Ethnography Among the British Upper Middle Classes: Writing About Or Writing a Gentry Class?.

ISBN-10: 1473998123
ISBN-13: 9781473998124
Category: Elite (Social sciences)
Language: English
Published: 2016
Author: Daniel R. Smith

Description

This case study is concerned with the writing of an ethnography about young upper-middle-class British people. Against the backdrop of a published ethnographic monograph, Elites, Race and Nationhood: The Branded Gentry, the case study explores how the empirical subject matteran ethnography of a bbrand, Jack Wills, and their upper-middle-class participantsgave rise to re-interpreting British social class through a bygone category: gentry. Ethnography is, simply, writing about culture. As such, part of the ethnographic process is engaging in the production of social categories and concepts as much as rendering apparent the cultural universe under consideration. In this case study, I outline how and why an archaic class category may be able to be utilized for its ability to shed new light on existing accounts of class and culture in British society. Taking into account that ethnography necessarily ends up as written texts, the case study explores how ethnographic methods require dialogue with texts, people, and practices so as to fully elucidate the novel aspects of social life it captures. By so doing, it brings to light new information about existing social problems. In this regard, the literary construction of a "gentry" out of historical context does not do violence to social reality; instead, it shows how longstanding notions of belonging and class distinction become reimagined in relation to present social-economic arrangements.

Get the book

Similar books

The fall and rise of the English upper class: Houses, kinship and capital since 1945
By Daniel R. Smith
... among top British wealth holders' in A. Giddens and M. Stanworth (eds) Elites and Power in British Society ... Ethnography amongst the British upper-middle classes: writing about or writing a gentry class?', SAGE Research Methods Cases ...
Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth Century
By Adam Kuper
'Malinowski had no sense for social organization,' Meyer Fortes complained, 'he had no real understanding of kinship or political organization.'35 Enter, or rather re-enter, Radcliffe-Brown. In 1937, the year in which Witch- craft, ...
Cultural Anthropology: A Global Perspective
By Raymond Scupin
A Global Perspective Raymond Scupin ... As discussed in Chapter 6, contemporary anthropologists view cultural evolution as multilineal with tremendous variations within these different forms of societies depending on ecological, ...
Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach
By Richard H. Robbins, Rachel A. Dowty Beech
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lutz, Catherine, and Anne Lutz Fernandez. 2010. Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effects on Our Lives.
Romantic Relationships in a Time of ‘Cold Intimacies’
By Julia Carter, Lorena Arocha
This book addresses the nature of intimacy and relationships in a time of what Eva Illouz characterizes as ‘cold intimacies’.
Encyclopedia of Anthropology
By H. James Birx
... 1590, 1996–1997, 2284–2285 Redistribution, 160 Redshift, 351 Rees, Martin, 81 Rees, William, 2255 Reflectionism, 604, 607 Reflexive anthropology, 277 Reflexivity, 188, 397,851,2341 Reform Judaism, 1343–1344 Refugees, 183 Registers, ...
The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics
By Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell, Thomas F. Carter
Alan M. Klein, Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Klein, Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction ... Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.
The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945
By Daniel R. Smith
By exploring the history of English society's passage to capitalism and its curious class structure, this book examines the writings of upper-class figures - from Rory Stewart to Roger Scruton - to illustrate how anxieties about the future ...
Writing the South African San: Colonial Ethnographic Discourses
By Lara Atkin
She is co-author with Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, and Nathan Garvey of Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (Palgrave New Directions in Book History, 2019). xi CHAPTER 1 Literature and ...
Learning and Using Languages in Ethnographic Research
By Robert Gibb, Annabel Tremlett, Julien Danero Iglesias
The volume aims to promote a wider debate among researchers about how they themselves learn and use different languages in their work, and to help future fieldworkers make more informed choices when carrying out ethnographic research using ...