New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58 - Paperback

by Sherry B. Ortner (Author)

Pioneering anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner is renowned for her work on the Sherpas of Nepal. Now she turns her attention homeward to examine how social class is lived in the United States and, specifically, within her own peer group. In New Jersey Dreaming, Ortner returns to her Newark roots to present an in-depth look at Weequahic High School's Class of 1958, of which she was a member. She explores her classmates' recollected experiences of the neighborhood and the high school, also written about in the novels of Philip Roth, Weequahic High School's most famous alum. Ortner provides a chronicle of the journey of her classmates from the 1950s into the 1990s, following the movement of a striking number of them from modest working- and middle-class backgrounds into the wealthy upper-middle or professional/managerial class.

Ortner tracked down nearly all 304 of her classmates. She interviewedabout 100 in person and spoke with most of the rest by phone, recording her classmates' vivid memories of time, place, and identity. Ortner shows how social class affected people's livesin many hidden and unexamined ways. She also demonstrates that the Class of '58's extreme upward mobility must be understood in relation to the major identity movements of the twentieth century-the campaign against anti-Semitism, the Civil Rights movement, and feminism.

A multisited study combining field research with an interdisciplinary analytical framework, New Jersey Dreaming is a masterly integration of developments at the vanguard of contemporary anthropology. Engaging excerpts from Ortner's field notes are interspersed throughout the book. Whether recording the difficulties and pleasures of studying one's own peer group, the cultures of driving in different parts of the country, or the contrasting experiences of appointment-making in Los Angeles and New York, they provide a rare glimpse into the actual doing of ethnographic research.

Back Jacket

New Jersey Dreaming is certainly the most impressive of books on the American high school experience. It makes one of the most important sociological arguments in recent years on the dynamics of class in post-World War II American society, and it presents innovations and important strategies for anthropologists conducting research in and on American society."--George Marcus, author of "Ethnography through Thick and Thin"

Author Biography

Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture, and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.