Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The study of class became a very unpopular subject in the 1980s and 1990s in many quarters of anthropology and other social sciences. This was an era in which culture became a dominant mode ofunderstanding the world, even though in principle there is absolutely nothing contradictory about considering the two together. For many, class has been associated with other vulgarities such as exploitation and a whole array of material things, which are not considered sufficiently sophisticated for the culturally oriented social scientist. Some of the critique of class analysis is well taken. There was in many approaches a tendency to reduce the basic structures of social life to relations of exploitation, to “relations of production” as they were called in some Marxist discourses. The notion that there were general cultural features of modern capitalist society, for example, that were not class-based, was sometimes rejected by Marxists. In this perspective, culture was seen as a reflection of class position and as such had to be entirely dependent upon such a position. Commercial mentalities, cultural distinctions related to lifestyle, including housing, interior decorating, clothing, and Bourdieu's “taste” were understood as direct products of social position (that is, including sub-class differentiation). It should be noted that the critique of such models was forthcoming even from those ... log in or subscribe to read full text