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In the midst of the Vietnam war, sit-ins, counter-culture, and campus rallies, the 1966 graduating class of a South New Jersey coast high school came of age on the margins of political and cultural upheaval. Rather than presenting the stereotype of Sixties youth scene, this study reveals this group to be conservative teenagers shaped by mainstream loyalties to God, Country, and Family. These "Coasters"—white, middle-class, suburban baby-boomers—were spectators of rather than participants in the decade's activism. Yet, even as they were missed by the powerful currents of the times, their lives were touched by those currents more than is suggested by the stereotype of Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority."

Paul Lyons interviewed 47 members of the class of 1966, recording recollections of their school days, politics, work, family life, community, and expectations for future careers and family. Each chapter is complemented by personal profiles of individual "Coasters." Removed from both the urban experience and that of the elite suburbs, these teenagers disprove popular cultural assumptions that all baby boomers, with few exceptions, went to Woodstock, protested against the Vietnam War, engaged in drug experimentation, or joined the hippie counter-culture. Instead, Lyons' study explores how their then relative ambivalence to political and cultural rebellion did not preclude many "Coasters" from indirectly incorporating over the years certain core Sixties values on issues of race, gender, mobility, and patriotism.

Consumption Intensified examines how self-identified middle class Brazilians in São Paulo redefined their class during Brazil’s economic crisis of 1981–1994. With inflation soaring to an astounding 2700 percent, their consumption practices intensified, not only in relation to the national crisis but also to the expanding global consumer culture. Drawing on her observations of everyday practices and on representations of the middle class in popular culture, anthropologist Maureen O’Dougherty explores both the logic and incoherence of middle- to upper-middle-class Brazilian life.
With the supports of middle-class living threatened—job security, quality education, home ownership, savings, ease of consumption—the means and meaning of “middle class” were thrown into question. The sector thus redefined itself through both class- and race-based claims of moral and cultural superiority and through privileged consumption, a definition the media underscored by continually addressing middle-class Brazilians as consumers—or rather, as consumers denied. In these times, adults became more flexible in employment, and put stakes in their children’s expensive private education. They engaged in elaborate comparison shopping, stockpiling of goods, and financial strategizing. Ongoing desire for distinction and “first- world” modernity prompted these Brazilians to buy foreign goods through contraband, thereby defying state protectionist policy. Discontented with the constraints of the national economy, they welcomed neoliberalism.
By uncovering connections between culture and politics, O’Dougherty complicates understandings of the middle class as a social group and category. Illuminating the intricate relation between identity and local and global consumption, her work will be welcomed by students and scholars in anthropology and Latin American studies, and those interested in consumption, popular culture, politics, and globalization.

The culture of the bourgeoisie gradually came to dominate European society during the nineteenth century. Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren examine how this new style of life developed and how it spread. They focus on Swedish society from 1880 to 1910, conceptualizing events and behavior in a way that applies to western culture in general during that era, and illustrate their yhemeswith contemporary photographs.  Through their interpretation, we are reminded that middle-class culture is only one alternative among many, and not always the best.

Culture Builders deals primarily with the ways in which ideas about the good and proper life are anchored in the trivialities and routines of everyday life: in the sharing of a meal, in holiday-making, and in the upbringing of children.  The authors describe how the attitudes of the bourgeoisie toward. Time and time-keeping set them apart from the peasantry. Uses and perceptions of naturals increasingly divided the classes.  For peasants, nature consisted of natural resources to be used. Fr the bourgeoisie, nature had only non-productive connotations.  Another change was the growing importance of home over the community.  Life became a romantic ideal, not an economic necessity.  For the first time, parents became self-conscious about how to raise their children.

Frykman and Lögnen also show how the middle-class developed new perceptions of dirt, pollution, orderliness, health, sexuality, and bodily functions, and how they disdained the filth of peasant households. By stressing refinement, rationality, morality, and discipline, the middle classes were able to differentiate themselves not only from the peasants, but also from the degenerate aristocracy and the disordered and uncontolled emerging working class.  The bourgeoisie viewed their own form of culture as the highest on the evolutionary ladder, and turned it into a national culture against which all other groups would be measured.