The Anthropological Study of Class and Consciousness

11. Do Hair and Class Gel?

— 275 — introdUCtion Americans spent over $50 billion on cosmetics and toiletries in 2006 (Singer 2007). That is more than the US government spent in the same year on elementary , secondary, and vocational education combined, according to the US Office of Management and Budget report. As sales in luxury items continue to grow, an upscale hair salon offers a space to consider the expression of class and status by working-class hairdressers and the leisure-privileged middle-and upper-middle-class patrons. This work is based on fieldwork over a three-month period in the summer and fall of 2003. I spent about ten hours a week hanging out and conducting informal and formal interviews in the Mike Miller Salon and Spa, an up-scale Aveda salon in a mid-sized city in Florida.1 Before I started fieldwork in the salon, Mike said to me, “There’s only one thing . . . It’s your outfit . . . Well, we all dress in a certain way.” I knew immediately what he meant and wore only black and white clothing to the salon for the next three months, just like the salon workers. e l e v e n do hair and Class gel? k a t e g o l t e r m a n n — 276 — k a t e g o l t e r m a n n The goal of my analysis is to explore the constraints of class by examining the material culture (see Miller 1995:148) of an Aveda hair salon that publicizes a policy of profits with principles. It is structured in three parts. In the first, I show how Aveda’s corporate ideology shapes its marketing campaign and the material culture of the salon and how that in turn shapes the subjectivity of the female customers. In the second, I explore how Mike frames beauty work as an expression of concern for the upkeep of his customers ’ individualism and specialness, which results in a uniquely modern and American feeling of doing good. In the third, I examine how the store’s policies on customer service are an attempt to make the salon appear to be a site of one-class society—that of the privileged upper class. I found that the salon is not just a place that people visit because it is a relaxing pastime but a site where lofty ideals are put on display, where the hierarchy of class and status seem to collapse, and where beauty work is the symptom of and antidote to women’s anxiety about aging. Because this fieldwork took place in 2003, about eight years before the publication of this book, I am positive many things have changed in the salon. Changes occurred the minute I stepped out of the salon for the last time, and changes have been occurring ever since. In fact, I last heard that Mike was having personal issues related to his marriage and financial trouble with his business; many of the original hairdressers that I knew left the salon to work other jobs. And, my own analysis has changed based on exposure to new literature and viewpoints. Thus, this study looks at a specific location where particular cultural and social interactions took place within a specific time frame and is written from the standpoint of a researcher with her own theoretical background, personal opinions, and agenda. This paper should be understood as the exploration of one slice of the complexities of the Aveda Corporation and its dealings. Mike’s salon demonstrated a culture of work and class interactions that are at the center of this particular piece of writing, but the salon exists amid a multitude of other relations. There are varying degrees of interactions among local, national, and international actors such as, for example, other franchise owners, Aveda salon “affiliates,” Aveda corporate workers, Estée Lauder parent company employees, United States–based NGO partners, media associates, contract workers, international governments, international NGOs, and indigenous cooperatives and communities. If the Aveda Corporation is at the center of this web, these actors provide gossamer threads of connections to the center — 277 — D o H a i r a n D C l a s s g e l ? that sometimes tangle and overlap with each other. Because of the diverse interests of these people (i.e., salon owners in New Jersey or Ohio are probably more concerned with the daily operations of...