Dream Weavers

Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future. Karen Cerulo and Janet M. Ruane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Dreams of a Lifetime belongs to a particular shelf, one that holds those books that utilize sociology seriously to best capture the pulse of the United States at a particular juncture in time. In this tradition, one can find treatises about loneliness (Riesman, Slater), disconnection (Putnam, Sennett), how people think and feel (Bellah et al.), the life of those on the lower ladders of this society (Sennett and Cobb, Liebow, and more recently Desmond as well as Horschild).2 A lot has changed since some of these books were published—the structure of the public sphere and the circulation of scholarly books, the competition of literary nonfiction and its emphasis on personal stories, the shrinking market for printed-matter—but the impetus remains the same: to explain to ourselves who we are at a particular juncture in time, in a jargon free, yet sociologically informed way. This book does so by exploring the role of dreams in American everyday life: how do people think about their future? What kind of projects do they deem desirable? Which ones do they believe are actually possible? But Karen Cerulo and Janet Ruane find that in the country where people are vehemently and repeatedly told to dream of a better future, there is a paradox: while we are asked to imagine our lives without constraints, the structure, content, and forms of our future aspirations are themselves patterned and stratified, dependent on our social location. Wouldn't this self-defeat the premise and promise of dreaming itself? Dreams are here not the unexpected visitors our unconscious regales us with at night, but rather our fictionalized, conscious, and deliberate/expressive culture expectations about the future. The authors have written in a humanistic, lyrical tone that communicates the compassion and empathy that have inspired their project. The main point of Dreams of a Lifetime is to debunk common-sense individualistic explanations of how aspirational ideas of our future come to be. But let us not let the transparent and jargon-free writing style fool us, the book is based on ambitious multi-dimensional research and analysis of the phenomena. It captures the surprisingly patterned ways in which aspirations are coined and enacted, contributing to sociological debates about scripting, the coherence of culture, the role of narratives in informing our self-identifications, and the relationship between values and cognition. Cerulo and Ruane explore how six different themes emerge when people discuss -in interviews, focus groups, and interview panels- how they project their future. The authors call these themes career (emphasis on achievements and long-term wellness); adventure (a rupture in time); fame, wealth, and power; philanthropy (a very U.S. word to explain the care for others); and family. But what people say is not enough, and the research then proceeds to analyze the tenor and texture of those same themes. Are the dreams feasible? How far do they go? Do they transpose to others in the family? Are they flexible or set? For how long are people willing to chase after them? The book then subjects these two “dependent” variables to the scrutiny of how they are stratified: how do the young imagine their future? How do those at the end of the life cycle? And how do the multiple sources of inequality we usually mobilize in sociology to make sense of the distribution and access to resources—like class, race, and gender—structure the shape of our most inner longings? The book then matches the themes and textures of our long-term future aspirations with their sources. Pairing the dreams with different objects from mass culture, Cerulo and Ruane elucidate how we get our guidelines for dreaming. In doing so, they explore how the public culture of dreams guarantees the endurance, effective symbolization, and coherence found throughout the patterns their research has uncovered. What kinds of lessons have folks incorporated? Looking at the public culture of movies, proverbs, and popular TV shows, Dreams of a Lifetime divides the lessons people have made their own into positive lessons (Opportunity is Boundless; Dream Big; Never Give up; Optimism makes things possible); and negative ones (The harder they fall; the system is rigged.) In scrutinizing how people envision and anticipate their future, Dreams of a Lifetime presents a series of counter-intuitive findings about the depth, texture, and coloring of those dreams in relation to their location in the social structure. For instance, lower-class folks never dream of adventure, given that their life consists in some way of ruptures and scarcity. Upper-class counterparts share with those in the middle-class how much more expansive their dreams are than those in the lower echelons of society. Those in the lower class have—rightfully—incorporated more the negative lessons about dreaming than any other group. When it comes to race, the really illuminating pattern is not that white and black people do not share the themes of their dreams—they do—but rather that while the social form is the same, the content of it changes according to grouping. With some groups—white and Asians—reporting grandiose plans for their career dreams, and others—mostly Latinos/as and blacks—having dreams of career and improvement that feel rather modest in comparison. Latinos/as are in fact an interesting outlier since they do not share the positive outlook of blacks, regardless of sharing certain common demographic traits. Women of all races and ethnicities shared with blacks respondents how diverse their dreams are, as if “to cover all bases.” Perhaps the most interesting findings are those related to the life course, a frame lately displaced from the limelight in U.S. sociology, and that seems very productive when applied here. The dreams of young people are as broad as those in the old age; and middle-aged people are those who have more focused and precise aspirations, as well as those who have incorporated more intensely the negative public lessons about their future and what it brings. While there is a line that relates this book to earlier work by Cerulo (2006) on how people in stressful contexts envision what is going to come, the emphasis here is rather on putting together a theory of how culture reproduces and inequality is reproduced in turn. And this is not surprising; Karen Cerulo has been one of the key figures in the consolidation of the sociology of culture as a scientific endeavor, moving away from more humanities-friendly approaches (together with other sociologists like DiMaggio, Griswold, Mohr, Peterson, and Swidler, among others). Moreover, she was one of the early introducers of models of cognition in sociology before their prevalence and explosion, as well as someone interested in how culture can be measured. Given this, it is not surprising that the focus of the book is on cultural templates, the interaction between private and public forms of culture, and how aspirational narratives are presented in speech and taken at face value in analysis. As Dreams of a Lifetime stands, we could summarize how culture operates as something that combines Bourdieusian disposition, cultural templates, and particular contexts (though the book does not capture how these meanings are actually mobilized in interaction and actual situations). This model aims to join two strains in cultural sociology: dispositional analysis and culture in action, emphasizing the individual level of analysis while finding in it the myriad of overlapping patterns individuals are subject to. This leads me to a series of questions about the book and how similar findings could be found in other contexts; how prevalent the good-life template—centered in future hard-earned achievements—is; and about the value of taking people's testimonies at face value when studying dreams. With respect to the replicability in other contexts, I cannot stop comparing the findings to my home country of Argentina. I still remember a comedic radio segment from the early 2000s, in which an actor playing a right-wing pundit would always wonder about “until when” Argentina would keep in a downward fall that would move it further away from its “first world” counterparts. The show made fun of those who locally admired the United States, and their parody reached its apex when tong and cheek reviewing a U.S. rom-com movie focused on how “unworried by inflation, crime, and uncertainty, the two young and attractive people can actually focus on romance.” In the comparison by the comedic pundit, it's only within a context of constant stability that people can fall in love and project romance and family into the future. Moreover, in a more recent and serious example, sociologists Auyero and Servián (2023) has shown how much poor people in Argentina “dream of veal milanese,” underscoring the kind of aspirations available to those deprived of resources in a peripheral country in constant crisis. And I highlight this because, while the book acknowledges how much the stories it presents are U.S.-centered and how a small proportion of the variation it finds is produced by crisis and scarcity, I suspect it does not do enough to underscore how much of this “good life” that is being dreamed of is dreamed within the parameters of a life of endless empowerment, equal parts freedom, self-improvement, and discipline, which is very meaningful in the United States but not as prevalent in other contexts. This has the theoretical consequence of both normalizing this version of the good life as the blueprint to compare people's dreams to as well as making the settled times, within the parameters of the culture in action paradigm, the de facto or normalized environment for action, something painfully not true for many other contexts, where what is called unsettled or in crisis is actually the norm. Even when discussing the finding that Latinos/as do not dream as their counterparts in the dominated minority slot of U.S. society, the book could have benefited from exploring how the sociodicy—to use a term from Bourdieu (1979) about how we go about justifying the social order and its meaning, following after Weber's theodicy—of those infused with versions of the self that are empowered but also understand that empowerment is not endless, reacts to the peculiar U.S. narration of the self as boundless. I was also curious about the effect that current technologies of the self, based on a conception of the good life built on rejecting strong attachments to the world and the ego, have on aspirations. I'm thinking here of yoga or mindfulness, which are mostly based not on dreaming about the future but rather on being present in the present moment and accepting what life has in store for us. If the book covers “manifesting,” and The Secret, I was surprised about the absence of those alternative ideas of the self and temporality espoused by the non-Western philosophies appropriated and circulated in the United States as particular techniques for the body and the mind. How would they transform our accounts of personhood? How do they transform our ideas about our future selves? But these queries I was left with do not take much out of what is a lyrical and empathetic read, overflowing with kindness and humanity, and a superb book about how culture works and the inequality at the heart of the American dream. Dreams of a Lifetime offers lessons for those interested in how to best study and model the relationship between cognition, narrative, and culture, yet the insights of this book stand out as contributions that any social scientist would benefit from. I highly recommend it

Citation · Dream · Library science · Media studies · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Latin American socio-political dynamics · Psychology

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