Anthropologies of Class

Power, Practice, and Inequality

James G. Carrier, Don Kalb

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781107087415
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316237144
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Rising social, political and economic inequality in many countries, and rising protest against it, has seen the restoration of the concept of 'class' to a prominent place in contemporary anthropological debates. A timely intervention in these discussions, this book explores the concept of class and its importance for understanding the key sources of that inequality and of people's attempts to deal with it. Highly topical, it situates class within the context of the current economic crisis, integrating elements from today into the discussion of an earlier agenda. Using cases from North and South America, Western Europe and South Asia, it shows the - sometimes surprising - forms that class can take, as well as the various effects it has on people's lives and societies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: class and the new anthropological holism
• 1 The concept of class
• 2 Dispossession, disorganization and the anthropology of labor
• 3 The organic intellectual and the production of class in Spain
• 4 Through a class darkly, but then face to face: praxis through the lens of class
• 5 Walmart, American consumer-citizenship and the erasure of class
• 6 When space draws the line on class
• 7 Class trajectories and indigenism among agricultural workers in Kerala
• 8 Making middle-class families in Calcutta
• 9 Working-class politics in a Brazilian steel town
• 10 Export processing zones and global class formation
• 11 Global systemic crisis, class and its representations
• References
• Index