[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Cultural Studies
It’s widely held that Americans do not really know, or believe, that they are living in a class system; the ideology of the American dream and the general individualism of the place ostensibly cover over the realities of class. But if People Like Us is even remotely representative, that is not quite right: Americans see class all around them--they just don't always call it that. Neither the filmmakers nor those filmed are especially clear on the economic basis of class inequality.
With the exception of a food co-op worker in Burlington, Vermont (the cooperative "was set up as an alternative to the capitalist modes of production") and a beer-drinking guy at the Redneck Games in Georgia (the working class "does 80 percent of the work and draws 10 percent of the pay that the work produces"), they are not that interested in class relations in any Marxian sense. There is hardly a labor union to be found here. Besides, with the exception of those at the very top and the very bottom, almost all the people in this film consider themselves middle class.
But their awareness of the everyday workings of class, and especially of "culture" as a sort of currency that people hoard and exchange what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called "cultural capital" is extraordinarily sharp and developed. The film uncovers class divisions in the kind of bread people will and won't eat, they do and don't display in their houses, in how they dress and what they do to have fun. And like the high school kids who describe the fine calibrations of their school's social structure, the adults can provide a detailed accounting of the tastes and manners that distinguish their kind of people from those in other classes................
