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

ABSTRACT

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 boundaries

Acknowledgments

This 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 statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Interactionists have been concerned with the ways in which subjective meaning emerges from encounters in situations that are always shifting and ambiguous (Blumer, 1969), socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), and where personal identity is formed (Mead, 1934).

2. By practice Bourdieu refers to social patterns of behavior and habitus, “durable, transposable dispositions” (1977, p. 72) by which individuals contribute to the reproduction of structure of domination.

3. These behaviors involve matters of etiquette, dress, deportment, gesture, intonation, dialect, vocabulary, small bodily movements and automatically expressed evaluations concerning both the substance and the details of life (Goffman, 1951, p. 300).

4. Prospect Park contains recreational areas, a zoo, a stage, ponds, a lagoon, picnic grounds, and different sport pitches.

5. Source: Author’s elaboration on U.S. Census Bureau data for Park Slope and New York City, 1970–2010.

6. In 2009 I decided to spend a month on vacation in New York City, and I found a room for rent in what, at the time, I did not know would become the object of my research in 2011: The neighborhood of Brooklyn’s Park Slope.

7. Developed by the founder Master Gichin Funakoshi.

8. The dan is the ranking system used in karate and other martial arts to indicate the level of one’s ability.

9. Single character variations, in terms of disrespectful attitudes, are commonly managed by the Master, who in case of misbehavior can decide to withdraw the dojo membership.

10. As I will explain in the section devoted to the anti-social behavior, this attitude is not very “martial,” as usually it is considered an honor and a great opportunity to train with experienced practitioners.

11. All informant names have been fictionalized in order to protect anonymity.

12. As a way to say that typically co-workers do not help each other out.

Additional information

Funding

Research 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.