Passing secrets in class

[muckefuck]

This opinion piece by fellow alum John Scalzi is sparking some interesting online discussions, particularly on the role of class. (Here's a thoughtful response from nihilistic_kid highlighting the importance of that factor.) One of these was in the Facebook feed of a friend, and a friend of hers made this interesting observation:

Upper class kids, especially those from academic families, view knowledge as something to be shared, and it is not just right but proper to defer to superior expertise. I think one of the most telling markers of class, honestly, is family recipes. If you ask someone from a lower class background about the recipe for some particular dish, nine times out of ten you'll get some waffle about my/mother's/grandmother's "secret recipe," with all the song and dance that sounds like something between the trade secrets of the medieval guilds and some occult mystery tradition. If you ask someone from an upper class background, this is invariably taken as an invitation to talk about themselves, their ancestry, or their travels, giving the provenance of the recipe, mentioning personal variations, and more often than not referring to "tricks" rather than "secrets," as the assumption is shared common knowledge rather than secrecy, and mentioning "tricks" is just a way to gauge a person's expertise. With that sort of worldview, it's not surprising that upper class kids have a leg up in academia because it comes out of the later tradition.

I'm interested in hearing how this does or doesn't jibe with the experiences of others here. My family background is pretty firmly middle class (though Dad's family was on the borderline, his father being a workman-cum-farmer) and the description of "upper class" behaviour sounds about right for us and our milieu. But I don't really have enough experience trading recipes with members of the "lower class" to speak to that part of it. Most of the working-class people I've chatted with about food have been recent immigrants and I think that skews the sample.

Comments

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Hm, interesting post from nihlistic_kid (but the link needs fixing). His comment about Southern whites being paid less than Northern blacks is interesting, but I suspect it was precisely the differential, even more than the average amount, that is psychologically rewarding for whites.

I have been spending quite a lot of time with some very poor white people lately and I think this attitude towards knowledge - shared vs. hoarded - is just a special case of a very broad kind of privilege, which is the privilege of "not having to care". Upper class people can afford to be generous because they are not accustomed to having to fight tooth and nail for every last advantage just to squeak by. Hoarding and competitive behavior also seems associated with having a lot of siblings, and people who grew up having to compete for food at the dinner table seem permanently imprinted by that experience. (Perhaps that's why recipes are such a good example.)

Generosity is seen as a virtue, so of course those who cannot or don't believe they can afford it are seen as less virtuous by those who can. I can't call recipe-hoarding a vice but it probably is much less necessary than it seems.

It's sort of unbelievable how much energy goes into different kinds of psychological game-playing among people who can afford it the least. I find some lower class whites to be almost pathologically defensive of their honor, and this is the source of all kinds of woo-woo ranging from secret recipes to outright occult manipulation.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Interesting observations, and a logical conclusion about generosity vis-à-vis badly needed and jealously guarded advantage. I will need to ponder them at greater length to figure out how to reconcile it with my own observations in two jobs I held (1, 2) that involved bidirectional class-divergent interaction: I found that privileged rich upper class individuals tended to be niggardly, and underprivileged poor lower class individuals tended to be generous. But this was in terms of material goods and money, not recipes or other knowledge.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in looking at that study from the 70s. The question I was left with was, "Are regional variations in the cost-of-living being accounted for?" In other words, the Southerners may have been making less money in absolute terms, but since cost-of-living and purchasing power varies in different parts of the country (just look at gas prices), were they really worse off, comparatively? I would suspect the variation would have less to do with the presence/absence of unions and more to do with the presence/absence of industry.