Harvard Munch Club: BDSM subculture

The recent institutional recognition of Harvard College Munch has been shocking our middle class sensibilities and causing a slew of media articles. According to its constitution, Munch is a group for students interested in kinky sexuality to meet, and organize relevant events—speakers, discussions, screenings and demos. Its purpose is to create a safe forum for students to discuss their sexuality and problems in their relationships, and to promote a positive and accurate understanding of kinky sexuality on campus.

The Atlantic reports on BDSM at Harvard, and the incorporation of BDSM into the mainstream:

This story has been getting lots of attention. Fox News is shocked, The Daily Mail is breathless, and Gawker is amused. But none of these pick-ups note how Harvard is a bit derrière on the Ivy League BDSM support group trend. "The popularity of 50 Shades of Grey has accelerated a mainstreaming of the BDSM subculture already underway," The New York Observer's Rachel R. White reported earlier this month.

Like the excerpt notes, BDSM has been a popular topic this year ever since the Fifty Shades trilogy brought BDSM into national media attention. Its status as a subculture will only remain so long as it remains disruptive and has relative independence from forms of media. The subculture's independence from media has been decreasing as more documentation of the practices and objects of BDSM have surfaced, but the BDSM lifestyle still has the ability to "shock" more conservative readers, as evidenced by the disapproving comments found in the Crimson about this topic. On the other hand, the Crimson's op-ed, voicing its support for Munch will lead to a decline in BDSM's status as a subculture and the dominant hegemony subsumes it into the mainstream.

 

One way that Harvard College Munch (specifically) has remained independent from the hegemony of the dominant class has been by avoiding media exposure of individual members. Munch members are kept anonymous. It is also difficult to find extensive documentation of the culture of Munch members unless you are on their email list, which assumes that you've been accepted into that subculture already.

This subculture is also influenced by class. For example, one BDSM/Fetish demographic survey done by Gloria G. Brame, PhD in 1999 revealed that 63 percent of people who participated in BDSM/fetish had middle class incomes. 62 percent had parents who had middle income as well. Of course, some of this data is outdated, so it is difficult to say how relevant it is today. However, it is still a high enough percentage to take note of. The following two results are from the released survey results.

 

4. How would you describe your household income?
Middle Income	4411	63%
Upper Income	1456	21%
Low Income	1016	14%
Wealthy	114	2%
5. How would you describe your parents' household income when you were growing up?
Middle Income	4344	62%
Low Income	1407	20%
Upper Income	1117	16%
Wealthy	129	2%

These results suggest a link between those who identify themselves as having "middle" income and those who participate in the kink community. Perhaps those with more time and money on their hands were able to indulge in kinks. After all, kink objects range from cheap plastic handcuffs to expensive toys. Thus, those with more money will have a greater ability to explore their kink. Even designing complicated rope constraints takes a certain amount of leisure time, something people with greater distance from economic necessity can afford to do.

Seriously, who has time to learn how to make this kind of rope formation?

Dog collars, a throwback to the Punk subculture, now used as a fetish object.

The Riches: Using Symbols to Create Identity

The Riches is an FX original American television series that focuses on a family of Irish Traveller con artists. The family consists of the parents, Dahlia and Wayne Malloy, and their children, Di Di, Cael, and Sam. At the beginning of the series, the Malloy family is escaping from a botched Traveller clan reunion in an RV. While on the road, the Malloy family gets into an altercation and RV chase with another Traveller family. During the chase, the Malloys accidentally kill another family travelling on the road: the eponymous Riches.

It turns out that the Riches were just on their way to move into a new neighborhood in Baton Rouge, LA. They also happen to have all their personal items with them, including identification documents. Wayne convinces the family to assume the identity of the Riches. The shows follow their attempts to blend in in an extremely wealthy community and keep their stolen identities a secret 

The Malloys went from this...

...to this

The family pick up the semiotic codes of the wealthy in order to create a new identity for themselves in their new environment. Owning "a beautiful wife", "a multi-million dollar home" and "a fancy car" are outward signs of wealth. However, semiotic codes are manifested in subtle things as well, such as hobbies. For example, when Dahlia tests her daughter on her hobbies, her daughter's "hobbies" include fencing, skiing, racquetball  and sex/chess. The semiotics codes are a conduit through which differences in power and hierarchy are communicated. Travellers in The Riches call everyone who is not a traveller a "buffer", which essentially denotes them as a law-abiding citizen and an easy mark for a con-artist. The difference in hierarchy can be seen in the slang that travellers use and the language the Malloy family encounter in their new lifestyle, among other things.

Their travails show how class differences are socially constructed; their ability to de-construct the wealthy lifestyle and re-incorporate the codes they find into their own behavior show how human efforts can overcome initial structural conditions. Wayne's desire to keep the new, high-class lifestyle he conned his way into symbolizes the desire of the lower class or the middle class to achieve a higher status. Wayne's optimism that "we can make [their con] real" symbolizes the American dream to achieve the class status you want by adopting the semiotic codes of the class position you desire to have.

Hipsters: Subculture is dead

I am tired of talking about hipsters. This is a group whose dress, attitude, and taste have been adopted by so many people that it can not even be considered a subculture anymore. This is ironic, because hipsters pride themselves on being separated from the mainstream. However, their presence has been so documented that it has now become mainstream. Hipster clothing is mass-produced by stores like Anthropology, Free People, and Urban Outfitters. Hipster styles can be found in magazines, chain stores, and almost everywhere I look. There is even a handbook on how to be a hipster. Everyone is a hipster nowadays. Even denying that you are a hipster can be a form of hipster-ism. 

This video sums up the history and codes of being a hipster quite nicely. It also presents a paradox to of being a hipster nowadays:

Hipsters are definitely not a subculture, though they used to be. In class, we talked about how resistance and struggle are key in forming subcultures. For example, each British youth subculture was subversive to what was considered 'normal'. However, there is nothing in hipster style, attitude, or taste which "contradicts the myth of consensus" (as put by Dick Hebdige in Subculture)--the myth of consensus being the codes of the dominant hegemony (e.g. the middle class). 

 

From Key themes in Media Theory by Dan Laughey:

Subcultures operate through a system of oppositional codes that offend the majority, threaten the status quo and contradict the 'myth of consensus' suggested by dominant codes (Hebdige 1979: 18)

Laughey defines a subculture as "an underground set of practices -- usually working-class in character -- that try to resist surveillance by the dominant culture (e.g. police) as well as incorporation into mainstream culture. A subculture ceases to exist when it becomes incorporated, manufactured and packaged by commercial interests.

If this picture below presents accepted objects and style of a hipster...

  Let's see how well Urban Outfitters follow it:

Well, we've got the blazer, the cuffed pants, and white converse (or white shoes that look like converse). And that's just one picture from the fall men's catalog.

Part of why hipsters became incorporated into the mainstream is because of the internet and media. The video above cites the creation of hipster-parody memes which really brought hipsters to the attention of the general public.

Illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme, who just recently published The Unknown Hipster Diaries (which was compiled from his blog titled The Unknown Hipster) says, "subculture is dead. In this age, subcultures become documented immediately and therefore are mainstream instantly."

I agree that the presence of Reddit, Tumblr, and Lookbook have created outlets to document the rise of any subculture. The more interconnected we become, the faster subcultures become incorporated into the mainstream, and the harder it gets to create subversion. To preserve subculture then, will be to avoid media exposure. 

High culture poetry, or just noise?

I went to a poetry reading last January to see final project presentations for some people in a creative writing program. The creative writing arts intensive taught students to use digital media to alter or create poetry. Most people recorded themselves reading a poem, and then added sound to the poetry reading. One girl, however, altered her piece in such a way that many of the attendees had difficulty understanding her piece. She explained afterwards that her "poetry" was actually a comment on poetry itself. The self-referential nature of her final project parallels the field of art in high culture.

Here is how the audience experienced her presentation:
First, we heard sounds of people talking indistinctly. It sounded like the ambient noise one would hear in a crowded cafe. Then, there was a laugh that was quite loud and distinct. The audience laughed along; the laugh was so out of place that we found it funny. There were more indistinct noises, and then another laugh. The audience laughed again, but a little less this time. We were beginning to wonder what the piece was about. This pattern of indistinct noises and then laughter continued for almost ten minutes. People were already bored after three. Many of us kept waiting for something to happen but eventually realized that this was the entire piece. At the end, most of the audience was either confused or annoyed.

The girl explained afterwards that she had taken a poetry reading Jack Kerouac had done once when he visited Lowell dining hall. However, she had taken out Kerouac's voice and only left the background noises. To me, she had not created poetry, but removed it. The directors of the creative writing program however praised her piece for the questions it raised about the nature of poetry. In doing so, they acted as critics within the field of poetry who held opinions informed by an understanding of poetry's history and context. The directors, having high cultural capital, were able to understand the direction that the girl was going in, namely altering a poetry reading in order to comment on the nature of poetry as well. Too bad the rest of the audience, being outside the field, didn't understand her message. To the audience, her piece was merely noise.

This is what we heard...

This is what we were missing...

Primed for a career

Professor Nelson joked, during his lecture on bobos, that everyone attending Harvard is being primed to be a bobo, While it may make sense that most of us are being primed to be in the similar class when we graduate, we should also recognize that our class backgrounds and habitus may still put people in different positions after graduating. For example, my classmate whose father is a partner at Goldman Sachs will have a much different experience in the finance industry than I will have. He grew up being primed to go into investment banking, whereas I started out the job search without any inside knowledge or any personal connections that could help me land an internship.

These careers and the type of people who go into these careers are reproduced through habitus. Professor Nelson showed the class several pictures of celebrities who were essentially primed to go into showbiz. Angelina Jolie's father is Jon Vaught, an American actor who won one Academy Award, out of four nominations and three Golden Globe awards out of nine nomination. Taking after her father, Jolie has received one Academy Award and three Golden Globe awards as well.

I expect that many of the careers that my peers chose will be heavily influenced by what their parents did as well. Their choice might be a response to their parent's position, but it will still have been shaped by their parent's career choice.

The business card scene from American Psycho: how I imagine investment banking must be like at the top.

We Made This Movie: A Search For Authenticity

We Made This Movie--abbreviated as WMTM for the purposes of this post--is about a generation of kids who are desperate to make something but have nothing to say. Like hipsters who draw from the past to define their consumer choices, and people who take the same picture and add different captions to create a meme, our generation seems bounded by what already exists. Our nature is to create but we can't find anything creative to say, so we're re-purposing and recreating what already exists in a desperate effort to break into new ground. The way WMTM avoids this depressing reality is by creating a moment of true (creative) authenticity at the end when LeBron realizes that his movie is really about the personal stories of himself and his friends. Even though it by accident, his persistence allowed him to created a “break” in the culture industry (as used by critical theorists in the Frankfurt school). He (re)discovered what it means to create something of value. Value doesn't come from ripping off Jackass or Borat; value comes from saying something authentic about the condition of human existence. .

I still think this generation has something to say. Like LeBron in the earlier stages of the movie, we are simply still in the process of understanding what is worth saying. Perhaps a break will eventually surface, but in a way that requires a paradigm shift in our understanding of authentic creation. Sure, all these memes are the same thing, but perhaps we can mine from the captions some message that tells us something true about human existence, and that will be our new creative form.

So basically, WMTM is an allegory about finding authenticity, and I would say it succeeded.

Thrift Shop: a celebration of the lower class

"Thrift Shop", performed by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, defies the hegemony of the dominating class by giving status to codes of the lower class. "Thrift Shop" is a manifesto on the glories of bargain hunting, starting with the hook which describes the experience as "f--- awesome" and the bridge which describes the clothing as "incredible" (or at least making the wearer look incredible). and The song lyrics glorify characteristics of Holt's LCCs as outlined in Distinction in America.

[Hook]

I'm gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket
I - I - I'm hunting, looking for a come-up
This is fucking awesome

 [Bridge]

I wear your granddad's clothes
I look incredible
I'm in this big ass coat
From that thrift shop down the road

Many of the settings and objects in the video exemplify LCC taste. Holt found that LCCs want to have lots of space in the house and yard and desire luxury goods, whereas HCCs consider abundance and luxury crass. The materialist taste of LCCs manifests itself in the first major scene of the video, in which Macklemore is shown getting into what looks to be a luxury car in the driveway of a mansion. Macklemore's giant fur coat and the clothing he describes wearing in the club scene (leopard mink and gator shoes) is another example of LCC taste: the coat (despite its cost) is showy and ostentatious--a clear cry for attention.

The clothing that Macklemore re-claims for himself (from your "grammy, your aunty, your momma, your mammy") is a symbol of creating pseudo-identity using consumer goods. These clothes are hand-downs from other people. By combining these cast-offs Macklemore makes a new identity that looks cool but is not authentic. Contrast that, of course, with the aesthetic taste of HCCs, who value authenticity in their style.

Macklemore is just concerned with saving money, though, regardless of the style and even of the quality (buying a cheap coat even though it smells like piss). The lyrics emphasize how cool the clothes look despite their costs. This focus getting the most value out of your dollar is a value of LCC. Bargain hunting is an activity that people with lower cultural capital tend to value; it's an example of using utilitarian means to achieve ends.

Finally, the video and song challenge hegemony by glorifying an activity indicative of lower cultural class status. In "Thrift Shop", paying $50 for a Gucci t-shirt earns criticism from Macklemore, not praise. He calls out the owner as a "ignorant bitch" who is getting "tricked by business". Additionally, this lyric argues that the man with a expensive, brand-name shirt is just as victim to the culture industry and false consciousness as anyone else because the shirt is mass produced. Macklemore criticizes a man for wearing the same shirt as six other people. Neither person has achieved authenticity. Both reclaiming "unique" pieces and wearing mass-produced items fall under the culture industry. However, Macklemore challenges the value of authenticity, and the values of HCC in general. His pride in his LCC elevates the status of LCCs to that comparable to HCCs.

Side note: I have no idea what the woman in the video is supposed to represent in terms of class and culture, but her presence is hilarious.

Chelsea Handler: in which objects reveal class

Conan and Chelsea's exchange about cars in the above video reveal how financial and cultural capital create differences in tastes and consumption practices. Chelsea has high financial and cultural capital as a talk show host who is now a "super successful" celebrity. Her financial capital allowed her to buy a Bentley, a luxury car brand owned by Rolls-Royce. Although I know very little about cars, I could tell through Conan's reaction to Chelsea that owning a Bentley must be a big status symbol.

Later, I asked my roommate, "What kind of people do you associate with Bentleys?" to which she responded: "Rich people. They're really expensive, but typically older gentlemen drive Bentleys because they care more about cars."

On the other hand, though Conan has high financial and cultural capital as well, he owned a Ford Taurus. Again, I didn't know the exact significance of owning a Ford Taurus, but I could tell by Chelsea's disbelief that a Ford Taurus must be on the less expensive end of the car industry; Chelsea's surprised seemed to stem from disparity between Conan's cultural and financial capital and his car taste. As another successful talk show host, one would expect Conan to own a car brand more "befitting" a person with high cultural capital. However, Conan's pride in his car brand reveals a stronger tie to humble beginnings than Chelsea holds, despite evidence that both Chelsea and Conan grew up in working class families (Chelsea's father working as a used car salesman and Conan's father drove a car that was missing the floor).

Later, I looked up the prices of Bentleys and Ford Taurus. Turns out the price of a Bentley can range from $200,000 to $500,000. The Ford Taurus, on the other hand, has a cost that ranges from $25,000 to $40,000.

Ciritcal Theory: Facebook + Instagram

Instagram

6981 up, 5708 down

April 26, 2012 Urban Word of the Day Every hipster's favorite way to make it look like they take really classy pictures when really they are still using their phones. Yeah, you might look really cute/old school/vintage/retro, but it's still a cell phone picture. Photographer: Hey man, look at this picture I took with my Canon 5D Mark II camera and edited in photoshop! Hipster: No way man, look at this picture that I took on my phone with instagram! It's even better! Photgrapher: *FACEPALM*

Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in August is a perfect marriage of two products whose users exude psuedo-individuality and spectatorship. On Facebook, users become defined by their 'Likes', their interactions with other people, their photos, and their friends. Very little of how we portray ourselves on Facebook comes from actual individuality. This is most apparent with the 'Likes' page, in which our tastes and our interests come almost directly from mass-produced forms of media or entertainment.

The culture of taking pictures just to put them on Facebook becomes a form of staging one's life, rather than living it. This occurs with Instagram as well. The abundance of pictures on food for example, reveals how people focus more on taking pictures of food, rather than actually eating it.

Instagram allows anyone to create "artistic" looking photos just by adding a filter. It's standardized artistic photos, and commercialized it. You can now sell your instagram photos online. What's considered "good" in the photography world is now being judged by the masses. Even "bad" instagrams can sell. This applies well to Bordieu's concept of fields. Fields try to become autonomous of the market, but in this case, the market dominates what is good and bad for this kind of photography.

Spring Break in the Hamptons

"What did you do over spring break?"
"I went to a friend's house in the Hamptons. What about you?"
"That Hamptons?! That's so Gossip Girl of you! I'm at home. Your life is so exciting!"

This phone call happened a year ago, and it was the first of many breaks I would experience with my friends from home. Even though my family did not own any summer homes, two of my freshman year roommates owned houses in Cape Cod, and another guy living on my floor owned a house in the Hamptons, which he later invited me and six others to vacation at for Spring Break. Since I have arrived on campus, I have been made used to the idea of summer homes. I no longer balk at the idea of someone I know living in a house on 5th Ave in New York, but I also recognize such things as symbols of the upper class. 

For example, you can see the backyard through the windows. It's not very clear, but in the upper left hand corner is the edge of the tennis court. We all decided to take a picture in my friend's sitting room, which was decorated with a lot of blue and yellow, with blue China everywhere.

At the same time, some parts of the fabulously wealthy lifestyle still make me uncomfortable, because they go against my middle class upbringing. For example, my friend's family employed a housekeeper. I was not used to having somebody, other than my mother, picking up after me. My friend's mom also had the cooks come to the house each night to cook us dinner. It wasn't strange at all for my friend, who had grown up with cooks and housekeepers, but it was strange for me, because I was being served food but I also didn't have a customer-server relationship with the cooks.

We took a picture with most of the group. The housekeeper is in the middle; she's the black blur wearing all white.

Because I now have such different life experiences than my friends from home, I can't consider myself part of their status group. At the same time, I'm not like my new Harvard friends, because my family does not have a summer home I can vacation at whenever I want. I suppose I am still in limbo now.

Kendrick Lamar, "Black Boy Fly"

Rolling Stone calls up and coming rap artist Kendrick Lamar "a storyteller, not a braggart or punch-line rapper, setting spiritual yearnings and moral dilemmas against a backdrop of gang violence and police brutality." Kendrick was born and raising in Compton, CA. The turbulence of his childhood feature prominently in his lyrics. "Black Boy Fly" is one particularly autobiographical song on his first major album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, which dropped October 22, 2012.

Rap Genius has a great breakdown of the meanings and references embedded in each lyric of "Black Boy Fly."

The song describes Lamar's experiences growing up in the black lower class where "every neighborhood is an obstacle" and being jealous of two of his peers who were making it out of Compton whereas he felt trapped. His experiences are similar to the experiences the Rivers family have in There Are No Children Here; his neighborhood seems submerged in "crime waves," "guns bursting", a pervasive understanding or belief that "only one in a million will ever see better days." Lamar doubts if he'll ever make it. His frustration increases when he sees classmate Arron Afflalo graduate with honors and leave Compton with a bright basketball future ahead.

Lamar's decreasing hopes of leaving Compton are reflective of Bordieu's culture of poverty theory. In Bordieu's theory, the disadvantaged adjust their aspirations to what they expect their life chances to be. Agents are strategic actors who are simply responding to the structural disadvantages thy face each day. Lamar raps that "Compton made you believe success wasn't real" and that "I never believed the type of performance that I could do." Both exemplify the act of adjusting one's aspirations to one's expectations, which is a response to the perceived lack of opportunity coming from one's socioeconomic position and results in self-defeating behavior.

Many of the songs on his album talk about typical experiences of a person growing up in a low income neighborhood and the issues they face growing up.

Power: Inequalities in Social Exchange

I went to a lecture presented by Brodwyn Fischer, a professor of history at Northwestern University yesterday, called "Poverty, Social Intimacy, and the Politics of Inequality in Post-Abolition Brazil". The topic focused on urban inequality in Brazill between the 19th century and mid 20th century. It specifically looked at Recife, Brazil as a case study. 

Fischer began the lecture by examining the function of inequality in Brazilian cities, which she claimed to be at the foundations of Brazilian society. In Recife, survival depended partly on social networks. To survive, it was important to make friends with people a few levels higher on a vertical hierarchy.

“Access to any form of power, prestige, and upward mobility depended on vertical power relations,” Fischer said. She also said that people in Recife relied heavily on social networks for survival. Although Fischer didn't elaborate on what survival in Brazil generally meant, she did point to one case study in which a hierarchical relations trumped race and allowed a darker-skinned but better connected man to avoid being condemned in a rape trial. The result of this hierarchy was vertical dependence and increased inequality.

In many ways, this reflect's Blau's theories of social exchange, in which all social exchange is based on imbalances in power.

Strategic alliances were made between the person without much power and the person with greater power in order to survive. As a result, those who had greater social capital and a higher social status held power in society; they were the dominating class. The subordinate class had to depend on this hierarchical system in order to survive. This also reflects Weber's framework of society, because people have a certain amount of power based on their position in society. However, it also incorporates Marx's theory of domination, because the subordinate class depends on the dominant class for survival (like how the worker depends on wages for survival) and get exploited as a result.

Affirmative Action: Culture as Capital

The Crimson published an opinion piece by Sarah Siskind that has been attracting a lot of controversy lately for Siskind's treatment of affirmative action. What's been getting Siskind so much press has been this section:

Race-based affirmative action attempts to target these groups: the discriminated against, the poor, and those with unique experiences and intellectual merits. However, affirmative action is fundamentally flawed because it uses race instead of targeting these groups themselves. Less academically qualified applicants should be treated as such, unless they come from poorer households and therefore do not have access to the same amount of resources as other applicants. However, this would be class-based affirmative action, not race-based.

Helping those with primarily low academic qualifications into primarily academic institutions makes as much sense as helping the visually impaired become pilots. How would you feel if you were assured before going into surgery that your surgeon was the beneficiary of affirmative action in medical school? I do not see why higher academic institutions should lower their standards for admission.

Siskind's piece discourages the use of affirmative action on the principle that it uses race to target the "discriminated against, the poor, and those with unique experiences and intellectual merits" instead of the aforementioned groups themselves. Siskind argues that, as a result, admission boards use race as a proxy for determining the specified groups, which is "fundamentally flawed" in her opinion. Even leaving the question of race out of this question, I think we need to consider one assumption Siskind makes that I believe is flawed after reading Lisa Stampnitzky's article, "How Does 'Culture' Become 'Capital'? Cultural and Institutional Struggles over 'Character and Personality' at Harvard" (Sociological Perspectives, 2006). Namely, Siskind assumes that more selective colleges are primarily academic, when that is not necessarily the case. 

Developments in Harvard's admissions policies in the mid-twentieth century began a trend in the field of selective higher education; selective schools became more likely to use a holistic selection process, considering multiple academic and personal factors in their evaluation of applicants (qtd. in Stampnitzky 476). Lowering the academic guidelines to allow for people (no matter the race) of qualifying character or personality traits may simply be the result of incorporating "institutionalized cultural capital" (Stampnitzky 475).

Siskind's third target group, "those with unique experiences and intellectual merits" should be separate groups. Perhaps affirmative action is about accepting someone with unique experiences (not conditional on intellectual merits). The hope is that unique experiences are not mutually exclusive of intellectual merits; after all, doesn't intellectual curiosity generally lead you to unique experiences?

Finally, I'd like to address Siskind's point on intellect:

Finally, what about intellect? Perhaps our universities are in dire need of diversity of intelligence. Counter to most stereotypes, ugliness is highly correlated with poor intellectual performance by traditional measures, though I don’t know how many qualified applicants will be willing to put that down on their application.

Though she meant it satirically, I wonder if there isn't more truth to her statement than she realizes. Perhaps Harvard (or any other selective school) is indeed looking for diversity of intelligence. After all, the Harvard admissions office in the 1950s "expressed fears that academic achievement might be linked to poor character, neuroticism, conformity, and effeminacy, among other detrimental qualities" (Stampnitzky 472). They didn't want to fill Harvard exclusively with brains; they wanted bodies full of heart, mind, soul, and other intangible qualities.

Harvard admissions officers in the mid-twentieth century were looking to produce national leaders and worried that intelligence (as we narrowly measure it) was not a good proxy to determine those candidates. These admissions officers were looking for a mix of students with "character and personality", the broad interpretation of which allowed them to to "counter the challenge/threat of academic meritocracy yet also allowing them to claim to speak from within the discourse of merit themselves. Their strategy and the adoption lead to the rise of culture as capital within the field of elite education.

Punch Season: The Pudding

It is punch season again. 

Punch season at Harvard is one of most exciting times of the year for the seven or so percent of students involved in that social pursuit. It is strange to think that the majority of students who are not involved in the final club scene do not even know that it is going on. 

I dredged up an email from last year, when the Hasty Pudding Club had an open punch event. An email had been sent out that allowed others to invite a friend to the punch event. Naturally, many people forwarded the email around and the house, where the first event took place, was quite crowded. 

Also in the email was a short pamphlet with a brief overview of the Pudding. Here is an excerpt:

Initially founded in 1770 by Nymphus Hatch and fully codified in 1795, the Hasty Pudding Club holds a unique and distinct place in the history of Harvard College as the oldest collegiate social club in America. Well over two centuries on and the Pudding continues its fine tradition of fostering friendships and camaraderie, a club rich with tradition and as diverse as the College. The Pudding offers a phenomenal social space for freshman through seniors on a campus without a student center. At our home on 2 Garden St. members enjoy some of the best food in the square at lunches and Friday night dinners – many parties are also not to be missed. Beyond all these benefits, the HPC offers freshmen a unique opportunity to form deep and lasting friendships with a diverse group of their classmates for a full four years and beyond.hose in the Pudding often becomes friends with each other outside of the club (as they should). 

The Pudding, along with many of the male and female finals clubs we have on campus, exemplify many of the preppy values noted in The Official Preppy Handbook. The Pudding is one example of a club that "prepare[s] Preppies for one of the great traditions of Prep life: clubmanship" (Birnbach 94). The characteristics mentioned in the Handbook can be applied to all of the final clubs, but I will focus on analyzing the Pudding in this post. 

Togetherness. Membership in a club forms strong ties.

There is a definite emphasis on togetherness in the blurb the Pudding sent out. The blurb emphasizes the Pudding's "fine tradition of fostering friendships and camaraderie" and the "unique opportunity" for freshman to "form deep and lasting friendships with a diverse group of their classmates for a full four years and beyond." The Pudding is also seen as a gateway into getting into male final clubs for freshmen boys. 

Exclusivity. All of these clubs have ways of limiting their membership.

These clubs may say that they restrict membership on a "democratic" (94) basis, but knowing someone in the club who will vouch for you is key. Of course, all the boys I knew who were actually punched--not forwarded the email by someone else--were members of the crew team, the "sport of the preps" (101). 

Endowment. Most of these clubs posses enviable (and enviably managed) securities portfolios, as well as investments in the real estate the clubhouse sits on, and the art and antiques that furnish it. Real estate is a signal of power for clubs at Harvard. The Lampoon, the Crimson, the Signet, the Advocate, etc. all have club houses that they operate out of. Having a clubhouse is a powerful signal of economic and symbolic capital. There is a lot of old money going into those endowments, and a lot of status that comes with being associated with those clubs. 

Culture of Success/Insecurity at Harvard

Harvard students are very lucky to attend a school where structural advantages (such as a powerful alumni network, economic and academic resources, and status) allow students to positively adjust their aspirations to fit higher expectations upon entering Harvard. We do not lower our aspirations as a reaction to perceived lack of opportunity, as Bourdieu suggests disadvantaged communities do. As a result, most Harvard students students exhibit behaviors that propel them to success as a strategic response to perceived abundance of opportunities. In general, there is a culture of success at Harvard that comes from perceived structural advantages. We see classmates receiving internships at top firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Blackstone which makes getting jobs at such firms seem attainable and even expected if you know the right people. Students are also surrounded by those with high financial and cultural capital, which allow them to raise their own social capital as well. Opportunities to interact with guests like the the former Prime Minister of Greece and key Washington strategists everyday gives students social connections most people never even imagine. 

For example, given my admittance to Harvard my senior year, I could have ostensibly been a competitive candidate for a summer internship at Google the summer before my freshman year. However, I never even considered Google a possibility because I had never heard of anyone from my school doing such a thing. Similarly, Bourdieu's explanation of actions as strategic adjustments of aspirations vs. expectations could explain why so few women have an interest in science and technology fields and even fewer are found in managerial positions at science and technology firms. Perhaps fewer women shoot for managerial positions they don't think they can break the "glass ceiling" which leads to women avoiding the field altogether because they don't see many women in those fields. The implication then is for women interested in science and technology to recognize their self-defeating behaviors and pursue their field of interest regardless of what they believe is possible for them.

At the same time, there is also a culture of insecurity at Harvard which students need to recognize as well. I see people around me becoming much more successful than myself, and it makes me doubt my own ability. This insecurity strikes many students while they are at Harvard and especially during their freshman fall. You compare you test scores or resume to your peers and think, "I guess I'm not as hard working as my peers" or "I'm not as talented as my peers". This language suggests that your lack of relative success stems from some flaw in your character (talent, work ethic, etc.). For some people, this belief leads to self-defeating behavior such as turning in mediocre work or not applying to a  certain firm because you doubt your merit. Students should learn to recognize this kind of thinking so that they may overcome it when it occurs. 

Habitus and Identity Formation

If you do not see an audio player, please go here to hear the audio. If that doesn't work, go here to download the audio.

The above is an interview with Sarah Foo, a first generation immigrant who is currently a freshman in college. Sarah Foo moved to the US with her mother and her sister on April 14, 2008. Her family settled in Tampa, Florida where her mother knew someone in the community; there was a strong Thai community where they moved because of the Thai temples located in Tampa. The family came with visas and applied for permanent residency as soon as they were able to. Sarah and her sister enrolled in public high school. She was 14-years-old at the time and spoke very little English. The above excerpted audio focuses on Sarah's first experiences in the US and her feelings on her own identity.

Sarah describes her first experiences in the US as alien and overwhelming primarily due to the culture shock she faced upon arrival. Sarah had come to the US with a worldview and set of cultural practices formed by the structures she had grown up with in Thailand. The habitus that she internalized was clearly very different from the habitus of her American peers, as evidenced by the differences in dress and social interaction that she saw. The interview shows that her habitus was in conflict with the habitus she saw around her, and it is not clear that her habitus has changed significantly as a result of assimilation. Though Sarah later described becoming more comfortable living in the US, with regards to language and picking up social norms, Sarah still identifies as Thai, and not American "yet".

Sarah’s connection to Thai culture fits well with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a theory of culture. All of Sarah's early socialization experiences were informed by Thai culture. As a result, by the time Sarah moved to the US, she had internalized much of Thai culture and formed her primary disposition. “More than half of my life took place somewhere else,” she explains. Assimilation occurred gradually and naturally over time because “[h]abitus is fairly resistant to change, since primary socialization in Bourdieu’s view is more formative of internal dispositions than subsequent socialization experiences (Swartz, 1998:107). Coming to the US meant that Sarah's habitus necessarily changed as it encountered new situations. However, Sarah seemed to internalize American practices as elaborations to her habitus, rather than fundamental alterations to her cultural disposition; when she overcame the culture gap, she was adding American practices to her habitus, rather than altering her internal disposition as a Thai person. Thus, Sarah's habitus informed her identity as fundamentally Thai.

What Sarah was used to: a typical classroom in Thailand

What Sarah experienced: a typical classroom in America

Cotillion

In the spring of my junior year, I was in invited to a cotillion hosted by the Junior League. The Junior League is an an organization of women committed to improving the community. Its purpose is exclusively educational and charitable. The Junior League in my area had many qualities of the upper class as they were discussed in class and in the Birmingham reading, The Right Kind of People.

First, its members consisted of the well-connected and well-to-do in the area. I was an outlier who was attending cotillion on scholarship. It was quite a shock to realize that many of these girls were paying a over $600 to participate in one cotillion. My family was unable to afford the cost, and I was lucky enough to have part of my dress and attendance fee covered by generous sponsors. For many of the other attendees, cost was not as much of a concern because they came from upper class families or from families that had been sending their daughters to this same cotillion for generations.


My parents were certainly outliers compared to the other invitees. I remember going to a tea held for all the mothers of the girls participating in cotillion. The house we entered was huge; there was catered food and cloths on all the dining tables. My mother and I didn't think it would be as formal as it was, having never been to a tea before. In fact, I didn't tell my mother to dress up at all, and was mortified when I arrived at the tea and realized just how out of place she looked. I attribute this social gaffe to class differences between the girls invited to the cotillion and myself. I think this picture exemplifies the class differences found between my mother and the mothers of the tea.

My mother, as you might have guessed, is the Asian woman in shorts.

This is an abridged description of the ball, as found on the event page:

JLWJC’s 60th Annual Community Ball and Cotillion One of Kansas City's most prestigious fundraising events. This year's Community Ball and Cotillion will be held at the Kansas City Marriott-Downtown on Saturday, December 4th, 2010. The Community Ball and Cotillion recognizes outstanding high school seniors who are actively involved in their school and community. We will be honoring 72 young men and women from 15 area high schools. For more than 75 years the Junior League of Wyandotte and Johnson Cos. has provided assistance to create change in the lives of women, children, and families. Our 2009-2014 signature campaign is Safety Network – Each One Reach One for Safety. The JLWJC will align its training, volunteer and funding efforts with programs and initiatives focused on safety. Tickets to this event are $150 per person. Sponsorship levels are also available

Similar to debutante balls and cotillions held in high society New York, our cotillion operated as a fundraising event; several girls had fathers paying on sponsorship level. Our cotillion took place in a grand ballroom in a hotel. There was a dance floor in the middle and tables with white clothes around it. All the girls wore custom-made, long white ball gowns. 

Sadly, this isn't the picture from my year, but the year after. They took down the picture from my year before I could save it to my computer.

We also had a portion during which each girl and boy were "presented". The emcee would say our full names and our parents full names. The girls would be escorted by their father to the middle of the stage. The father would leave and then the girl would be escorted the rest of the way by her dance partner. After being presented, the boys and girls who were presented performed a dance that we had been taught before the ball. All in all, it was a fun experience, though I never realized all the social nuances that occurred until now.

This is me being presented during cotillion. The dress was actually excruciatingly heavy.

I think we made this exact formation at some point during the dance. Some things really don't change.