ABSTRACT
Seeley and his collaborators, like their predecessors in American community studies, have—unlike the Fortune articles—granted a kind of courtesy anonymity to their suburb, more as a sign of good will than in any hope that one can hide so distinctive a feature of the landscape as Crestwood Heights. Veblen knew that the apparently deadpan could be devastating, and part of Mary McCarthy’s genius is to be able to say, for instance, that “the professor came into the room carrying his briefcase” so that the descriptive remark appears to undress him, to show him as he really ridiculously is, without pretense or illusion. The anthropologist who goes into a culture that has successfully hardened against white contact does not face this danger, nor does the industrial sociologist, whom the workers in a factory regard as a tool or fool of management or of themselves.
