ABSTRACT
A consideration of the opinions and attitudes about class and cultural distinctions held by the people who live here is informative but, being fraught with complications, a good deal less useful than might be supposed at first sight. Take the following series of comments made by the people we interviewed: they indicate the range of opinion and attitude, and the complexity of self-assessments:
These testimonials to the general awareness of social inequalities, and the existence of distinct class sub-cultures within Swansea could easily be multiplied by the score-as they could indeed for any community in these class-afflicted islands. Varied, informative, contradictory, they reveal the complications of class judgements in individual cases. Some see class primarily in economic terms stressing what have been called ‘the objective factors’
(occupation, education, place of residence, family background) others are prompted to react mainly in psychological terms, emphasising ‘the subjective factors’ concerned with prestige and status and classconsciousness (notably prejudice, snobbery, aspiration, concern with statusgiving possessions, awareness of speech and dress differences, sense of belonging, hostility, cultural taste, and so forth). The list of ingredients seems endless: individual judgements of class differences and of personal position within the social scale are compounded variously of a mixture of these objective and subjective factors. It is particularly noticeable how the names of localities within Swansea tend to be used as symbols and ‘verbal banners’ (in Centers’ phrase) of class distinctions-the names of the neighbourhoods on the west of Swansea (Sketty, particularly, but also Uplands, West Cross and Langland) convey at once the connotation of social superiority: those on the east and of the public housing estates carry the inference of a lower social class-regardless of the internal complexities of these local communities. Equally noticeable is the apparent tendency to think in class terms of a simple two-fold division into middle and working class, a tendency reinforced by the basic geographical dichotomy of Swansea into east and west in the popular image of the town.
