The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate

When I reviewed the anthropological book Purity and Danger, I mentioned that I thought Mary Douglas’ work (concerning religion’s desire to map out the details of the world in an orderly, rational fashion—and condemn anything that crosses the boundaries) applied to the modern world, but I wasn’t sure how. I was thinking mostly of women and the obsessive insistence of religious conservatives (among others) on absolute boundaries between men and women (even men doing “too much” housework is bad according to some). But Elizabethan London shows it also applies to class.
The excellent book by Lisa Picard (which I’ll review in detail this weekend) touches at one point on the sumptuary laws of the Elizabethan era, detailed requirements as to how fancy you could dress depending on your rank: Dukes dressed better than barons, barons dressed better than merchants, merchants dressed better than craftsman and so on. The goal being to prevent the lower orders from passing themselves off as their betters.
And I remembered that the same issue has popped up at other times in relatively recent history. The book Big Trouble discusses that when hotels were a new thing, social observers worried that with strangers meeting in hotels, it would be easy for someone to pass himself off as a gentleman. And supposedly the elaborate table manners of fancy dinners (all those forks, knives, etc.) were designed by the upper classes as a bulwark against the nouveau rich: Them not knowing all the rules made it simple to mark them as parvenus.
And it also reminds me of the uneasiness caused in the antebellum 19th century at the growing awareness slavery was no longer just a white vs. black matter: Due to slave owners’ fondness for raping the slave women, there were many slaves who were whiter than some of the masters. That freaked out a lot of people (Steven Talty’s Mulatto Nation gets into this). One solution advanced (though not taken very seriously) was that slavery should be broadened to include poor whites as well.
We still have a class system today, albeit more informal than the classic European version. I wonder, do they still have the markers that separate out the outsiders from the in crowd?