The earliest anthropologists were certain that they could use their methods and theories to understand “America.” Some (M. Mead, L. Warner) did, directly, and then soon many more have been certain that they could contribute to some understanding of the United States (its problems, futures, etc.). In this century-old and ongoing conversation some things have remain surprisingly stable. Over the generations ethnographers have reported observing, or hearing, very similar things. Not surprisingly, they have greatly differed in their interpretation of what they observed. I muse today about the implications of the tension between the perennity of observations and the shifting of the interpretations.  Where might anthropologists go from here?

Take, as one instance of ethnographic stability, students in the high schools America builds for them (Varenne & McDermott 1998). For at least a century, about any observer (including “participant” ones) have noticed how, under the distant control of their teachers, the students organize how they sit in their cafetaria, how they walk in the corridors, how they recruit other students into their activities—or cancel these other students. They do this in complex ways and with complex, sometimes dramatic if not tragic (or comic), consequences that are remain a perennial theme in the American imagination, in novels, films, etc. And they can also produce extensive critiques of all this.

As early as 1929, the Lynds reported that “one of the keenest and most popular girl in the school” told them about eligibility for a “leading high school club”:

Since then, about all anthropologists of American high schools have collected very similar accounts.  They have also reported that such accounts by student participants correspond closely to what they observed. Warner’s work in Jonesville (1949), or Hollingshead in Elmtown (1949), suggest that not even the Great Drepression or WWII had made a difference. One thing that Warner and Hollingshead did notice that is not included in the Lynds’ report is the ambivalence, if not critique, of the students’ structuring their interaction. As one girl told Warner:

Note the we(named friends)/they(anonymous members of a club) dichotomy.  Note also the telling of a psychological price about which Jules Henry made much (1963). A generation later, as the “liberations” of the 1960s hit suburban New Jersey, I also could not miss the “cliques” even in a town that appeared to many as quite homogeneous in terms of class (Varenne 1982).

There is no evidence that one would not observe similar organizing in the high schools of early 21st century America. There are probably shifts in vocabulary, or the symbols around which the students organize. From 1960 to 2025: Differences: women’s hair (up vs. down), men’s jackets (colorful vs. black); Similarities: sex pairing and heavy gendering of (extra-ordinary) clothes.
There is no evidence either (or rather perhaps the reverse) that one would not also continue to observe various forms of discursive critiques of this organization—including performative ones. After all, about everyone, participants as well as observers, would agree, classes/cliques are not what “American is all about” and one may wish to distance oneself from those who are somehow wrong.

I was reminded of all this when, for various contingent reasons, I looked again, after a very long time, at Francis Hsu’s work on what he did not question labeling “America.” To this date, Hsu remains the only president of AAA with a Chinese last name. He was born in Manchuria in 1909. He was schooled in China, experienced serious difficulties in the wars and invasions of the 1920s and 1930s in China. Eventually, in 1937, he was accepted as a doctoral student at the London School of Economics, worked with Malinowski, received his PhD in 1941. He briefly returned to China and soon left. By 1944 he had started an academic career in the United States, culminating with his three decades at Northwestern University.

I will leave aside wondering whether Hsu was a “Chinese” or “American” anthropologist, or whether his early enculturation (habitus?) made him a more sensitive observer of America. He did write extensively comparing and contrasting “the Americans” against “the Chinese” (1963, 1972, 1981). Phrasing his observations and interpretations that way may be the reason so many dismissed his work and it has been all but forgotten—or at least dropped from the canon of work on the United States. My reasons for not making him part of my personal canon had more to do with his overly grounding his work in the kind of late Boasian psychological anthropological then deprecated at the University of Chicago. That is, in bad graduate student fashion, I focused on Hsu’s interpretation of his observations, rather than on the ethnography on which he relied.

Today, I take Hsu seriously. I focus on his contribution the still ongoing debate about the place of “class” in America, and particularly on what anthropologists can contribute to the debate. I start with a few sentence by Hsu criticizing Lloyd Warner. Hsu starts with a summary of Warner’s observations:

And then he quotes Warner’s interpretation of something Warner also observed, that high school students are “less open and more careful about what they say and how they feel on the tabooed subject of status.” Warner interpreted this as the students having “learned to use American values of individualism and are able to make clearer distinction about the worth of an individual than are younger children.” (1953: 1982-183). Hsu objected that this was a common error among American social scientists “due to the fact that many … American scholars have been too emotionally immersed in the absolute goodness of their own form of society, ethic, thought, and religion that it is hard for them to question them… They cannot see anything but the eventual triumph of their cultural ideals … over realities such as racism and religious intolerance” (1972: 245).

Complaining about the more or less unconscious biases of other social scientists is, of course, a staple of anthropological debates. What interests me here is that Hsu criticizes Warner’s interpretation, but not necessarily his observations. In my own work, I certainly observed extensive performances of what the students talked about as “cliques.” There were the sitting patterns in the cafetaria, the clothing and other bodily displays (e.g. hair styles) in the corridors and classrooms, the sorting and segregating of para-educational activities (sports, cheer leading, pushing video carts). I talked extensively with both teachers and students about all this, and they were more than willing to answer at great length to explain and teach. I also noted the greater ease that the younger students had in talking about cliques as things. In contrast the older students said things like “last year cliques were bad, but not so much this year,” “some people think of us [football players] as a clique but we are really only a loose group of friends.” It would seem that the seniors had indeed “learned” how to talk to observing adults asking questions about the obvious and needing, perhaps, to be corrected about what they suspected would my interpretations. Not only had the seniors learned about the “taboo” (in Warner’s words) on class talk, but also how observing social scientists might blame them for not observing it.

Like Warner, I emphasized this evolution and was later critiqued on grounds similar to Hsu’s: I would have de-emphasized the “reality” of the cliques (Lesko 1988: 74). Whether I (or Warner) did by bringing out the anti-class/cliques discourses a matter of interpretation about the nature (ontology?) of such things as “classes” (and the other matters social scientists deplore like racism, genderism, etc.). What should not be a matter of dispute is the (total social) fact that anthropologists observe both class (race, gender) segmentation and the discourses critiquing those, and that one can observe all this not only among the professional observers but also among the participants, whether high school students, politicians, or artists. Whether anthropologists should then report this as an “American Dilemma” (Myrdal ) or a conflict between “Dream and Reality” (Warner 1953; and passim in the literature), or, as I would suggest, constitutive of each other (as I would say), should now be a matter of dispute.

[more on all this in a future post]