E. Paul Durrenberger - The Anthropological Study of Class and Consciousness

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THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
OF CLASS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
OF CLASS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

EDITED BY E. Paul Durrenberger

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

2012 by the University Press of Colorado

Published by the University Press of Colorado
5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C
Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of American University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The anthropological study of class and consciousness / edited by E. Paul Durrenberger.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60732-156-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-60732-157-6 (ebook)
1. Social classes. 2. Classism. 3. Class consciousness. 4. Social stratification. 5. Labor unions. 6.
Working class. I. Durrenberger, E. Paul, 1943
HT609.A44 2012
305.5dc23

2011050456

Design by Daniel Pratt

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the Industrial Workers of the World,
which clearly defined class relations

Preface

This is a book about the role of the concept of class as an analytical construct in anthropology and how it relates to culture. We hope this book will give anthropologists permission to use the word class.

We should not let the ideologies of neoliberalism deter us from incorporating class as central to our understandings. If everyone agrees there is no class, then those who experience it most intenselyfor instance, Walmart shoppers who daily live the injuries of class but dont know what to call italong with anthropologists with insufficient analytical clarity use other concepts and words that disguise those realities. In polite academic circles it may be race or gender. Among the hoi polloi it may be those Mexicans or other immigrants. Whether the discourse be elevated or not, these terms are poor substitutes for a viable and vibrant concept of class.

The contributors to this volume explicate the relationships between experience and how people understand their worldsconsciousnessculture, and how both experience and consciousness relate to the realities of positions in economic systemsclass.

In the tradition of American anthropology, we include archaeological interpretations to extend our time horizons into the past so that we can better understand long-term processes rather than be confined to contemporary ones. The book begins to answer these questions with archaeological work (Honeychurch, Bolender) that sets the time-span of the study of class and indicates the advantages of confining ourselves to the evidence of material objects and remains so that the ideologies of the living do not interfere quite so much with our attempts to understand the relationship of class and culture.

The contributors all focus on Morton Frieds (1967) notion of class as groups of people defined by differential access to resources. Sometimes differential access is enforced by means of the apparatus of state organizations, but examination of the archaeological and historical record suggests that this is not an inevitable relationship. The central questions that unify this collection of ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological works from various locales and periods are:

What are the objective bases for class in different social orders, from chiefdoms to industrial states?

How do peoples understandings of class relate to their conceptions of race and gender?

How do ideologies of class relate to realities of class?

How does the US managerial middle-class denial of class and emphasis on meritocracy relate to the increasing economic insecurity that many now experience?

How do people who experience economic insecurity respond to it, and what are the political implications of their responses?

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
OF CLASS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

ONE

Introduction

E. PAUL DURRENBERGER

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.

:477

Steinbeck was writing of California. We write about the world as the processes he described in The Grapes of Wrath have overtaken the planet. He outlined the processes (1939: 324325):

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in to few hands it is taken away.

And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history.

The land fell into fewer hands, the number of dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression.

In the twenty-first century the processes have become globalized, as Paul Trawick discusses in his paper in this volume. And now the dispossessed in California come not from Oklahoma and Arkansas as they did in Steinbecks day, but from Latin America where great corporations have replaced the great owners of Steinbecks time and have exacerbated all of the processes he described. Today we cannot even find the face of the owner, for it is a corporation. And, as Griffith discusses in his work in this book, it is no longer just California that receives the refugees from corporate rapacity but many other areas of the United States as well as other lands.

Wherever ethnographers do fieldwork, we see these processes at work. We see them in the great cities as the burgeoning informal economy ().

The global flows of capital escape ethnographic attention because they are not localized to any one place for us to see () graphically illustrate.

In increasing the disparities of wealth and income both within countries and among them, the processes of globalization have highlighted the distinctions between the local and global owning and working classes. Corporations have become more powerful as they control not only local and national economies but global processes (), modern corporations rely on media manipulations of reality that they can own. Classes vanish in this fog, and all too often contemporary scholars willingly follow the corporate lead.

WHY STUDY CLASS?

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