’ was an oxymoron.24 (I
exaggerate, of course, and Weequahic was strong in a number of the
‘smaller’ sports such as swimming and track, but that was the reputation.)
Finally, the hood box had a distinctive quality in this context. Although
there were a few genuinely outlaw characters, most of the so-called hoods
were not very hoody, and were hoods purely by stereotype – class and ethnic
background, styles of dress, hair, and makeup – rather than by seriously
oppositional behavior.
This basically structural analysis allows us to break through the question
of the representativeness of Weequahic as an American high school. It allows
us to place the school, despite its distinctive ethnic composition, squarely
within the overall spectrum of American high schools, to see the ways in
which it both fully participates in the structure and yet has a distinctive
form. Many readers may suspect that the distinctive Weequahic configur-
ation – the strength of the tame, the small role of jocks, etc. – is related to
its high Jewish population, and I would not necessarily disagree with that.
But working with a structural framework in this context rather than with a
notion of ‘representativeness’ allows us to see how this 83 per cent Jewish
140 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
school is just as ‘representative’ as any other of a certain American (I am

tempted to say all-American) way of organizing student social life.
American culture?
I have produced a little table in this article that represents a high school
social taxonomy, a system of categories that sort people – with pain or
pleasure – socially, and the principles that underlie those categories. I have
also suggested that the structure that underlies this table – the ‘class’ oppo-
sition between more and less economic/cultural/emotional capital, on the
one hand, and the ‘personality’ opposition between social/sexual/genera-
tional ‘wildness’ and ‘tameness’ on the other, and their ongoing intersection
– operates as a deep grammar of social/economic/sexual/generational
relations of exceptionally long duration within ‘American culture’.
In many ways it seems absurd to call the US ‘a culture’, or the site of a
single culture. The country is huge, diverse, and constantly changing. And
yet, and yet. It is not difficult to see that the axes of the table represent a
minimum basis, a bottom line, of hegemonic American culture in its two
most important and distinctive dimensions: its profound ‘individualism’ and
its profound grounding in a capitalist economic order. The vertical axis of
the table is the axis of capitalism: ‘class’, ‘capital’ (everything from money
to consumer goods to loving families), social distinction, security and
poverty, the haves and have-nots. The top axis of the table is the axis of indi-
vidualism: personal charm, personal looks, personal talents, everything the
individual needs to ‘get ahead’ and to be esteemed and/or envied by one’s
peers. These points, I think, go a long way toward solving the mystery of
the extraordinary historical durability of the US high school social system;
the system is built on the fundamental axes of the culture as a whole.
Yet just as there are variations on the structure in relation to local vari-
ations of class, race, ethnicity, and so on, there are variations on the struc-
ture over time. Warren Susman has written a classic article on the shift in
American notions of selfhood from the importance of ‘character’ to the
importance of ‘personality’. He places this shift in the early decades of the
20th century, and links it especially to the growth of a culture of con-
sumerism over a culture of productivism. The idea of personality, empha-
sizing social magnetism by virtue of charm and style, contrasts with the idea
of character, emphasizing self-discipline and moral rectitude (Susman, 1984
[1973]). One tends to feel cautious about these binary shifts (from shame to
guilt, from traditional to modern, as if someone had flipped a switch), but
let us take it that there is something to the point. The effect would be that
the top axis of personality became even more individualistic, or at least
differently individualistic, than it had been before. At the same time, earlier
high school ethnographies suggest that the social class of origin of the
students was more visible in structuring the social hierarchies in the high
schools, and even had an impact on the teachers, insofar as they were con-
scious of the class backgrounds of their students, and felt the need to keep
prominent local citizens happy (Hollingshead, 1949; Gordon, 1957).
At least three things happened in the 1950s that generated further shifts
in the meanings of the terms, and in the relations between them, while still
preserving the basic structure. First, for a variety of historical reasons,
including the McCarthy witch hunt of Communists, ‘class’ more or less went
culturally underground, as it was associated with ‘class warfare’ and defined
as un- or anti-American. Thus, the top of the table – personality – became
even more accentuated than it had been, relative to a somewhat silenced
class axis. Second, to the extent that class remained visible largely through
consumer items, the meaning of class itself changed in a more individual
direction: it became less a marker of social and economic differences based
on ownership or labor, and more a series of ‘distinctions’ that could be
bought and displayed by individuals.
Third, there was the coming together of so-called ‘youth culture’ in the
1950s, with its own self-awareness, its own (heavily marketed) styles of
clothing, and its own ‘public culture’ of music, movies, cars, sex, and tele-
vision.25 It is important to note, first, that there was (and is) no single ‘youth
culture’. The most visible strand of post-war youth culture was the roman-
ticization of rebellious youth, as captured, for example, in the film Rebel
without a Cause (1955). But at the same time a serious, educationally com-
mitted youth was also interpellated or hailed (Althusser, 1969) by politicians
in the wake of the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the need for more
scientists, with more new ideas, to make the US competitive. Perhaps most
importantly, increasingly affluent youth were also identified and targeted by
the advertising industry, as consumer markets were expanded dramatically
during the extraordinary affluence of the 1950s. It is not difficult to see how
these variations in youth culture can be mapped onto the high school
categories: advertising/consumerism and the high capital, popular kids;
Sputnik and the ‘nerds’; James Dean and the ‘hoods’.
In addition, however, the emergence in the 1950s of a distinctive (if very
diverse) youth culture, both from the point of view of adults and from the
self-perceptions of young people themselves, no doubt fueled the high
emotional charge of the high school experience with which I began this
article. As both cause and effect, the emerging youth culture intensified the
construction of the high school as a relatively autonomous social space. The
emphasis shifted, to some extent, away from the high school’s educational
functions, and from its function of preparing young people for adult life,
and toward treating it as a kind of social world unto itself. Or, to turn the
point around, one could think of the social world operating in high schools
142 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
as the institutional base, the base in real, everyday practice, for the emerg-
ence of the post-war ‘youth culture’ that both built on and played with the
enduring grammar of ‘American culture’.
Acknowledgements
Thanks as always to Tim Taylor, in-house critic who always zeroes in on the
right things. Thanks to the editors, Loïc Wacquant and Paul Willis, for exten-
sive and enormously valuable comments, as well as for general enthusiasm. Paul
Willis’s comments in turn were partly based on written reports by Helen Wood
and Mats Trondman.
Notes
1 One could also make a list of movies about the hell of high school. The one
that comes immediately to mind is Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976).
2 On ‘American culture’, very variably conceived, see Potter, 1954; Warner,
1962 [1953]; Spradley and Rynkiewich, 1975; Varenne, 1986; Reynolds
and Norman, 1988; Plotnicov, 1990; Bellah et al., 1996 [1985]; Trencher,
2000.
3 Private schools for the children of the wealthy accepted only a small pro-
portion of the population, and among those, boarding schools, where the
child actually went away from home, took even fewer. Indeed, from the
point of view of a country that defined itself as largely middle class, these
private schools were seen as somewhat contrary to the American spirit.
This is changing now as an enlarged affluent upper-middle class is increas-
ingly sending its children to private schools, especially in urban areas.
4 I did not use a standardized questionnaire for the interviews. I simply had
a few prompting questions in my head which I would use as the occasion
arose, or as they seemed called for. I did not ask every person the same ques-
tions, nor do I try to quantify their answers. These were, above all, ethno-
graphic interviews, in which I largely let the interviewee take the lead. I was
interested in the responses they produced on their own, in response to the
general question, ‘So, tell me about your life since Weequahic.’
5 I coined the term Business/Professional Class, or BPC, because it is reason-
ably descriptive of the occupational makeup of this sector, and because I
wanted it to link up, in a later argument (n.d.a), with the Ehrenreichs’
(1979) Professional/Managerial Class, or PMC.
6 I put ‘real’ in quotes because, while the economic and/or occupational
differences are objective, sorting them into ‘classes’ always involves a
certain amount of arbitrariness.
7 All names are changed, but they retain their relevant ethnic connotations.
8 It is interesting that looks did not come up much in the interviews; this is
one of the few examples.
9 Before the 1950s: for the 1920s, see Fass, 1977; the Vonnegut quote used
earlier refers to the 1930s (Vonnegut was Class of 1940); for the 1940s, see
Warner et al., 1944 and Hollingshead, 1949.
10 The 1950s and later in date order: Gordon, 1957; Parsons, 1959; Coleman,
1961; Henry, 1965 [1963]; Palonsky, 1975; Schwartz and Merten, 1967,
1975; Varenne, 1982, 1983; Canaan, 1986; Eckert, 1989; Foley, 1990;
Chang, 1992; Bettie, 2000. There is also a large literature on ‘youth culture’
which partially overlaps with high school studies. I especially want to
mention here William Graebner’s outstanding Coming of Age in Buffalo:
Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (1990).
11 There is a large literature on the American denial of class. References would
include DeMott (1990) and Vanneman and Cannon (1987).
12 Think too of the Roth character from the Weequahic section dating the rich
suburban girl in Goodbye Columbus (1960).
13 The cashmere sweater appears to have been a virtual fetish in the 1940s and
1950s. It is not only mentioned in several of my interviews, but it also shows
up in this discussion of a Midwestern high school of the same era:
Of course, everyone longs for the cashmere sweater, but in case you can’t
afford that you’ll have to take wool. (Gordon, 1957: 116)
Cashmere sweaters are now worn by the right crowd . . . . (Gordon,
1957: 117)
At the other end of the class spectrum, one is reminded of the fetishistic
quality attributed by Carolyn Steedman to her mother’s desire for a certain
coat, in Steedman’s working class memoir (1986).
14 This issue is beautifully explored in Sennett and Cobb’s classic, The Hidden
Injuries of Class (1973).
15 The phrase is a variant of the title of Katherine Newman’s book on middle
class downward mobility, Declining Fortunes (1993).
16 In the American context, it also has complex relationships with race and
ethnicity, but this question is beyond the scope of the present article. See
Ortner (1998).
17 I have had many problems with Parsons’s work, in terms of both his theor-
etical orientation and his often soporific writing style. But I found this
particular article quite interesting. Besides an astute discussion of the
relationship between social class and success in school, there was a
critical discussion of jock sexism in high schools (1959: 316), which I
appreciated.
18 Michael Peletz (personal communication) suggested that the terms for the
people on the top, from the point of view of those in the bottom categories,
144 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
may be equally pejorative: brown-nose, suckup, goody-goody, etc. But those

voices are rarely heard.
19 I suspect that this category increased among the ‘average citizens’ in the
1950s, as a result of the Sputnik boost of brainy science boys. But I have
no data on this phenomenon.
20 Loïc Wacquant tells me that ‘hoods’ as a label for the alienated tough guys
in the high schools derives from the word ‘neighborhood’ and has links to
the idea of gangs, which are usually neighborhood-based. This has been true
in recent years, but I think the term in the 1950s derived from ‘hoodlums’,
a term for criminal gangsters.
21 During the countercultural era (late 1960s to the early 1970s), the druggies
and freaks also contained a significant element of middle-class dropouts.
Nonetheless, the type itself remained linked to a working-class and/or
African-American oppositional style. Indeed, that was its attraction for
oppositional middle-class kids.
22 It would be interesting to see what the growth of female sports has done to
the system. This point has come up in discussion after talks, and from scat-
tered comments I gather that it does not change the overall structure very
much.
23 Also inner city schools (see Cousins, 1994).
24 In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth quotes the famous cheer:
Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam,

We’re the boys who eat no ham,
We play football, we play soccer,
We keep matzos in our locker. (Roth, 1967: 56)
The origins of the cheer are unknown. It could have been coined by non-
Jews ridiculing Weequahic athletics, or it could have been coined by the
famously self-ironizing Jews themselves. Thanks to ‘P. R.’ himself for a
timely response to a query about where he had quoted the cheer.
25 There was also a youth culture in the 1920s – see Fass, 1977. But it tended
to be much more elite. The 1950s youth culture was based largely in the
middle class, and it had important, if ambiguous, links to the working class.
For the culture and politics of the 1950s, see Baritz, 1982; Graebner, 1990;
Halberstam, 1993; Hine, 1986; Jezer, 1982; O’Neill, 1986; Samuelson, 1995.
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148 E t h n o g r a p h y 3(2)
■ SHERRY B. ORTNER is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia

University. She has worked for many years with the Sherpas of
Nepal and has recently turned her attention to the US. She has also
made contributions in feminist theory and broader social and
cultural theory. Recent books include Making Gender: The Politics
and Erotics of Culture (Beacon Press, 1996); Life and Death on Mt.
Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (Princeton
University Press, 1999); and an edited volume, The Fate of ‘Culture’:
Clifford Geertz and Beyond (University of California Press, 1999).
Address: Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 452
Schermerhorn Ext., New York, NY 10027, USA.
[email: sbo3@columbia.edu] ■

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01 Ortner (JG/d) 1/5/02 2:38 pm Page 115

‘Burned like a tattoo’

ABSTRACT ■ This article is part of a larger ethnographic and

K E Y W O R D S ■ class, distinction, US high schools, prestige

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 117

The place and the project

Figure 1 Map of southwest Newark, New Jersey (USA), showing Weequahic

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 119

that I was able to fill in questionnaires on some of the non-participants from

■ Business/professional class (BPC)5: 55 individuals, or 27 per cent

Memories and categories

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 121

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 123

Figure 3 One each of the jocks, twirlers, and cheerleaders of the

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 125

One of my other stock questions was whether people remembered ‘class’ or

Walter Markowitz: Money didn’t mean anything in high school, everybody

Franklin Bodnar: [whose father was an auto mechanic] We were talking

Similarly, interviewees rarely invoked the interior furnishings of houses.

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 127

Weequahic High School’s most famous alumnus, novelist Philip Roth,

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 129

on clothes. And within the category of clothes in the 1950s, cashmere

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 131

Deconstructing high school

‘Class’ includes material resources, as well as less tangible assets –

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 133

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 135

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 137

style of sexual attractiveness in dress and demeanor. Moving to the lower

Permutations of the structure

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 139

prominent there, as in the school described by Paul Willis in his classic

school is just as ‘representative’ as any other of a certain American (I am

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 141

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 143

may be equally pejorative: brown-nose, suckup, goody-goody, etc. But those

Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam,

Althusser, Louis (1969) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 145

Ortner ■ ‘ Burned like a tattoo’ 147

■ SHERRY B. ORTNER is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia

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