Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
American Misfits is filled with colorful anecdotes, lively characters, and sharp social analysis. One of America's leading sociologists, Robert Wuthnow shows that respectability is rarely about respecting others but rather about identifying others to malign for their deficiencies and offenses."
—Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis"This is an outstanding book—impressively researched, boldly argued with interdisciplinary breadth, and innovative in the way it depicts the middle-class American dream as perpetually fleeting and tenuous, marked off by day-to-day practices of the rank-and-file and prone to negotiation among those who seek to patrol the boundaries of belonging. It is also a riveting read, driven by rich description and detailed investigation of countless colorful characters who have tested those boundaries and found themselves held up as test cases of what America should and shouldn't look like, and who should and shouldn't be counted as respectable citizens."
—Darren Dochuk, University of Notre DameTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 1 A Relational Approach: The Social Construction of Respect and Respectability 19 2 Worked as a Huckster: Moral Connotations of Placeless Labor 39 3 An Incurable Lunatic: Pension Politics in the Struggle for Respectability 70 4 Not a Fanatic: Zeal in the Cause of Zion 101 5 Dying Young: Immigrant Congregations as Moral Communities 135 6 Excessive Profits: Wealth, Morality, and the Common People 187 7 Naughty Children: Moral Instruction by Negative Example 227 8 Othering: Cultural Diversity and Symbolic Boundaries 258 Notes 267 Selected Bibliography 307 Index 327
