Primates of Park Avenue describes my personal experiences on the Upper East Side both while I lived there and while my children were in programs there over a period of six years.

My piece for the Huffington Post. Read it here. 

Nothing could be more foreign to the tribe I studied and lived among than giving up on their own personal upkeep—the zealous, dedicated striving to be a particular kind of fabulous, fit, and chic Manhattan Geisha with children. The type of women who get “wife bonuses.” But what was the point of all this effort, this endless fighting and trying and depriving and especially all this working on and working at our selves? It certainly wasn’t sex—you could call uptown a sexless Sahara.

When our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign.

Winter holidays allow us to be affiliative and pro-social--anthropology's words for connected and friendly. Here's how the tribe I study in Manhattan does it--and why.