discourse/language

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized the notion of the habitus. The term refers to both the knowledges and physicalities that maintain distinctions between groups (examples in a sec). It’s a great concept for helping us understand the reproduction of class differences without relying strictly on economics. It takes more than money to make money, it also takes knowing the right things, the right people, and the right way to act.

The habitus, then, is one way to show that you “belong” to the group. Imagine being on a really fancy job interview for a really fancy job. Can you talk knowledgably about what vintage of which wine was really excellent in any given year? Do you know which fork is the salad fork? What parts of your body are allowed on the table? When? How quickly do you eat? What is the sign that you are finished with your food?

People who grow up in wealthy families that prioritize these things tend to absorb this knowledge naturally while growing up, just as a kid who grows up on a farm knows how to wrassle a lamb for fixin,’ mend a barbed wire fence, and spot a good steer at the auction. Both of these types of knowledges are useful, but they don’t transfer; my colleagues, for example, are forever unimpressed that I can tell the breed of most horses just by looking.

In any case, while these examples refer to class and rural or urban upbringings, Missives from Marx offered a great example of the habitus as a marker of religious belonging.

In the video below, made by evangelicals, the evangelical habitus is satirized. “Lost at an evangelical meeting?” the video asks, “Here’s how to do evangelicalism!”

* Title, post idea, and video stolen from Missives From Marx.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The photo below was submitted to Fail Blog as a failure of communication:

In English adjectives come after before the noun that they modify such that, the way this is written, it reads as if there is a “big black reward” for the finder of the “lost dog” instead of a “reward” for the finder of the “big black dog.”

So this is funny, right?

It’s not simply funny because of the grammar mix up, it’s funny because “big” and “black,” when put together, have a particular connotation. We live in a society in which those words often go together because we stereotype black men as having large penises and being, generally, large.

The fact that the grammar mistake is humorous, then, relies specifically on this stereotype… so it’s nice evidence that the stereotype is real. The sign simply would not have the same impact if it read “Lost Dog Big White Reward” or “Lost Dog Big Yellow Reward.”

Fail Blog, via Dr. Grumpy.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

With tax season upon us, it is almost obligatory for Americans to complain about what they’re shelling out to Uncle Sam. According to Gallup polls, 46 percent of Americans think their taxes are too high.

The good news is that figure is near rock-bottom for the past 50 years; the bad news is that tax-related violence has been on the rise for the same period. The most recent example of this trend occurred last month, when software engineer Joe Stack, enraged by disputes with the Internal Revenue Service going back to the 1980s, flew a small plane into an IRS building in Texas.

In a lengthy essay/suicide note posted on his website, Stack styled himself after the early American patriots of “no taxation without representation” fame, reminding us all of the unique prestige of tax revolt in American history. As Stack points out, some of the first lessons American children receive about their nation’s history equates taxes to oppression, and revolt against those taxes to the struggle for liberty and justice for all. This probably contributes to Americans’ widespread distrust of taxation, and the acceptance of that distrust as normal and natural.

But that view of taxation is not shared worldwide. In fact, citizens of some countries are actually happy about paying taxes. If you’re an American reading these words, that statement probably sounds pretty far-fetched. But consider this: the citizens of Denmark pay the highest income taxes in the world (an average of 48.3 percent), and are also the happiest people in the world.

It’s not just that Danes pay those high income taxes: they also pay a Value Added Tax of 25 percent on every cup of coffee or pair of sneakers they buy, making the outcry in my hometown of Chicago over having the highest sales tax of any major city in the US (a whopping 10.25 percent) look picayune by comparison. And then there’s Denmark’s tax on new cars: a heart-stopping 180 percent. So if you buy a car with an MSRP of € 20,000 , you’ll pay an additional € 36,000 to get the car registered and licensed.

The Danish car tax, in and of itself, would probably be enough to provoke armed rebellion in the United States. So why do the citizens of Denmark not only tolerate the array of taxes they pay, but appear downright happy about them?

And just to be clear, Danes aren’t just generally happy, or happy despite the taxes they pay. Rather, they are specifically happy about paying taxes! Take this exchange, for example, from a recent series of “person in the street” interviews from Copenhagen by United States National Public Radio:

KESTENBAUM [Ed—NPR reporter]: You think paying taxes is terrific?

Ms. BAUOLASON [Ed—resident of Copenhagen]: I do actually think it is terrific.

From an American perspective, Denmark “seems to violate the laws of the economic universe.”

The key to this attitude seems to lie in Danes’ trust in government and each other—something I noted in an earlier post. As this video interview with a pair of Danish sociologists suggests, this trust stems from several factors. Among the most important is the widely-shared belief that their society is just, and that socio-economic goods are equitably distributed. As a result, many Danes seem satisfied that they are getting their money’s worth–that is, they enjoy tangible benefits of the taxes they pay in terms of universal health care, tuition-free education through the university level, and employment benefits and security far beyond anything available in the United States.

Meanwhile, things could not be more different in the United States, which ranks 23rd in the world happiness rankings, and where distrust of government has been virtually axiomatic since the Reagan era—if not before. This helps account for a paradox: while the United States has among the lowest income tax rates in the world, and we have nothing like the VAT and auto registration taxes that Danes pay, Americans rarely challenge each others’ complaints about “high taxes.”

In fact, one of the remarkable things about Joe Stack’s anti-tax rant/suicide note is how much it resembles what now constitutes “mainstream” rhetoric on taxation in America—particularly in the aftermath of the government bailout of financial firms following the 2008 economic crisis.

Stack wrote:

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?

Compare this to CNBC newsman Rick Santelli’s now legendary on-air rant of February 2009, in which he sounds many of the same notes as Stack, using virtually identical arguments and references to American history:

So while Stack’s violent actions took this rhetoric to the extreme, the evidence suggests that he was no outlier in his  perspective on taxation in America: his basic views are apparently shared by a wide swath of his fellow citizens, from television news reporters to the Tea Party movement to think tanks like the conservative Cato Institute.

What accounts for this extreme disparity between American and Danish attitudes toward taxes? And what does this have to do with the differences between the two countries in terms of happiness?

The evidence suggests that both phenomena stem from perceptions of fairness. While—as the two video interviews from Denmark suggest—many Danes believe that they benefit personally from their tax contributions, the rhetoric of people like Stack, Santelli and others suggest that many Americans believe they get little to nothing in return for their tax contributions. Instead, they believe their taxes benefit the “free riders” in US society—whether conceived as “welfare queens” at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, or as corporations and executives at the top.

Thus, Stack signed off with this bitter epigram: “The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” For him, it was a bitterness unto death; for like-minded Americans, these beliefs contribute to a sense of pervasive injustice that frustrates their “pursuit of happiness” and makes April 15 a day of national resentment rather than a simple administrative deadline.

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Brooke Harrington is Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the Copenhagen Business School. She is the author of two books: “Pop Finance: Investment Clubs and the New Investor Populism” (Princeton University Press, 2008) and “Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating” (Stanford University Press, 2009). She is currently doing research on offshore banking.  Harrington blogs at our fellow Contexts blog, Economic Sociology.

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Amanda S. took a screen shot while doing her taxes online at Turbo Tax.  The program asks if the filer is married or gay married:

What a fascinating moment in U.S. history.  In some states a person can marry someone of the same sex, in others they cannot.  Tax programs trying to help people file their federal and state taxes need to record both kinds of marriages because they collect information for both tax returns simultaneously in order to reduce the time burden on the client.

But why not just ask people if they were married?  Perhaps the people who designed these questions thought that the term “marriage” is so deeply associated with heterosexuality that it wouldn’t occur to people who were married to someone of the same sex to check it.  Then again, I would think that those gay couples who are legally married would be especially cognizant of their right to check the “marriage” box whether same-sex marriage was specified or not.

Or are there different tax rules applied to gay and straight marriage?

In any case, if we’re going to separate homo- and hetero-marriage, why not label “marriage” as “opposite-sex marriage” or “other-sex marriage”?  Why normalize heterosexual marriage (real marriage, you know, the original marriage, marriage marriage!) and mark homosexual marriage (the gay kind, duh, so gay)?

I don’t know what they were thinking… but it’s fascinating.

Happy tax day U.S. Americans!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The American Anthropological Association website on race has a great collection of the racial and ethnic categories included on Censuses throughout the world, showing how different countries formalize different racial categories.  They illustrate just how diverse ideas about race are and challenge the notion that there is one “correct” question or set of questions.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Rob D. sent along a commercial, made by the non-profit organization Iranians Be Counted, aimed at encouraging Iranian Americans filling out the U.S. Census to check “Other” and write in “Iranian.” It features a famous Iranian commedian doing a bunch of outrageous personalities, but in between the schtick is an argument that there is power in numbers and, therefore, a benefit to being identified as specifically Iranian:

This type of effort is really interesting and taps into a larger debate about Census categories.  How do we divide up the categories that we count?  Iranians are a much smaller group than, say, Arab American Persian (which is currently not an option on the U.S. Census).  If there is power in numbers, then wouldn’t it be better to write in “Arab American” “Persian”?  But, if you write in Arab Persian instead of Iranian, the resources to be gained from being counted may not benefit your community specifically. [As two commenters have pointed out, Iranian Americans are not Arab, except for a small minority. Iranians are Persian and most speak Farsi, not Arabic.  My mistake.]

The Asian American community in the U.S. is a good example of this conundrum.  “Asian” is a social construction; it is an umbrella label that includes very, very different groups.  There is great power in the social construction because it gives “Asians” a presence in American politics that, for example, the Hmong or the Vietnamese alone could never have.  But counting Asians as a group also means obscuring some very important differences among them.

For example, Asians outearn Whites in income surveys, suggesting that Asians should be excluded from programs trying to help groups escape poverty.  But, in reality, the groups we categorize as Asian vary tremendously in their average socioeconomic status.  Some Asian groups (e.g., the Japanese) outearn Whites; other Asian groups (e.g., the Hmong) have very high poverty rates.  When we look at the data broken out by smaller groups, we see more need, but the group itself is small enough that it can be ignored by politicians.

UPDATE: Roshan, in the comments, corrects me further:

Not all Iranians are Persians… Persians compose only 51 percent of the population. Other groups include the Azeris (24 percent), Gilaki and Mazandaranis (eight percent), Kurds (seven percent), Arabs (three percent), Lurs (two percent), Baluchs (two percent), and Turkmens (two percent) (Hakimzadeh, 2006).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Charlotte alerted us to a make-up brand called Primitive that makes and sells natural lips sticks, glosses, and pencils.

The company is drawing on familiar associations of primitiveness with naturalness.  We were natural “for centuries,” but have now somehow graduated from naturalness, such that we need to make a special effort to recapture the simple, intelligent, real, and honest beauty of our foremothers.

So, Primitive romanticizes our primitive past while making a questionable assertion about the relationship between time and naturalness.  In addition, the names of their products locate primitiveness in some parts of the (modern) globe and not others.

The products are named after places that are, almost exclusively, in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the South Pacific.  In a previous post I introduced the idea of “anachronistic space.”  I wrote: “Catherine MacKinnon coined the term ‘anachronistic space’ to refer to the idea that different parts of the globe represent different historical periods.”  In this case, Primitive is counting on our associating a (romanticized) primitiveness with only some places and not others.  It’s 2010 in Mali and Morocco.  They don’t represent our own past, they represent unique modernities.  And the places left out of these product names — largely North America and Europe — don’t represent the future.  They are not wholly modern societies that have shed their primitive past; they, just like all societies, are a mixture of old and new stitched together to form the present.

For more instances in which anachronistic space appears, see our posts on representing the fashion of the Surma and Mursi tribes and Wild African Cream.

And for more on the social construction of the modern and the primitive, see these posts: “Africans” as props for white femininity, Union Carbide brings modernity to the world, primitive Australia cures modern ills, women as carries of tradition and progress, representing the Middle East, equating modernity with permissiveness, and civilizing the Pueblos.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Some have argued that the vitriolic nature of the opposition to health care reform among the political right comes not from a concern about money per se, but a concern that the money of good, hard-working, white Americans will be transferred to the not-so-good, lazy, non-white Americans. That is, that this is isn’t about money, it’s about color.

The fact that conservative anti-health care reform activists hurled the n-word at Black lawmakers on Saturday adds heft to that argument, as does the justification of the use of that word by Representative Devin Dunes (Republican – California) as understandable given Leftist “totalitarianism”:

Via Matthew Yglesias.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.