Spencer Kaplan

Introduction

Anthropologists have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of the processes whereby power and responsibility are exercised…for the quality of life and our lives themselves may depend upon the extent to which citizens understand those who shape attitudes and actually control institutional structures

Laura Nader, 1972

This course is about “studying up,” a practice coined by Laura Nader in her contribution to Reinventing Anthropology (1972). Nader identified the study of elites as an urgently needed move in anthropology and to enable its engagement with pressing social problems. Though Nader’s essay received much attention after its release, studying up only emerged as an actual practice much later. Due to its subject matter and the power relationship between ethnographer and interlocutor, studying elites carries a whole series of methodological, ethical, and theoretical problems which may have contributed to this delay. Indeed, how can a discipline preoccupied with the ‘savage slot’ and the ‘suffering slot’ turn its attention to those with the most power in a given society or community? How has the study of elites required anthropologists and ethnographers elsewhere to challenge and reconfigure taken-for-granted methods? What have ethnographers learned about elites and the role elites play in the most pressing social processes of our time? And finally, what can attempts to study up teach us about studying in any direction? This semester, we will pursue such questions.

This seminar is designed for upper-level undergraduates interested in the study of elites, broadly defined. Some exposure to anthropology, qualitative social science, and/or ethnography will be helpful. Readings will draw from anthropology, sociology, and social theory and strive to cover variety of ethnographic sites. The course will ask students to consider and investigate a group of elites of interest to them. They will develop and share their initial findings and develop a plan for further research.

Assignments & Assessment

Participation (25% of final grade)

Please come to class ready to actively engage with the readings and with your colleagues. This requires critical reading of the assigned materials and preparation for discussing them. The goal of class discussion is not to show how well you can recall the facts; rather the goal is to engage with readings critically and cooperatively. To this end, come to class with some notes on key arguments, passages of interest, and/or questions for the group. When reading, consider how you might annotate the texts to aid yourself in the discussion. Participation comes more easily to some than it does to others. I’m here to help: using your canvas posts (see below), I can assist you in making the space you need to flourish. I am also happy to discuss and strategize participation with you during office hours.

Weekly discussion posts (15% of final grade)

After reading each week’s assigned readings, please post on the course’s canvas page. Posts can include your reaction to the reading, connections to similar (or vastly different) cases, and/or connections to what you’ve learned elsewhere. Please also post a question to cover during discussion and be prepared to pose that question to the group when we meet. Please keep the posts brief, limiting your response to 250 words.

Midterm (20% of final grade)

Pick a particular group or space of elites (broadly defined) to “study up.” Perhaps there’s a particular group of people or space of power whose workings, cultural logics, daily practices, and/or forms of power puzzle you. Bollywood stars. Management consultants. Arab gulf royalty. Yale’s board of directors. Perhaps your selection aligns with one or some of our readings, or perhaps it’s adjacent—a similar kind of elite but in a different time or place. Or maybe it’s a group we haven’t covered but, in your view, needs to be addressed.

Studying up comes with challenges—which we will address throughout the semester—but there are some advantages, one being that elites often figure prominently in public discourse, affording some kinds of access that are less available in different kinds of research. Let’s try and take this up. Follow your selected group or site in the media (figured broadly). How is it presented (and how does it present itself) publicly? What preliminary insights can you find about its history, social organization, forms of power, and/or cultural practices? What makes this group or site “elite” and how is its status (re)produced? Write up your findings in a 5-page overview. Note, too, where gaps in knowledge remain, and note as well what further questions come up with this additional knowledge. This assignment is designed to help you complete the final assignment.

Final (40% of final grade)

Write a 10-15 page research proposal that incorporates some form of studying up or studying of elites, again broadly defined. This can (and hopefully does) correspond with and draw from your midterm. This proposal can be used for further work if you so wish, including research for a dissertation. Or it can be purely aspirational—a call for others to turn their critical gaze in line with yours.

Motivate this study by explaining the relevance of this elite group or space to contemporary society. This is where your midterm might be most helpful. Considering further research, what questions do you have? What social positions and forms of power are involved here? What relevant work exists that can/should be engaged/expanded/updated/contested? What sources of data can you identify beyond what you’ve already presented in your midterm? What challenges (methodological, ethical, epistemological) should researchers anticipate? And finally, though you may envision this work producing a conventional article or monograph, what else can emerge from this research? Draw from class readings, additional readings, and beyond.

We will discuss strategies for writing an effective research proposal in class.

Plan for the Course

Only works under “Read” are required. I’ve selected book chapters to focus on but please track how those chapters fit into the overall book and consider the non-assigned sections. I’ve included other works of interest for further reading or use in your midterm and final.

Part I: Introduction

The first few weeks will introduce students to the study of elites in anthropology and adjacent fields. We’ll begin by interrogating the concept of eliteness. Then we’ll read Laura Nader’s essay on “studying up” and place it in context of anthropology during the 70s. From there we will discuss how studying up might find new relevance in light of today’s key problems and debates. Finally, we’ll move into the how of studying up. Studying elites comes with a unique set of methodological and ethical problems related to access and representation.

Week 1: Introduction to the class / Who are elites?

This week we’ll introduce ourselves and review the syllabus and goals for the course. We’ll start with problems of definition. To what extent does elite intersect with bourgeois, capitalist, colonizer, and white?

Read:

• “The Higher Circles” in Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
• “Europe’s Formation,” “The First Bourgeoisie,” and “The Modern World Bourgeoisie” in Robinson, Cedric. 2005. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. United States: The University of North Carolina Press.
• Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich. 1979. “The Professional-Managerial Class.” In Between Labor and Capital, edited by Pat Walker. Boston: South End Press.
• “The matter of whiteness” in Dyer, Richard. 2013. White: Essays on Race and Culture.

Week 2: Why study up?

Studying up was coined by Laura Nader in a landmark 1972 volume titled Reinventing Anthropology. This week we’ll discuss the article and the intervention in which it participates. We’ll also consider what an anthropology of elites can contribute today.

Read:

• “Introduction” in Hymes, Dell H. 1972. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Nader, Laura. 1972. “Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell H. Hymes, 284–312. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73.
• Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.” American Anthropologist 122 (2): 259–71.

Week 3: How to study up?

The study of elites comes with a series of challenges generally absent from “studying down.” How have anthropologists approached studying sites of power—that is, particular groups of elites or social phenomena like whiteness? What do discussions about the stakes, methods, and ethics of such work reveal about the relations of power and knowledge implicated in studying in all directions?

Read:

• Gusterson, Hugh. 1997. “Studying Up Revisited.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 20 (1): 114–19.
• Souleles, Daniel. 2021. “How to Think about People Who Don’t Want to Be Studied: Further Reflections on Studying Up.” Critique of Anthropology 41 (3): 206–26.
• “Postscript” in Gusterson, Hugh. 2008. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Repr. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press.
• M. Beliso‐De Jesús, Aisha, and Jemima Pierre. 2020. “Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): 65–75.

See also:

• Ortner, Sherry B. 2010. “Access: Reflections on Studying up in Hollywood.” Ethnography 11 (2): 211–33.
• Souleles, Daniel. 2018. “How to Study People Who Do Not Want to Be Studied: Practical Reflections on Studying Up.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 41 (S1): 51–68.
• Mears, Ashley. 2013. “Ethnography as Precarious Work.” The Sociological Quarterly 54 (1): 20–34.

Part II: Fashioning Elites

Though elite status is often inherited, elites are made—and make themselves—through cultural practices, some quotidian and others monumental. These weeks will cover the fashioning of elites and in the process attend to debates about power, subjectivity, capitalism, statecraft, and kinship.

Week 4: Production

One archetypical figure of the elite is the capitalist. This week we’ll discuss how capitalists are made through culturally and historically contingent relations and practices. Our key interlocutor this week is Sylvia Yanagisako. Her ethnography of bourgeois silk producers in Italy critically engages with classic works by Marx and Weber, which we will read as well. How does Yanagisako employ ethnographic data and contemporary kinship theory in her intervention?

Read

• Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. V. 1: London ; New York: Penguin Classics. Read p. 92 in Marx’s preface to the first edition and “Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital” (p. 248–257)
• Weber, Max. 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London ; New York: Routledge. Read “Chapter 2: The Spirit of Capitalism”
• Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko. 2002. Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Read “Chapter 1: Producing Culture and Capital” and “Chapter 2: The Generation of Firms”

See also:

• Bear, Laura, Karen Ho, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako. 2015. “Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, March. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism
• Kaplan, Spencer. 2022. “‘Bringing your full self to work’: Fashioning LGBTQ Bankers on Wall Street.” Anthropology of Work Review.
• Jackall, Robert. 1988. Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Week 5: Consumption

Following last week’s study of production, this week we’ll balance the economic equation, so to speak, by examining consumption. Here we’ll look ethnographically at an emergent class of capitalist entrepreneurs in China who employ carefully choreographed forms of consumption to resolve the tensions of China’s recent social transformations. How is consumption implicated in the (re)production and moralization of elite status?

Read:

• “Conspicuous Consumption” in Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Penguin Books.
• Osburg, John. 2013. Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China’s New Rich. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Read Introduction, chapter 2, and chapter 4.
• See also:
• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• Graeber, David. 2011. “‘Consumption.’” Current Anthropology 52 (4): 489–511.

Week 6: Education

In societies organized around meritocratic ideologies, hegemonic narratives link education with social mobility. How might education actually serve the opposite ends and reproduce existing forms of social stratification? This week we’ll look at spaces of elite education, including boarding schools and elite universities, and their entanglements with institutions like Wall Street. What forms of knowledge are transferred via pedagogy during the reproduction of a social class?

Read:

• Khan, Shamus. 2013. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Read “Introduction: Democratic Inequality” and Chapter 5
• Ho, Karen Zouwen. 2009. Liquidated : An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press. Read chapter 1
• Rivera, Lauren A. 2012. “Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms.” American Sociological Review 77 (6): 999–1022.

See Also:

• Subramanian, Ajantha. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Rivera, Lauren A. 2016. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs.

Midterm due by end of day Friday, Week 7

Week 7: A historical interlude

This week we’ll recast an old, seemingly worn-out ethnography as a proto anthropology of elite self-fashioning. Drawing from the historical context surrounding Boas’s Pacific Northwest fieldwork, Isaiah Wilner surfaces the story of George Hunt, a Kwakwaka’wakw man who pursued his political ambitions through potlatch. Hunt appeared as the protagonist of Boas’s writings on the potlatch. With Wilner’s help, what can Hunt’s story teach us about the relation between status, performance, history, and historiography?

• Selected passages from Boas, Franz. 1897. “The Winter Ceremonial” in The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians: Based Upon Personal Observations and on Notes Made by Mr. George Hunt
• Wilner, Isaiah. 2013. “A Global Potlatch: Identifying the Indigenous Influence on Western Thought.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37 (2): 87–114.

Part III: Elite spaces

The remainder of the semester will proceed thematically across the various spaces in/from which elites exert their power. As you’ll notice, current studies of elites are generally limited to particular geographies and demographics. Attend to this syllabus critically, asking why this is so.

Week 8: The state

As sites of political power, state offices host daily practices and exchanges among elite subjects. Unsurprisingly, ethnographic access to the inner workings of states is difficult, but as Nayanika Mathur shows, it is both possible and informative. What kinds of elites does statecraft produce? How do elites exercise state power and in the process, produce the states they represent, and produce themselves as statespeople? How are elites themselves subject to power?

Read:

• Mathur, Nayanika. 2016. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read introduction, chapter 1, chapter 4, chapter 5

See also

• Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Li, Tania. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Rabinow, Paul. 1995. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weeks 9 & 10: The investment bank

Since the financial crisis of the early 2000s, social scientists have increasingly attended to the process and effects of financialization: the structural and moral transformation of non-financial institutions according to the values and worldviews of finance—namely liquidity, risk, and shareholder value—effectively increasing economic instability and job insecurity (Bear et al. 2015). What kind of elites are financial elites, and how do their worldviews and daily practices lead to these structural transformations? We’ll spend two weeks on this topic, first reading Karen Ho’s ethnography of investment banks and then turning to the topic of “market feminism,” an attempt by certain market agents to adopt supposedly counterhegemonic ideologies.

Read (Week 9):

• Ho, Karen Zouwen. 2009. Liquidated : An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press. Read introduction, chapter 2, chapter 3, and chapter 5

Read (Week 10):

• Fisher, Melissa S. 2012. Wall Street Women. Durham: Duke University Press. Read Introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 3
• Roberts, Adrienne. 2015. “Gender, Financial Deepening and the Production of Embodied Finance: Towards a Critical Feminist Analysis.” Global Society 29 (1): 107–27.

See also:

• Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2007. “Arbitraging Faith and Reason.” American Ethnologist 34 (3): 430–32.
• Leins, Stefan. 2018. Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Chong, Kimberly. 2018. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization. Durham: Duke University Press.
• McDowell, Linda. 1997. Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Week 11: The lab

How is the production of authoritative knowledge embedded in the exclusive social spaces of scientific research? Moving to the laboratory, we again study the relation between world-making and self-making. First, we’ll read Sharon Traweek’s ethnography of high energy physicists in California and Japan—an early example of lab studies and studying up more generally. Note how Traweek’s work hinges on gender and geography as analytical and comparative categories. We’ll pair this with Kim TallBear’s study of DNA testing and genealogy. How does TallBear’s own positionality as an indigenous researcher and her engagement with indigenous studies reveal the anticolonial potential of studying up?

Read:

• Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press. Read Prologue, Chapter 3, Chapter 4
• TallBear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Read introduction, chapter 1

See also:

• Gusterson, Hugh. 1996. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press.
• Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• Myers, Natasha. 2015. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter. Experimental Futures : Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Week 12: The startup

Moving from science to technology, we’ll work through themes such as development, innovation, entrepreneurship, and tech ethics. How do the technologists we read about this week compare with the scientists and bankers we’ve discussed during the past weeks? What kinds of projects are these elites taking on, and in the case of Lilly Irani’s ethnography, how are the projects of technological development taken up by other kinds of elites like statespeople? Following a similar approach to Ho’s, how are the daily practices of technologists implicated in larger structural processes?

Read:

• TallBear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Read chapter 2
• Irani, Lilly. 2019. Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Read introduction, chapter 4, chapter 6

See also:

• Seaver, Nick. 2021. “Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation.” Cultural Anthropology 36 (3).
• Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1988. “Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Technology.” Man 23 (2): 236.
• Besteman, Catherine Lowe, and Hugh Gusterson, eds. 2019. Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Medford, MA: Polity.

Week 13: The nightclub

How are sex and desire implicated in elite production and reproduction? To answer this question, we’ll visit the nightclub with sociologist Kimberly Hoang. What does Hoang’s ethnography of hostess bars in Vietnam teach us about global capital, gender, sexuality, and embodiment? How are non-elites (in this case, the hostesses) implicated in elite projects? How does Hoang’s work engage with fellow sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s argument that money and intimacy are closely entangled?

Read:

• Zelizer, Viviana. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Read Chapter 1.
• Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Oakland: University of California Press. Read introduction, chapter 3, chapter 6.

See Also:

• Mears, Ashley. 2020. Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.