Situating myself, and interrogating my habitus

Life has been complex and multidimensional--so many layers, so many strands interwoven. I've been dusting off the archives the past couple of weekends (boxes pulled out of the depth of closets, their contents freshly exposed to light and memory and reflection), reconnected with friends from the past, and have felt the need to write and interweave the old and the more recent in new and unforeseen ways. Perhaps a blog, I thought? Let's try it.

For those who don't know me, I'm a woman in my early 50s. Raised in Virginia, with deep, rural Carolina roots. Oldest of three sisters, born to young parents, deeply imbricated in my maternal extended family though we didn't live near them. A child of precocious intelligence (and groomed by a father with a brilliant mathematical brain who constantly pushed and tested me), I became an academic overachiever and always did well in school, though I felt more on the fringes of the local public school's social world of peers. I never quite felt like I fit in. Growing up, white, in a still-segregated school system in Lynchburg, Virginia, I was aware even in elementary and junior high school of the deep inequalities in our social world.

I was fortunate, I think, to have had a mother who was progressive and free-thinking and who exposed me at an early age to feminist and liberal thinking. Surrounded by a culture of Southern Baptists, we were Unitarian Univeralists. My mother made sure that I had friends from a range of racial and class backgrounds. We lived in a lower middle-class neighborhood and I was surrounded by kids my age; their mothers all stayed home (mine worked in community development) and their fathers were a mix of factory workers and salesmen (mine was a former college professor and an engineer). My extended family also ranged from lawyers and doctors to farmers and welders.

Thus, Bourdieu's concept of habitus resonated deeply when I first encountered it in graduate school. I was always trying to make sense of something like social class--why my grandmother (Mama Tootsie) would tell us to avoid some people because they were "trashy" while encouraging us to associate with others because they were from "good families."

My grandmother's social classification system was much more complex than merely about how much money people had--(1) it had a depth of history to it (that is, "good families" were not just born one day--they usually had had several generations to demonstrate their "good-family"-ness), (2) it reflected something about a worldview that one gains from advanced education and intellectual exposure, (3) it was definitely associated with lifestyle choices such as where one lived and what kinds of styles one espoused, and (4) it also clearly was thought to be generally reflected in one's moral and ethical behavior and demeanor.

In my grandmother's eyes, this last characteristic was always tied to Christian belief, but even among the many kinds of Christians, she seemed to have a social grid in which there were various levels of respectability associated with different churches and the styles of their followers.

"Country" people, in Mama Tootsie's worldview, could be "good country people" or they could be "trash"--the first being hardworking, churchgoing, self-supporting humble and clean-living people who generally did not have much money but who had a great deal of dignity and pride, the latter being people who did not have much money but who lacked dignity because of their drinking, drugs, lack of morals (e.g. if a woman had illegitimate children), lifestyle choices (living in trailers or in run-down houses that were not kept clean and presentable).

Mama Tootsie had not grown up in a wealthy or extremely privileged family herself--her father was a would-be small-town entrepreneur in Landrum, SC, who had faced bankruptcy a number of times such as when his flour mill failed and his business partner, a Mr. Whitlock, committed suicide due to some financial misappropriations. Her mother and another woman had opened a small cafe to serve the soldiers at a nearby military camp during WWI. In spite of the family's fluctuating economic status, Tootsie and her sisters (and one brother) were raised as "respectable" young women, and she took this charge seriously throughout her life, marrying a young attorney from a neighboring county because she felt he would provide her with a good station in life.