• Maya
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    23 years ago

    This is really interesting. Particularly:

    Third, and related to this, it may be that misidentifications of working-class identity reflect the role of extended family histories in shaping people’s class identities. Most lay people, and indeed sociologists of class, tend to assume that people’s self-understanding is strongly shaped by personally experienced events, especially during their upbringing (Bourdieu, 1984; Goldthorpe, 1980). They also assume that the dispositions inculcated via primary socialisation are dependent on the economic, cultural and social resources (or capitals) that flow from parents’ class destination. This ‘two-generation view of the world’ dominates work on class identity and indeed the wider field of social stratification (Mare, 2011).

    Yet a strand of work in social psychology pioneered by Robyn Fivush (Fivush et al., 2008; Merrill and Fivush, 2016) challenges this idea that self-understanding is tied to autobiographical memory. This work emphasises a more ‘temporally extended self’ that is still guided by parents but is informed by stories of their lives before they had children, of their own childhoods and those of their extended families. These kinds of family stories provide a historical context for children, informing them of how they fit into a ‘larger life framework’ and family identity constructed across historical time. In fact, such family reminiscing leads to what they call an ‘intergenerational self’ anchored ‘as much by one’s place in a familial history as a personal past’ (Fivush et al., 2008: 131). In this way, supposed misidentifications of class may in fact reflect perfectly accurate readings of one’s class history, just premised on multigenerational family histories.

    This has always felt like why my own class background feels pretty tangled up, and in the opposite way. My mother is very educated and her family was solidly in the middle class. However, when I was growing up, my dad was a construction worker who became disabled, my mom homeschooled me and my sibling, and my “personally experienced events” were shaped by (varyingly severe) poverty. If you told the story of “how hard was it for your mother and father to make sure you could get to the doctor when you were a kid?” you would get a pretty hard-scrabble narrative. However, my mother educated us like little princelings, and we were taught all the middle-class social graces that enable getting around with people of that set. Compare me to someone else of similar family income who didn’t have those class advantages and you see a very uneven playing field.

    That isn’t to say that it isn’t myth-making when people lean on “well my grandfather didn’t have money”, but class is really thick and complicated and more than a year’s tax returns.

    • @poVoq
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      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

      • Maya
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        23 years ago

        We lived across the country from one side, and there were some other factors, but if we speak of the general case…

        I think this has a lot to do with how women have historically been expected to manage the social life of the family, but now there are more expectations about “you’re responsible for planning to see your side of the family” even though men perhaps don’t acquire those skills or prioritize that work.

        Also I think it varies by culture whether a woman is expected to involve her mother-in-law vs. her own mother a lot when she herself has a child. Child-rearing structures a lot of the internal life of a family, and who gets pulled in to assist matters a lot. My mother always alluded approvingly to the Korean practice of a woman moving back in with her mom around the time of birth where the new grandmother would assume the household work that the new mom couldn’t do Because Birth. On the one hand, it seems ludicrous that the man can’t step up even temporarily for that stuff (and comes to be fed! by the wife’s mother!!), but makes more sense once you realize how much knowledge of how to deal with an infant has to be passed on informally to a new parent.