Subjects and Capital: A Fragment of a Documentary EthnographySherry Ortner From the paper: This paper is part of an ethnographic and ethnohistorical project on class in the United States, as tracked through the lives of my high school graduating class, the Class of '58 of Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey....Parental class in the occupational and material sense; parental cultural capital, especially in the sense of cultural know-how; and parental emotional capital ranging from love and reliable availability to their opposites; these together constructed the members of the Class of '58 as diverse social subject, being launched into high school and eventually into the world.... Methodologically, I have tried to develop a representational strategy that would have the kind of impact that I think ethnography should have, and coined for this the label "critical documentary ethnography."...What I mean by critical documentary ethnography is, first of all, a socially critical perspective, and second of all the extensive use of people's own words, voices, styles, and emphases to communicate not only the substance of a point, but its affect.... On the theoretical level, although this project is greatly indebted in many ways to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I identify what I think is a rather large hole in his theoretical framework, namely, the question of the social and cultural construction of the subject in any rich sense. Here I have tried to fill that gap only in a limited way, growing out of the specifics of my ethnography, namely, that people spontaneously talked at length about difficult and implicitly damaging family experiences when they were growing up. I coined the idea of "emotional capital" to capture this particular aspect of the formation of them as social subjects. |