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`Burned Like a Tattoo'

High School Social Categories and `American Culture'

Columbia University, USA sbo3{at}columbia.edu

This article is part of a larger ethnographic and ethnohistorical project on social class in the US, as tracked through the lives of my own high school graduating class, the Class of `58 of Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey. In this article I focus on the underlying logic of high school social/prestige categories, and on the durability of those categories over the course of the 20th century. I argue for the centrality of both social class and what Americans call `personality' in the production and reproduction of those categories. I go on to suggest that the durability of the high school social categories may be explained by the fact that their underlying logic is nothing other than the logic of hegemonic `American culture' as a whole.

Key Words: class • distinction • US high schools • prestige classifications • individualism • American culture

Ethnography, Vol. 3, No. 2, 115-148 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138102003002001


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