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    Naked Elites: Unveiling Embodied Markers of Superiority through Co-Performance Ethnography in gentrified Brooklyn’s Park Slope


    Manzo, Lidia (2017) Naked Elites: Unveiling Embodied Markers of Superiority through Co-Performance Ethnography in gentrified Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Urban Geography. ISSN 0272-3638

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    Abstract

    In the super-gentrified neighborhood of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, elites joined democratic associations, such as karate dojos or food coops, to interact with and become socially accepted by the local community. Co-performance ethnography made it possible to recognize that progressive moral values led instead to exclusive behaviors. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and socio-cultural analysis, this article provides a definition of performance as the paradigm-driven methodological tool to unveil the hidden, micro-strategies of elite reproduction. I analyze how social mixing in gentrified neighborhoods encourages competing identities to reproduce symbolic boundaries, ultimately serving as a basis for socio-spatial inequality and conflict. The production of identities, behavior, and emotions highlights elites performance of a contextualized version of “self” to assert their superior status. It also shows how these relations of domination shape elites’ lives. These points call attention to the connections between capital accumulation and the hermeneutical agency of the body.
    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: Economic elites; gentri fi cation; co-performance ethnography; theory of the self; symbolic boundaries;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
    Item ID: 8939
    Identification Number: 10.1080/02723638.2017.1381535
    Depositing User: Lidia Manzo
    Date Deposited: 01 Nov 2017 10:49
    Journal or Publication Title: Urban Geography
    Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
    Refereed: Yes
    Funders: Irish Research Council (IRC)
    Related URLs:
    URI: https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/8939
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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