America Observed

On an International Anthropology of the United States

Virginia R. Dominguez, Jasmin Habib, Virginia R. Dominguez, Jasmin Habib

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785333613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon.Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Part I

On the Outside Looking In?

The US as Fieldsite

Chapter One

Manhattan as a Magnet

Place and Circulation among Young Swedes

Helena Wulff

Since World War II, children in Sweden have grown up with an increasing exposure to American culture through the media. It started with the arrival of the magazine Donald Duck translated as Kalle Anka¹ in the late 1940s, and continued when television was introduced in Sweden with sitcoms such as Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy. For six decades, on Christmas Eve, the day when Christmas is celebrated in Protestant Sweden, a Disney cavalcade entitled Donald Duck and His Friends Wishing a Merry Christmas—“from all of us to all of you”—has been broadcast on primetime television. For many Swedish children, teenagers, and for those of us adults who started watching it when we were children, watching Donald Duck with its rhythmic music and Schubert´s military march on Christmas Eve is as much a compulsory part of the Christmas ritual as a decorated tree, dinner, and presents (cf. Löfgren 1989). This is when Sweden comes to a halt. Streets are deserted as the program is allegedly watched every year by between three and four million people,² which is almost half of Sweden´s population. The voice of a vicar´s wife on the subject is quite unusual, but to the point. As Christmas was approaching one year, she remarked drily: “Yes, it´s time to commemorate the birth of Donald Duck again!”

The Schubert March featured in Donald Duck was as much as a young Swede living in New York in the 1980s was able to get live—via the telephone. This was why Sven, a musician, called home when the program was on, and had his brother holding the receiver close to the television set, to allow Sven to share the Christmas experience with his family. Sven was one of the young Swedes in New York City I researched in the late 1980s (Wulff 1991, 1992, 1994). They often identified New York as “a city where anything seemed possible,” which incidentally was exactly how Lévi-Strauss once described New York (Clifford 1988: 238).

With ethnographic examples from this field study of young Swedes conducted in Manhattan in New York, in this chapter I will discuss Manhattan as a magnet for young people. The Swedes were artists, business executives, and au pair girls who were attracted to Manhattan in the expansive economy and culture of the 1980s,³ after that particular time period this trend has been reduced but it is still there. (In the 1980s, young Swedes used the designation New York more often when they had Manhattan in mind than native New Yorkers and other Americans seemed to do.) There were Americans, Europeans, Asians, and young people from other parts of the world as well. The young Swedes described how they were “taking in impulses from all over the world” not only from people they met, but also from work routines and opportunities. Working as a photographer or a bank executive in Stockholm entailed having Sweden as a working habitat, while in New York, they liked to tell me, they had a sense of reaching across the world, and often did. This is why I will argue that the young Swedes acquired a global experience, rather than merely a transnational one.

As virtually everyone in my study was a newcomer, and sojourner in New York, this is an ethnography of how the United States is observed by outsiders. It also matters that the ethnographer is an outsider in New York, but has a similar background as the Swedes. On an auto-ethnographic note (Reed-Danahay 1997), this study was inspired by my first visit to New York in the summer of 1980. I then realized that there were a vast number of young Swedes in Manhattan who spent a few years in the city including, to a varying extent, in formal structures and institutions.

Arriving in New York in the early hours of a hot July morning, I was enthralled (and somewhat frightened) by the height of the skyscrapers, the ethnic diversity, and the fast pace. As I stood there on the pavement, I heard cars honking. There was the smell of a dry cleaner´s chemicals mingling with garlic fried in oil. Later that first day, the noise would increase: the traffic becoming aggressive and conversations loud, the heat heavy. Within weeks, I would get used to the taste of weak coffee and to people not knowing where in Europe my home country is located.

On a New York Quest

Before delving deeper into the lives of the young Swedes in Manhattan, let me identify two pivotal points that inform this study. The first point is that it is a well-known fact in transnational urbanization that different types of immigrants are drawn to world cities. Most of them are poor and uneducated people. They are an expected topic of research on social injustice, as well as of government policy. This is certainly the case with immigrants in Manhattan and New York. The second point is that New York tends to be regarded as culturally apart from the rest of the US. The young Swedes were referring to this, and to New York, as if it was a separate country, and so would many native New Yorkers. It is the special combination of a cosmopolitan city with a long history as an economic center that has enabled cultural diversity and activity to flourish. Also New York is still a place where many immigrants, tourists, and other visitors first arrive in the US. Having noted that New York is different from the rest of the US, it is necessary to add that this city remains a product of the US. It is not generically cosmopolitan. Manhattan could not have happened anywhere else. What is typical of New York from the outsider’s point of view, such as frontier spirit and diversity, is typical of the US, but to varying and lesser extents in other cities and towns, let alone in rural areas. It is my contention that an analytical observation of the US is incomplete without New York and its social and cultural diversity, which includes middle-class Europeans.

There was an emic term, a New York term, for young middle-class Europeans who were conspicuously present in Manhattan, especially in the nightlife: native New Yorkers called them “Eurotrash.” The young Swedes were aware that they were running the risk of being classified as “Eurotrash,” and when they talked about this slightly jokingly derogatory designation, they pointed out that it referred to others, not themselves, and that it might contain an element of envy from the New Yorkers. Typical “Eurotrash” dressed in “flashy clothes,” they were predominantly men who came to New York with the sole intention of sparkling in the nightlife. They were mostly around in the 1970s and 1980s, and lacked any hint of serious commitment to improving their education or career. Still, there were certain similarities between “Eurotrash” and the young Swedes since the latter were educated people, rather comfortable economically, and were visible in that nightlife.

About two hundred Swedes were included in my study, thirty of whom were in focus, aged between 19 and 30. There were as many artists and executives as au pairs, but altogether only one-third were men while two-thirds were women. Among the executives, the majority were men, while artists and au pairs tended to be women. I conducted fieldwork for six months in New York, which consisted of participant observation and interviews. In addition, I interviewed returnees in Stockholm; some were the same individuals as in New York, some were not. I was able to engage in participant observation with the young Swedes when they were at work in studios, at galleries, at banks, and in homes. I also joined them when they were at play in the evenings at bars, restaurants, and clubs. I spent some time at social activities at the Swedish Church, which was a meeting place with ethnic—not religious—significance to the Swedes. It should be pointed out that they were all ethnic Swedes. This would be different now, as the population of Sweden has changed rapidly and become quite diverse, a circumstance that is noticeable not least when Swedes go abroad to represent Sweden at international competitions in sports, music, or even film.

I visited quite a few of the young Swedes in their homes ranging from tiny one-room apartments to classical studios and lofts. Many of the artists, but also executives, were sharing apartments. Most of the au pairs lived in suburban houses outside Manhattan with the families they worked for, but they were oriented toward Manhattan, spending most of their free time there. Some au pairs did live in Manhattan, though, in small rooms behind the kitchens of grand apartments on the Upper West Side.

The majority of the young Swedes were middle class, that is artists and executives, who tended to be of upper middle class background. Some of them were upper class, from well-known business families in Sweden. A few were from the aristocracy. The au pairs were mainly of lower middle class origin—more of them had working class parents than artists or executives—but there were some from upper-class homes. Many of the artists were supported economically by their parents, and still they rarely had enough money, and it did happen that they survived on very little food. They then borrowed money from friends, had dinner with people they knew would pay for them, ran away from checks, or lived on popcorn for days. None of them were able to make a living on their art, at least not yet, which was their criteria of success. Almost all of them made extra money by waiting tables or working in ice-cream parlors or supermarkets. If these jobs had anything to do with their artistic ambitions, such as a makeup artist selling makeup among other goods in a pharmacy, or a dancer working in the box office at a dance theater (which included access to a studio where he could practice), they saw it as a step in their careers. At least they were moving in the right direction (Wulff 1992). Writing about German and Austrian refugee intellectuals and artists who had escaped to New York in the 1930s and early 1940s, Helmut Pfanner (1983) notes that they had problems getting the kinds of jobs they used to have in Europe. Just like the young Swedes almost five decades later, some of these Europeans took simple jobs in their area of endeavor, hoping that they would be promoted with time. There were thus book dealers who worked as errand-boys for bookstores and film producers working as ushers in cinemas.

The artists worked with painting, photography, jewelry design, graphic design, window decorating, modeling, swing and jazz music, acting, dance, sculpting, and architecture. One woman worked as a makeup artist, another woman attended the Tisch School of the Arts learning filmmaking. Some were involved in more than one pursuit simultaneously, or one after the other. The executives were employed at Swedish or American banks or agencies, or were running small companies doing export or import business with Sweden, or went to business schools.

Among the young Swedes, artists tended to come from Stockholm, while the au pairs and the executives had grown up in small towns, which meant that the majority of the young Swedes had moved from a relatively small town to the global city that New York is. There was an attitudinal difference in how those who were used to Stockholm on one hand, and those who had not lived in a city with at least some kind of cosmopolitanism, related to the intensity and diversity of Manhattan. Those who came from Stockholm were usually uncritically positive, even engrossed—“hungry” as they said themselves—in relation to New York. They were eager to go out on all kinds of visits, to destitute ghettos and to decadent clubs, as well as to learning how to operate in the art world and the business world. This was not the case with those who came from other parts of Sweden, especially the younger ones, who mostly were less comfortable in New York (Wulff 1992). They frequented less spectacular restaurants and clubs that still might provide them with unexpected excitement in the form of romantic encounters.

All the young Swedes were well aware of the fact that they were in the process of acquiring the social and cultural capital that a sojourn in the US tends to entail in Sweden. The artists and executives were above all busy collecting job qualifications, which they were planning to use afterward back in Sweden. Still, they did have many different reasons to make the move to New York when they finally did, and their reasons to stay on might in fact not be those that had urged them to go there in the first place. The artists principally went to New York in order to expose themselves to the opportunity of becoming famous, while the main reason for most of the au pair girls was the nightlife of New York (Wulff 1992). But New York was a place for unlimited opportunities, beyond what any of them would ever experience in Sweden, at the same time it included the possibility that they might settle down permanently in New York.

Moratorium in Manhattan

Erik Homburger Erikson (1968: 156–58, 242), the psychoanalyst, has said that a psychosocial moratorium, “a delay of adult commitments . . . a period that is characterized by selective permissiveness on the part of society and on provocative playfulness on the part of youth,” seems to be inherent in human development. Young adults are allowed to experiment with different roles; there may even be certain social zones that are meant to take care of such activity. The young Swedes shared this, and the opportunity to devote themselves to the nightlife of Manhattan. They were all in the process of prolonging their youth while enjoying the freedom from responsibilities and long-term personal commitments far away from parental surveillance and control. Very few were married, not all that many were living together with a partner, although it was more common than not to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. A small number were gay. None had children. And it was in the roaring nightlife of Manhattan that artists, au pairs, and executives felt free to meet across class boundaries.

This they could do, at least the men, at the gentlemen´s club Friends of the Pea (Ärtans vänner) to have traditional Swedish pea soup every Thursday at different restaurants with Swedish connections. The oldest member was an 85-year-old shipbroker who had been a member for about half a century, the youngest was on one occasion a 19-year-old man with his hair in a ponytail who had arrived in New York a week earlier. Like all cultured gentleman´s clubs, Friends of the Pea is partly organized for men in order to build and cultivate their work networks, but also, and for most of them, it is above all a reason to party and confirm their Swedishness in the ethnic diversity of Manhattan. In other words, they formed what Shokeid (1988) has called affective ethnicity, the kind of ethnicity without political, economic, or other social interest that relatively invisible ethnic groups form in a changing situation. Yet, the affective ethnicity at Friends of the Pea did have an instrumental aspect since it happened that the men helped each other extend their professional networks, and the setting was indeed social.

Soon spirits are running high at Friends of the Pea, and the conversation consists of bolder-and-bolder dirty jokes. It is, to quote one of the happy young men “the hottest night on earth” (jordens drag), not least because of the sweet alcoholic punch that is served with the pea soup and pancakes. So what are the girls up to while the boys are enjoying themselves in all-male company? Some of the au pairs, at least, went giggling to see male striptease as a way to break boundaries.

Erikson (1968) brings up the importance of pranks during moratorium. The young Swedes were often involved in pranks on nights on the town: artists, au pairs and executives, men and women, all together dressed up in black clothing—short leather jackets, black jeans or mini skirts for the women. The identity play, experimentation with different roles, tended to take the form of pranks. One of the au pairs described this, without me having asked about it, by saying “you can play a little with your identity here.”

A night on the town might last for twelve hours and take place at three or four locales beginning at a restaurant with dinner, going on to a bar and clubs for dancing until the early hours of the morning when it was time for the “after hour” clubs (Wulff 1992). The city that never sleeps offered opportunities for identity play, “to go out and lie,” as the expression was, about who you are, trying on another “possible life” such as that of a fiction writer or a film director. This experimentation with different identities mostly had to do with nationality, occupation, age, sexual orientation, and class. It took place during short conversations with strangers in the anonymity of the Manhattan nightlife. It was a good way to get into contact with people and easily get out, if you did not want to pursue them. But it did happen that people the young Swedes had known for quite some time turned out to be someone else, of a different background, than they had told the Swedes.

Another kind of identity play was performed by executives and other professionals who were doing very well, working extremely hard, making a lot of money, and ...