Introduction

The Yankee City project ranks as the most intensive, exhaustive and expensive single study ever made of a small American community, or any other for that matter.1 The first of the five volumes that reports the findings of Lloyd Warner and his colleagues lists a research staff of 30: four were writers, analysts and field workers, nine were analysts and field workers, five were just field workers and twelve were just analysts, i.e. eighteen people, at least, had done field work in Newburyport, the small New England town for which Yankee City is the pseudonym (the use of pseudonyms are a verbal manifestation of his assumptions of the broader generalization of this study). The project was conceived as part of a research programme conducted from Harvard and it was originally aimed to examine the 'non-work' aspect of the lives of the workers being studied by Elton Mayo at Western Electric (the famous Hawthorne experiments). Warner found this prospect impossible. He had just returned from three years field work among Australian aborigines and wanted to apply the same techniques used there to the study of American communities. Unfortunately' Cicero and Hawthorne (the location of the Western Electric factory) and other industrial sub-communities in Chicago ... seemed to be disorganized; they had a social organization which was highly dysfunctional if not in partial disintegration. If we were to compare easily the other societies of the world with one of our own civilization, and if we were readily to accommodate our techniques, developed by the study of primitive society, to modern groups, it seemed wise to choose a community with a social organization which had developed over a long period of time under the domination of a single group with a coherent tradition.' 2 New England and the Deep South seemed likely locations of such a community. Warner's fatal error was that his anthropological orientation and techniques misled him into believing Yankee City was in fact like that. It has been shown that he had serious misconceptions particularly about the communities history that his ahistorical functionalist conceptual framework and methods never allowed him to realize. Warner's strength was his lack of ethnocentricity that certainly allowed him to

see and report phenomena long ignored in American society, for example, stratification and yet he was blind to other aspects of the community. Warner wrote that 'to be sure we were not ethnocentrically biased in our judgements, we decided to use no previous summaries of data collected by anyone else (maps, handbooks, histories, etc.) until we had formed our own opinion of the community.'3 In the fifth volume: The Living and the Dead: the symbolic life of a community Warner commenting on the' history' portrayed in Yankee City pageants said that it 'was what community leaders now wished it were and what they wished it were not. They ignored this or that difficult period of time or unpleasant occurrence and embarrassing group of men and women; they left out awkward political passions; they selected small items out of large time contexts, sizing them up to express today's values.'4 It is unfortunately true that Warner's own words quoted above can be used as a similar indictment against his work in Yankee City as a whole. His unwillingness to consult the historical record and his complete dependence on materials susceptible to traditional anthropological analysis-i.e. the acts and opinions of living members of the community, served to obliterate the distinction between the actual past and current myths about the past. This is particularly ironic, as the determination of the Yankee City investigators to escape the ethnocentric biases of culture-bound history led them to accept uncritically the community's legends about itself. This is, as Stephen Thernstrom, Yankee City's historian, has remarked, 'surely the most ethnocentric of all possible views.' 5

The two extracts by Lloyd Warner present firstly some of his most important substantive findings-particularly on local stratification, and secondly some of his assumptions about the 'community as a laboratory'. The Yankee City volumes are well known for their characterization of the population of Newburyport into six distinctively named classes. Warner claims to have started with a general economic interpretation of human behaviour. He does not say that it was a marxist orientation, but it would seem to have been very similar. Yet while in Yankee City he discovered that some people were ranked lower even when they had higher incomes than people ranked above them and that others with low incomes were ranked high. People with the same jobs were ranked differently, e.g. doctors and this was not related to how good a physician he was. The famous Warner definition of social class is 'two or more orders of people who are believed to be and are accordingly ranked by the members of the community in socially superior and inferior positions.' 6

The extract that follows those written by Lloyd Warner himself was written by the editors of this volume and it sums up some of the

key points of criticism that have been made against the Yankee City series. Warner clearly believes that a community has a social structure with 'classes' as 'real entities' (not categories) into which all the inhabitants can unambiguously be placed and that people use their local community as a reference group and that people agree on their criteria of ranking and can classify each other by them. This definition of class led to an extraordinary outburst from other social scientists. C. Wright Mills, for instance, wrote that, 'Warner's insistence upon merely one vertical dimension led to the consequent absorbing of three analytically separable dimensions [economic, status and power] into one "sponge" word "class".' 7 Mills adds that most of the confusions and inadequacies of Warner's study flow from this fact. Warner had threaded all the many coloured beads on one vertical string.