American Individualism and Social Class Revisited

Abstract

My research in New York was primarily an effort to improve upon the rather generic anthropological conceptions of the Western individualistic self in which social class is barely addressed and most often only one kind of individualism is acknowledged. Insofar as my research points to different kinds of individualism in America, I try to complexify and dehomogenize the generic American or Western self used as a foil in so many anthropology texts. The questions I am primarily concerned with are: What meanings does individualism have for parents and teachers from different social classes in Manhattan and Queens? How are these different meanings a reflection of each community’s ultimate concerns and daily living conditions? How do various individualisms perhaps reflect different conceptions of the child’s self as well as different class visions of their child’s life trajectory? How can we understand the reproduction of social inequality better by understanding the reproduction of class differences, particularly the socialization of class-based individualisms? And finally, how are these class differences in individualism passed on to children as natural and self-evident and hence go uncontested and misrecognized? How do different individualistic styles become part of the child’s habitus? In this chapter are brief descriptions of the theoretical frameworks that have helped me think about these questions.