New Jersey Dreaming

In New Jersey Dreaming pioneering anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner turns her attention to the question of how social class is lived in the United States and, specifically, within her own peer group. Ortner returns to her Newark roots to present an in-depth look at Weequahic High School's Class of 1958, of which she was a member. Exploring her classmates' recollected experiences of the neighbourhood and the high school, she provides an ethnographic chronicle of their journeys from the 1950s into the 1990s, following the movement of a striking number of them from modest working- and middle-class backgrounds into the wealthy upper-middle or professional/managerial class. Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering and Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. She has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.