If the category doesn't exist, we'll have to invent it

Arts & Letters Daily, a frequent source of inspiration for this blog, has a link today to a book review in The Guardian on a tome called "Urban Tribes". I'll let the reviewer describe the author's intent:

Ethan Watters calls them "urban tribes", and describes them as "the fastest-growing demographic group in America". They have been to university, they have confidence and money, but they are uninterested in what comes next in the conventional middle-class life: a structured career, marriage, children. Instead, Watters's subjects form groups with like-minded peers, and spend the decades between early adulthood and middle age going out together, bonding and gossiping with their new extended family, earning money by freelance means, and drinking a great number of leisurely coffees.

Does this sound familiar? An author discovers that 20 and 30-year olds often like to be pretentious, think they're too hip to be like their parents, and maybe slack off a bit before settling into the usual middle age routine. David Brooks did this shtick back in 2000, coining the term "bobo" (short for "bourgeois bohemian") and writing a similar thesis. And in the '80s, it was Yuppies (that's "young urban professional), satirized (maybe a bit too tendentiously) by Oliver Stone in Wall Street as shallow, sushi-eating, fast-living types. SC won't even try to catalog all of the spinoffs and marginally activity-based categories, like "buppies" (black yuppies) and "ricers" (predominantly Chinese-American youths obssessed with putting garish paint jobs and coffee can-sized exhausts on Honda Civics).

The fact that this idea keeps popping up every few years suggests that maybe there's something meaningful being expressed. But it's too vague to acquire a particularly permanent label. So aspiring pop sociologists just pick a few points to be more salient than others -- sushi-eating, coffee-drinking, anime-watching (maybe the real story is the post-WWII takeover of American culture by Japan?!?) -- and, voila, instant category to be studied. All you need after that is a temporarily catchy name, and you've got yourself a book.

Comments

[Nicole Wyatt]

I drink leisurely coffees and eat sushi. I must be having a crisis of identity.