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Inequality

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1. Is Inequality a Natural Part of Human Culture? –Inequality is present in almost every society. A large contributor of inequality is an individual’s social class.
a. Egalitarian Societies: As far as history goes back, every individual’s economic and social structure was hunting and gathering, which stimulated egalitarian societies. With the amount of archeological evidence available, it proves that many societies counted on sharing as well as hunting and gathering. The idea of sharing, for long-term benefits, is still a method used today. Anthropologists have studied many egalitarian societies since 1993.
b. Ranked Societies: Another society Anthropologists have looked closely into are ranked societies, which focus on one’s status. A great …show more content…

Wealth: Wealth can define an individual’s power within a community and is a greater reason why people love bringing home money. Wages and the lowering of tax codes caused gaps in wages because of the increase in mortgage. credit card debt, and less inheritance from ancestors. Looking closely at graphs presented, we can see wealth is not circulated evenly. These factors now make it hard for Americans to find what position they identify with.
b. Ethnographic Portraits of Class in The United States: Ethnographic portraits of class in the United States considers the study of how class is built based on settings, race, and gender.
i. Poor Whites in Rural Kentucky: Pem Davidson Buck, an Anthropologist focusing on intersectionality, conducted Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky, to show how lower class whites in two parts of Kentucky are limited due to their class. Poor and working class whites were tempted by the leaders with promises of white privileges for “others” and “white trash” rather than people struggling for fair work and wages. Pem describes her personal experience living in Kentucky. She explains how her and her husband struggled to make ends meet until the made a plumbing and heating business of their own. Through her personal experience she now connects race and class to culture. She explains how being white does not even matter anymore more when it comes to global …show more content…

Downward Mobility: The Middle Class: The rise from nothing to something, the American Dream, has not occurred for U.S. families in a long time. A popular Anthropologist during the 1990’s conducted another research project, Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence, to look into the lives of multiple families in the United States who are trying to maintain their class. Another research project she conducted during this time, No Shame in My Game, focused on full time workers who were still considered poor. Many would describe the individuals in the experiment as not motivated with a poor work ethic, but they have struggle barriers that keep them from moving up. iii. Wealth, Inequality, and Wall Street: Anthropologist Karen Ho shares her personal experience of working on Wall Street while it was thriving. This is when she figured out when workers are laid off stock and bank investments will go up. She also explains that a lot of decisions made by the companies on Wall Street benefited the employees more than it did the

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The Brothers faced this challenge in their, largely, futile attempts to achieve middle class status through achieving a proper education. Macleod highlights that, historically, the “overall structure of class relations from one generation to the next” is extremely reluctant to change(4). The Brothers evince this in their inability to earn work with greater wages than their parents, forcing them to live in working class neighborhoods like they did. Although some of the Brothers did manage to obtain middle class work, they struggled to keep those jobs as they either got laid off or were pressured out believing that they just didn’t fit in the workplace environment- though this is largely in fact due to differences in cultural capital, knowledge, disposition, and skills passed on generationally, that arise from the different upbringings of the supervisors and the Brothers.

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The American dream is a dream of a land in which one can prosper with ambition and hard work. This idea has created many illusions for some because in reality the American dream is proven to be something that is rarely achieved. No individual is guaranteed success or destined for failure, but it is apparent that women, people of color, and those born into poverty will face greater obstacles than others, despite being a greater part of the American population. An author that tackles the issue of class in the United States is Gregory Mantsios. In his essay, “Class in America-2009”, Mantsios aims to prove that class affects people’s lives in drastic ways.

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There is lower, middle, and upper class, but there are also subcategories that fill the gaps in between, like the impoverished and the top one percenters. “Class in America”, written by Gregory Mantsios, addresses the myths and realities about socioeconomic class in America and how they affect American lives. His article highlights the unequal divide that has persisted over the course of history and will continue to manifest in the future. To introduce the existence of this issue, Mantsios states that this country’s citizens “don’t like to talk about class...or class privileges, or class oppression, or the class nature of society” (Mantsios 378). This is the case in America today because people are neglecting to acknowledge the existence of these elusive

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Although there a few modern examples of people with a ‘rags to riches’ story, namely Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs, the masses of people born into lower income households don’t commonly rise to the middle class. A recent study by Pew Charitable Trust signifies how important family wealth is, as the “median family wealth of those who made it to middle class was $94,586, while the median wealth of those stuck at the bottom was just $8,892” (Hargreaves 1). The higher a family’s financial capital is, the easier it is to invest in opportunities such as education, which increases income. Winston in 1984 observes how the proles are intelligent in their daily tasks, stating how "even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory” (Orwell 72).

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