Ashley Mears - Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

1. vii
2. xi

I wish to first thank the many men and women in New York who let me into their world and shared with me their time and the stories that form the basis of this book.

One positive consequence of taking a long time to write a book is that one gets the chance to discuss it with many people. I am much indebted to the generosity of friends, colleagues, and family who dealt with multiple iterations of the ideas in these pages. Many colleagues read and commented generously on versions of this material: Gabriel Rossman, David Grazian, Bruno Cousin, Sbastien Chauvin, Giselinde Kuipers, Noah McClain, Clayton Childress, Nicky Fox, Viviana Zelizer, Timothy Dowd, Jeremy Schulz, Alison Gerber, Sharon Koppman, Shamus Khan, Frdric Godart, Francesca Seteffi, Rachel Sherman, Luna Glucksburg, Gary Allen Fine, and Annette Lareau. My colleagues at Boston University, especially Emily Barman, Julian Go, Catherine Connell, Michel Anteby, Alya Guseva, Nazli Kibria, and Nancy Ammerman, shared their brilliance and helped me navigate academia. My student Connor Fitzmaurice gave invaluable feedback early on, and Heather Mooney provided terrific research assistance.

I was able to begin this ethnography with a Junior Faculty Fellowship awarded by the BU Center for the Humanities in 2012 under the leadership of the late James Winn, who was an inspiring colleague. During the early stages of data analysis, I held a research fellowship at the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality, thanks to the invitation of Sbastien Chauvin, with whom, over many conversations together, I developed my arguments around gender and capital. While drafting the book, I held a visiting professorship at the Central European University, in Budapest, in the remarkable (and resilient) departments of gender studies and of sociology and social anthropology: thanks especially to Alexandra Kowalski, Elisa Helms, and Dorit Geva for their support. I had the opportunity to share and refine various arguments of the book with audiences at several colloquia and workshops in the United States: the Economic Sociology Seminar at MIT, the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop at Harvard, the Center for the Study of Social Organization at Princeton, and in sociology departments at the University of Pennsylvania, Emory, the University of Georgia, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California, Berkeley. In Europe, I presented to and workshopped with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute, in Cologne, Germany; the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland; the University of Padua, the University of Verona, and the University of Bologna, in Italy; Lcole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales, in Paris; and at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Material from is published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales as Des ftes trs exclusives: Les promoteurs de soires VIP, des intermdiaires aux ambitions contraries. I am grateful for many thoughtful critiques from these journal reviewers and editors.

Thanks also to my careful and thorough editor at Princeton, Meagan Levinson, who is also a patient person. Meagan secured two of the toughest and most helpful reviews my work has ever received; thank you to these anonymous reviewers. On writing, I received valuable feedback from David Lobenstein early on, and Reynolds Richter was an excellent and efficient critical reader to the end. Thanks to Stephen Twilley for the terrific copyedits.

Thanks to friends who sustained me through this work: Olya Zueva, Eileen Lannon, Yulia Vasiltsova, Enrico Corniani, Marie Vaz, lvaro Sevilla Buitrago, and my mentor Judith Stacey.

Finally, to family. I thank my parents, Kathy and Mike and Edwin and Kathy, for their constant support. My mother-in-law, Slavica Petrovi, provided immense help and afforded me time to write. My sister, Jennifer Mears, designed the graphics and even accompanied me out sometimes. Thanks lastly to Vladimir Petrovi, a true partner in our transatlantic adventures in academia and parenting Nola and Luka.