What is uppermost on your mind right now?
The outcome of the US elections. However close the polls were, many people in my circles were hoping that Harris would win. I am on the left end of the political spectrum – which is hardly surprising since I am studying how to foster cultural membership and inclusion – and I am seeing how people are upset, at the same time as many are trying to understand voter motivation. A lot of what we now read in the liberal media is about how Harris put too much emphasis on denouncing Trump through stressing the danger he poses to abortion rights and democracy. That was proven to have been a huge mistake. I think that the Democratic Party did not fully register how much the American working class is on its knees, and how badly workers feel misunderstood.
Was too much stress put on cultural issues, and too little on economic ones?
I do not like to work with a hard distinction between culture and economics, because class identity is also a cultural idea, after all; but to be sure the Democrats insufficiently acknowledged economic realities on the ground, whilst touting Nobel laureates in economics assuring voters that the economy is in an incredible shape.
I am currently doing a research project on the working class. My team is now completing fifty in-depth interviews with young workers, ages 18 to 30, in Manchester, NH. Many of them hold two or three jobs just to be able to pay the bills, because the minimum wage is a mere seven dollars per hour (that is less than the cost of two coffee cups from Starbucks). Many politicians, including Democrats, have no idea what these people are up against. They are not registering these people’s living conditions and how big of a topic the cost of ‘eggs and bacon’ truly is – in other words, how traumatic it has been to live through the post-COVID price hikes. People are just having problems paying their bills. They are drained and exhausted, they have registered that things got worse for them under Biden and have now thrown in their lot with Trump, often almost in spite of him.
All the same, my first reaction was: I want to dig a hole, crawl into it, get into a fetal position, and stay there for the next four years. But then I thought: I am lucky, because we have been conducting these interviews with Manchester workers… exactly the group that Trump was targeting since this summer. So, we have sources detailing exactly how they think about all these issues, which gives me a renewed energy to really pursue this.
Could you tell us more about your research project at NIAS?
Well, I came here in September, not to write, but with the goal of collecting and processing data for a project on marginalized groups that are seeking recognition. Part of the project is about how those Manchester workers I just mentioned, seek recognition through politics, whether they do it and how they do it – through the Democratic Party, through the Republican Party, or through abstention. These are what we call ‘low information’ and ‘low participation’ workers. There is a parallel project in Manchester, UK. The collaborators there have not yet started the interviews because of delays with the human subject approval at the University of Manchester. The project turns out to be more expensive than planned, so I have been busy raising additional funding.
Another part of the project is about Indigenous people and how they seek recognition through environmental justice and through work. I am collaborating with a graduate student from the Northern Mariana Islands, which is an archipelago in the middle of the Pacific, in Micronesia, a thousand miles south of Tokyo. It is a Commonwealth of the US, so the US has the right to build military bases there, creating both jobs and considerable environmental damage.
And then there is the third part, which is about the region I come from. Two hours north of where I grew up, a corporation is planning to build a nuclear waste disposal on Algonquin land. The site, which has now been approved to be built, is situated along the Ottawa River, or – in Algonquin – the Kichi Zibi River. There I have tried, and it has been complicated, to get access to four different First Nations that are implicated in the conflict over the construction project. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which Canada has signed, requires that Indigenous people be consulted on any project that impacts their natural environment, and here it is their unceded territory, meaning territory that was not legally ceded to the federal government through a treaty. Of one of these four nations, the Kebaowek, the chief, who is a big opponent to the nuclear waste disposal, has signed on to our research project. This means he is co-leading the project with us and co-owns the data. And it means that our respondents from the community are in fact collaborators and will be compensated as such.
And then I also want to get access to the three other nations, one of which is collaborating with the nuclear waste disposal project. This is where I am now. It has been very diplomatically complicated and, to tell you the truth, humbling, because from the beginning I was told – and I am using their expression – this is ‘Indian time.’ It means that I am in no position to try to make things move faster. The project will happen if and when they give it priority. I would be lying if I said it has not posed serious planning and financial challenges.
How does your current project build on your previous work?
My previous project was a book for a wider audience titled Seeing Others: How to Redefine Worth in a Divided World (Penguin, September 2023). There, the goal was really to try to understand how to broaden the circle of who feels like they belong to society and who is valued. Since I am a cultural sociologist, my approach focused on the transformation of narratives of who is in and who is out, away from worth being defined entirely by socioeconomic or educational success. I am convinced we need what I call ‘pluralities of scripts of self,’ and that it is crucial that we also diffuse narratives that celebrate caregivers and people who have other roles in societies besides making money. We are talking very concrete and practical initiatives, such as the one I suggested to GroenLinks-PvdA when they invited me last month to talk about their positioning and goals – for instance giving teachers, nurses, firefighters and others whose job contributes to the community advantages when it comes to getting access to housing. I have been invited to talk with urban planners from the City of Amsterdam about the same topic in mid-December.
So, class is not part of your analysis?
Well, it is. But think about the indicators of unhealthy societies, things like interethnic conflicts, high suicide rates, distrust, unsustainability. Those are not only – and perhaps not even primarily – class issues. I think the goal should be to foster greater solidarity within a society that is also healthier overall. The idea is that by reinforcing a stronger social fabric in general, you can simultaneously foster social equity and sustainability. The two goals should not be framed as mutually exclusive, because they both contribute to the same overarching goal.
When we talk about economic inequality, people simply think about the access to resources, but I think not only the experience of scarcity non college educated people face matters, but also the lack of recognition they experience in how they are represented in our media. My work is always to try and connect the two. So, my interest is less in socioeconomic status, which revolves around material resources and the social prestige derived from them, and more about dignity, which is about ordinary universalism – about what we all share as human beings. Going back to Seeing Others, its premise is that we, with the help of cultural ‘change agents,’ can actively build a stronger and more equitable society by transforming the cultural messages that circulate in our environment. Concretely, this means broadening inclusion through (1) celebrating a plurality of worth, (2) promoting ordinary universalism and (3) reducing stigma.
Is this not also what the Democrats were attempting?
What I can say on the basis of our interviews is that a lot of working-class voters primarily voted against the Democratic Party and did so on the basis of their perception that it remains disconnected from their fundamental needs. Some people are reading the results as the working class saying loud and clear: “you don’t understand our challenges.” What I am getting from these voters who swung the balance – like in Georgia, where a lot of people in the rural counties came out who normally do not vote – is that people who are normally voiceless and feel disaffected, are now speaking loud and clear about their frustrations. This form of participation may be a way to claim membership.
My new project, I hope, will also open a way to better understand such reaction and counter reaction, and might help us do a better job at understanding how economic claims go hand in hand with cultural claims. Part of that is citizens defending their way of life, even if – as in coalmining towns – it is demonstrably bad for them. Arlie Hochschild writes about this eloquently in her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (September 2024). It is what they have, and they see little alternatives.
So, do they think Trump, off all people, will help them?
Make no mistake; the young workers that we were interviewing in Manchester, NH do not have any nostalgia for the era where workers were viewed as the backbone of American society. They live in a town that was at the center of the American industrial revolution and saw important working-class movement a hundred years ago, and they have no clue about this past history. They do not know when the working class was powerful or what that meant and could mean for people like them. Most of them do not even know who Bernie Sanders is, even if he is from the state next door. This is a generation that is not very connected to time (to history) and to space. Some of them simply said ‘I don’t follow the news; I listen to Joe Rogan.’
How does the branding of the Democrats as ‘woke radicals’ play in to this?
One of our respondents said: “I do not have any problem with men going with men, and women with women. But if you want to call yourself something else, it’s against common sense and it’s against science and biology.” One of Trump’s ads was “Kamala is for they/them. I am for you.” That ad was extremely successful and really resonated with our interviewees, which goes to show that ‘woke’ themes were certainly disqualifying for the Democrats. You might know this report The Hidden Tribes of America, from October 2018? It showed that only eight percent of the American electorate or so was very progressive and supportive of queer issues. As a result, the reality now is that many LGBTQ+ feel extremely threatened, and rightly so. Warm thermometer surveys show that these groups are accepted but draw the line at non-binary identities.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party also put a lot of energy toward being the voice of people of color, at a time when the category POC itself is highly contested. I was just reading a paper saying that in the very states where the term ‘Latinx’ is most used, the Latino vote for Trump was largest. To me, this suggests a movement away from wanting to see themselves as part of a coalition of racial minorities that are discriminated against.
You teach at Harvard. What is your own experience with this culture war?
I have been teaching at Harvard for twenty years, and before that I taught at Princeton for fifteen years, which is in my view even a bit more elite than Harvard in the sense that there’s more people who go there to be able to live with the elite and to embrace and revel in their eliteness. When I got to Harvard in 2002, I really liked that the students there appeared to be more concerned with the world. Most of the ‘cancelling’ that has been talked about over the last few years was not happening among the undergraduates at Harvard University but at Harvard’s professional schools like the Kennedy School, the School of Public Health, and the Divinity School. The undergraduates had survived the pandemic and just wanted to have fun with their friends. I perceived them as wanting “no drama.”
So, what do you make of Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind, where Harvard is presented as a hotbed of student wokism?
That is about selling books, if you ask me. It is not my experience and I have to say I am critical of the concept of tribalism. He starts from a vision of human nature that is peculiar to positive psychology. There is an evolutionist strain there, which is very masculinist, that is, it presumes static and ahistorical gender roles. I think it is backward.
This is very much what I fight against by using the concept of ‘groupness.’ One of the basic theories in psychology, social identity theory, says that we are naturally predisposed to support our group and to draw boundaries against other groups. For me, that is an empirical issue. Group boundaries are changeable and do change all the time. The acceptance of, for instance, same sex marriage would be an example… that is not predetermined in our human nature – it is a social accomplishment! A number of factors make groups have more or less tight or permeable boundaries. That is a hugely different approach from producing ideal types for distinct groups or civilizations.
Would you say you started out researching how group boundaries work and are now trying to figure out how to actively transform them?
Absolutely. My most widely cited article is “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences” (with Virág Molnar, 2002). It distinguished symbolic boundaries (how groups perceive each other) from social boundaries (the patterns by which they interact with each other through intermarriage, segregation, exclusion, discrimination) and spatial boundaries. We showed that these symbolic, social, and spatial boundaries – whether you look at the literature on professionalization, on race, on class or gender identity – are prevalent across a number of discrete literatures. The article connects anthropology, psychology, and political science, and it connects culture with inequality. But it also talks about the mechanisms through which boundaries are changed and about the properties of boundaries: how fluid they are, how can they become crossable. So, if you want, the paper became a point of reference to talk about all kinds of exclusion that had not been thought about comparatively before.
The fundamental position of my work is unchanged. I started from a literature in my field, cultural sociology, which focused on cultural repertoires. It was about how the environment we work and live in provides people with the cultural tools they will draw on to interpret what is happening to them. That is much more contextually bound than the essentialist assumptions of the universal model that some psychologists are using.
Would you say you are a Bourdieuan?
I was a student of Bourdieu, but no, my work is critical of his, primarily for his assumption that people who are taking a moral stance are losers – making virtue of necessity, pretending they are more moral or virtuous than others, because they have nothing else to lose. As I was writing my first book, Money, Morals, and Manners (1992), I became increasingly critical of him. In the end, it evolved into an empirical critique of his work, at a time when there were not many. I was able to critique Distinction (1979) by looking at the American Upper middle class in Indianapolis, New York, Paris and Clermonnt-Ferrant. For one thing, I concluded Bourdieu was blind to a certain cultural center-periphery dynamic, because he was so Paris centered. But there was much more…
Bourdieu, to be blunt, had drank the Kool-Aid offered by the elite schools he attended. He came from the South of France, and he was a typical scholarship student who had made it to the top universities. He was conformist, and in line with what such institutions wanted students like him to believe, which is that familiarity with high culture drives class selection. Of course, , he wrote about what he called symbolic violence – the culture of the upper class being presented as the standard by which everyone is assessed – and about how such ‘violence’ was directed toward the working class, but nowhere did he assess the extent to which the culture of the upper middle class was actually a driving force in this (cultural, as compared to moral criteria of evaluation for instance). So, I view him as extremely important and innovative in some ways, but blind in others. And of course, he did not recognize the patriarchal and exploitative system that he played a crucial role in reproducing as a “grand patron” of academia.
My idea for criticizing Distinction came to me when I went to Stanford in 1983. It became clear that the American upper-middle class students there had little in common with the students Bourdieu described. They were proud of being able to repair their bicycle and use many moral criteria to evaluate one another. This led me to want to write Money, Morals and Manners. This was the advantage of doing comparative work.
Who were your influences at Stanford and beyond?
First and foremost Seymour Martin Lippset, (who also mentored Theda Skocpol and Ann Swidler). Stanford proved to be a far more generous and less sexist intellectual environment than Paris. I also learned a lot from working with William Sewell jr. and Natalie Zemon Davis, and others through CIFAR’s Successful Societies Program, which I directed for nineteen years with political scientists Peter Hall and later, with Paul Pierson.
What do you want your work to achieve?
I admire scholars who are able to write books that take a normative stance for what they believe in. This is also why I write on dignity, trying to understand and communicate how to foster dignity for all. Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel was ambitious, but for an academic audience. With Seeing Others I have been able to do things I would otherwise not have been able to. But trade books also have their limitations, of course, so I am now thinking about doing a more hybrid book that could be simultaneously intellectually innovative and intervene in ongoing societal challenges at the cultural level.
This essay was edited and published in co-operation with the Dutch Review of Books. For the Dutch version, see here.
