Lloyd Warner

The Yankee City series is a multi-volume ethnographic study of social class, community structure, and institutional life in a small New England city, directed by Warner and his research team. It applied anthropological fieldwork methods — originally developed for studying non-Western societies — to an American community.

Warner was trained as an anthropologist and conducted early fieldwork among Indigenous Australian communities under the influence of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, but he spent much of his career in sociology departments, most notably at the University of Chicago. His work straddled both disciplines.

The studies examined Newburyport, Massachusetts, a small industrial city in New England that Warner gave the pseudonym 'Yankee City.' The research produced five volumes analyzing social stratification, kinship, religion, and economic institutions in the community.

Warner identified multiple social classes based on factors like income, occupation, education, and social prestige rather than focusing solely on relationship to the means of production. His model typically described six class levels in American communities, contrasting with the binary class framework of Marxist theory.