Naked elites: unveiling embodied markers of superiority through co-performance ethnography in gentrified Brooklyn’s Park Slope

《Naked elites: unveiling embodied markers of superiority through co-performance ethnography in gentrified Brooklyn’s Park Slope》

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作者: Lidia Katia Consiglia Manzo

来源: URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.40,Issue5,P.645-664

语言: 英文

关键字: Economic elites,gentrification,co-performance ethnography,theory of the self,symbolic boundaries

作者单位: Faculty of Sociology, The University of Trento, Trento, Italy

摘要: In the super-gentrified neighborhood of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, elites joined democratic associations, such as karate dojos or food coops, to interact with and become socially accepted by the local community. Co-performance ethnography made it possible to recognize that progressive moral values led instead to exclusive behaviors. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and socio-cultural analysis, this article provides a definition of performance as the paradigm-driven methodological tool to unveil the hidden, micro-strategies of elite reproduction. I analyze how social mixing in gentrified neighborhoods encourages competing identities to reproduce symbolic boundaries, ultimately serving as a basis for socio-spatial inequality and conflict. The production of identities, behavior, and emotions highlights elites performance of a contextualized version of “self” to assert their superior status. It also shows how these relations of domination shape elites’ lives. These points call attention to the connections between capital accumulation and the hermeneutical agency of the body.KEYWORDS: Economic elites, gentrification, co-performance ethnography, theory of the self, symbolic boundariesAdditional informationFundingResearch and writing for this article was supported by the Irish Research Council post-doctoral fellowship scheme at Maynooth University, Ireland (grant GOIPD/2015/518) and by a Milan City Council doctoral grant-in-aid awarded at The University of Trento, Italy.AcknowledgmentsThis research would not have been possible without the generosity of the Food Coop members and the Karate Dojo fellows who took part in this ethnography in the neighborhood of Brooklyn’s Park Slope. I also am particularly grateful to Susan Moore for her support and direction as editor, and the three anonymous reviewers whose input has significantly improved this article. Further thanks to David Bassens, Enzo Colombo, Mary Gilmartin, and Bas van Heur for their comments on various iterations of this work.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.