Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

This dissertation explores the impact of the permanent chautauqua movement in American culture, especially in the period from 1874 to 1935. It argues that chautauquas served as sites for the production of middle-class culture and the renegotiation of relationships among class, gender, race, and religion. Permanent chautauquas were popular vacation resorts throughout the United States, beginning with the founding of the Chautauqua Sunday School Assembly in upstate New York and increasing in number to about two hundred in 1900. They were associations of cottages offering community programs that were educational, religious, and entertaining. This dissertation examines the programs that the chautauquas planned, arguing that they espoused a burgeoning form of culture, one that supported a perceived morality and middle-class values like dedication to family, temperance, education, patriotism, piety, and fighting against temptation to sin. Particular emphasis is placed on how performance at permanent chautauquas led to new expectations of gender, class, race, and religion. Women had opportunities for leadership, were able to blur lines between public and private spheres, and could act out different expectations of their gender while on the grounds. While most chautauquans were middle class, attending a chautauqua meant that one's class was not important and all could enjoy a middle-class vacation. While the line between whites and non-whites remained stable, non-whites were granted performance opportunities at chautauquas that they might not have had; other non-whites participated as members of the work force that allowed white chautauquans the leisure they expected. Because chautauquas were Protestant communities, religion underlaid all activities on the grounds, redefining expectations of how religion and entertainment could be combined. Taken together, these renegotiations of identity at chautauquas impacted a broader American culture. This dissertation examines the performances at chautauqua, in particular the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle and their Recognition Day graduation ceremony; historical pageantry; professional performers who visited as part of the circuit chautauquas; and early film exhibition. It places them in a broader American performance context and argues that permanent chautauquas played a role in their development and popularity. It draws upon archival records from the chautauquas to outline the kinds of programming presented. Additionally, the research is supported by anecdotal evidence from a series of oral history interviews conducted with individuals who recall their childhoods at permanent chautauquas.

In recent years, the concept of emotion has increasingly been seen as a vital political factor shaping human subjectivity, that is, the process by which one becomes a subject. Emotion is an important component in the neoliberal economy within which well-being is seen to be best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and by assuming the interests of workers and companies are commensurate. I approach the job-search process and (un/under)employment as focal spheres in which to examine the everyday production and upkeep of emotional management to produce an employable self. Specifically, I draw on thirteen months of fieldwork at five career development workshops in Arizona to argue that the career advice industry is urging job seeking college educated Americans to use emotional management techniques to become employable in a neoliberal economy. Increasingly precarious employment for college-educated Americans prepares the ground for job seekers to pursue help from career experts. These experts guide job seekers to do emotion work to change their thinking and behavior so that they can be employable professionals ready for the work force. This attempt to repackage and recreate a new employable self is couched in discovering one's "authentic self" discourse, bringing out existing skills, and figuring out what one enjoys doing. Career experts re-frame unemployment and underemployment as a training opportunity for job seekers to become productive people. During these workshops, experts explicitly attempt to blur the boundaries between work and non-work, as well as between social good and profit, which is consistent with the neoliberal economy where the individual is seen as a product or company to be marketed. Therefore, in a neoliberal context, achieving individual well-being involves active incorporation of the personal sphere into the business domain. In addition, a look at the class identities of college educated participants reveals that emotion, particularly a sense of economic security, is also shaping how job-seeking Americans describe their middle-class identity. I illustrate that in the face of decreasing economic opportunities and a tight labor market, very few participants have a negative view of what "middle class" means to them, nor do they describe their class status with an occupation oriented criteria. The majority of participants' descriptions of "middle class" included consumption items, while almost half of them indicated the importance of economic safety, security and the lack of anxiety for basic economic needs. Following and extending on the concept of ontological security, which refers to the constancy of social and material environments, I demonstrate that despite their precarious employment status, participants still believe in the American Dream and they articulate middle-class identity through their ability to continue consuming, even in a more modified form, which allows them to retain a sense of security. This indicates the centralization of safety and security discourses in defining an American middle-class identity.

With the postmodern prevalence of shopping as both a recreational and subsistence activity, social class identity is increasingly constituted around access to the landscape of consumption. U.S. middle-class identity is normalized in commercial spaces and the exclusion of the lower-class from these spaces perpetuates wider social disparities. For socially aware members of the middle-class, distinction may be achieved by selectively shopping throughout the metropolitan area with the goal of influencing corporate practices. Yet this distinction is not without cost as middle-class shoppers are prime targets of identity marketing schemes and of the neoliberal regime’s construction of consent. Through 15 self-proclaimed middle-class shoppers’ reported use of Atlanta’s postmodern landscape of consumption, this study focuses on performances of middle-classness and representations of commercialized spaces with the goal of furthering the anthropological understanding of class identity and urban space as heterogeneous.