Abstract
In this article I report observations from an ethnographic study of a Swedish economic elite community, including interviews with residents and service staff, and participant observations in various social contexts stretching over a period of five years that can contribute to an understanding of how elite communities respond to potential social deviance among its members, such as feelings of insufficiency and stress, thus trying to avoid any ‘desecration’ of their social and cultural capital. Specifically, I examine how the practices through which desecration is avoided, for example the exclusion of unwanted members, interplay in the further consecration of the communities, thus maintaining and strengthening elites’ status and standing, Studying the problems and difficulties experienced by elites in their neighborhood settings, and how they try to manage them, is potentially an important step forward to better analyze and understand the way powerful groups in contemporary society maintain and strengthen their privileges and power.
Highlights
Research on deprived communities and neighborhoods, studies of ‘elite communities’, that is, the places where elites choose to live and exert their dominion, remain rare: Relatively few sociologists and other social scientists have examined how elite groups live in geographically distinct places, and how their communities affect their identities and selves as elites
Consecration is critical to elites’ legitimacy to act as powerful groups in society at large, and the way their communities are sacralized as superior places in social and moral terms legitimizes inequality
Desecration of elite communities comes about when residents fail to effectively reproduce dominant social norms, such as when they act in a way that is ‘socially deviant’, voluntarily and deliberately, as in protests, criticism, whistleblowing, criminal activity and so on, or involuntarily, as when being mentally or physically ill, not wanting or being unable to uphold an image of a supreme community lifestyle, as presented to others
Summary
Despite the standard images of elite communities’ consecration as offered by sociologists and other social scientists, there is some evidence that challenges the idea of the ‘positive side’ of consecration. If the social fears and problems of elites are exposed and examined systematically, a new understanding of how they constantly try to reproduce themselves may be gained: Effectively managing residents’ real and potential failures to uphold central norms and values is a critical, yet so far unexplored, aspect of elite communities’ consecration that can contribute to explaining why These places appear so successful in appearing as ‘shining cities upon a hill’ (Fitzgerald, 1981; Pincon and Pincon-Charlot, 2007; Wiesel, 2018). The present article’s focus may offer some methodological guidance in how to make the world of elites more accessible for scholarly inquiry and analysis
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