Summary Of Paying For The Party By Elizabeth Armstrong And Hamilton Ethnography

In their ethnography account, Paying for the Party, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton draws us our attention to MU, a Midwestern public university, where they recount the experiences of women adapting to college life. Drawing on their findings from their five- year study, the authors demonstrate how universities and students alike reproduce social inequalities not only by affecting the large scale interactions of college campus, but also the social interactions within students. Thus, in this book, Armstrong and Hamilton highlights how social inequality is reproduced by both the system and the people by discussing the university’s commitment to organizational imperatives, the social interactions between affluent and disadvantage students
According to Armstrong and Hamilton, one example of this interaction are the relationships between social isolates and other affluent students. The authors define social isolates as women, who by the end of the year can only claim one person as their friend. Therefore, social isolates exemplify social inequality because the women that were isolated were mainly those who lack the cultural capital of affluent students. In Forms of Capital, Bourdieu defines cultural capital as the skills, viewpoints and styles that defines the way a person sees and act in the world. According, to Bourdieu, different types of cultural capital can be praised or disadvantage by people. Thus, social isolates at MU university were disadvantage because the cultural capital they possessed went in disagreement with the cultural capital of affluent students. Armstrong and Hamilton argue that because of this, many of the social isolates were rejected by their peers, whom in turn performed symbolic boundaries. Lamont in her study of Boundaries in the Social science describes symbolic boundaries as conceptual distinctions made by people to set each other apart. Correspondingly, social ambitious women performed symbolic boundaries when they seek to disengage, reduce contact and dissociate from social isolates in order to be avoid being stain by their lower class. For instance, Armstrong and Hamilton argue that socially affluent women would avoid the dorm longue, maintain the doors shut and refuse the acknowledge the existence of social isolates. According to the authors, this is in turn brought many consequences for the social isolates, whom experience many academic, social and mental