As Sherry Ortner observes in New Jersey Dreaming (p. 90), high school plays a remarkably significant role in the American cultural imagination. In this readable book, Ortner casts an anthropological lens on the experiences of her own high school class. Ortner graduated in 1958 from Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey. Of the 304 members of the class, 83 percent were Jewish; the remainder were African Americans and “a very mixed group of kids of hyphenated ethnic identities.” (p. 69) Ortner’s once predominantly middle-class neighborhood has changed markedly since she graduated and the school’s students now are mostly African American and poor.

The members of Weequahic high school class of 1958 have done very well as a group and the story Ortner tells focuses on social mobility. Many of the parents of the students in Ortner’s high school came from poor families (often immigrants from Europe or the U.S. South); their move into the Weequahiac area represented a considerable improvement in socioeconomic circumstances. The members of the class of 1958 mostly left Newark; many have become part of what Ortner calls the “professional/managerial” class. Much of New Jersey Dreaming is a careful examination of changes in the class composition of Ortner’s cohort. She shows how her peers talk about socioeconomic rank in the past and present and provides tables giving details about the occupations of class members and their parents and spouses. Comparisons are made of the experiences of men and women and of people from different ethnic/racial/religious groups. The material is presented in an engrossing way, with long excerpts from interviews, amusing accounts of the fieldwork process, and reflexive comments about the problems of studying one’s own group. Ortner is acutely aware of the difficulties of constructing an ethnography via interviews about the past from a scattered population.

Because Ortner is a well-known advocate of practice theory, her book unsurprisingly places considerable emphasis on the interplay between the experiences of class members and various historical trends. The social mobility of the Weequahic class of 1958 is examined in the context of the improved position of Jews in the United States, the civil rights movement, and changes in women’s roles and activities. Ortner does a nice job of showing variations in people’s experiences, backgrounds, opportunities, and choices.

All anthropological studies of particular places and times must consider the extent to which findings can be generalized. Relatively few high schools in the past and present in the United States share Weequahic’s ethnic configuration and it is tempting to regard Ortner’s class in the context of the particular experiences and culture of the urban East Coast American Jewish community in the 1950s. Many readers will therefore be surprised by Ortner’s willingness to regard Weequahiac high school circa 1958 as being (p. 105) “squarely within the overall spectrum of American high schools” and “as ‘representative’ as any other of a certain American … way of organizing adolescent social life.” The experiences of my own high school class of 1964 from Plainfield, New Jersey (which I have learned about through a lively, ongoing internet discussion group), for example, seem quite unlike those that Ortner describes in Newark because of (1) my class’s much greater diversity in ethnic, religious, and economic background; and (2) the earlier impact on my cohort of the social movements and transformations of the 1960s. If such stark differences exist despite the close temporal and geographic proximity of these two classes, surely the experiences of members of, say, a high school class in rural Oklahoma in 1985 would be really unlike those of Ortner’s cohort.

In the book’s most ambitious chapter (pp. 90–109), Ortner argues that the Weequahic class in 1958 shared an underlying structure of social categories with many other U.S. high schools past and present. This explicitly Léévi-Straussian structure involves a four-cell table (p. 97) with two axes of difference—one of class (family’s place on the socioeconomic ladder, family’s cultural capital in the Bourdieusian sense, emotional/psychological quality of family life) and the other of personal attitude/style (tame and wild). The four boxes are more capital/tame (popular kids, class officers), less capital/tame (ordinary citizens, eggheads [nerds]), more capital/wild (jocks/cheerleaders), and less capital/wild (hoods/sluts, smokers, burnouts). Although Ortner thinks that her class had an unusually high proportion of tame members, she feels that the scheme shows that 1958 Weequahic resembled many other U.S. high schools. Readers will vary in how convincing they find these arguments. I remain a skeptic.

Despite these reservations, New Jersey Dreaming is consistently cogent, thought provoking and just plain fun to read. Because of the accessibility of the subject matter and the lucid discussions of anthropological method and theory, I highly recommend this book for classroom use.