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Discussion: Anthropology and Political Movements 143 Editorial Afterword PAUL CLOUGH Anthropology Programme University of Malta Msida MSD 06, Malta (pclol@um.edu.mt) In her discussion of Jeff Pratt’s article, Mary Orgel argues that the seem­ ingly incommensurable paradigms of ‘class’ and ‘culture’ actually stand in a necessary relation to each other. And yet, how are we to understand the necessity of this relation? What I find lacking in the interesting rejoinders to Pratt’s argument, is due attention to what is encapsulated in the last sentence of his abstract: ‘Collective “class” identities have to be seen as intrinsically moral narratives which constitute collectivities in terms of social difference, historical sequence, and political transformation.’ [italics mine] Various contributors to the discussion (eg., Aya, Orgel and Kasmir) do point out that his contribution is as much methodological as theoretical: it is only through thick description that we can unravel the connections between the two paradigms. Yet we need to pay more attention to his descriptions of these very connections in the cases of revolutionary class action in early 20th century Milan and Andalusia. Thus, his discussion of the political discourse of skilled workers in the industrial economy of Sesto San Giovanni argues that their sense of identity was as moral as it was economic. Their economic self-definition implied a moral code which interweaved ‘skill, honesty, reliability, respect, independence’ (Pratt 2001: 307). But in unraveling the moral aspects of their identity, it might be said that Pratt’s discussion of the forward-looking time dimension in their discourse, became side­ tracked onto the nature of ‘temporality’. Crucially, however, what is clear in his description, is the construction by Italian workers of a moral frame­ work for society. The process of ‘construction’ logically entails a future. Perhaps the moral dimension of culture was somewhat lost in the discussions, because Pratt himself sometimes binds together in a single sentence considerations of history, politics and morality (ibid: 309) or of work and the person (ibid: 310). And yet, he underlines the importance of moral purpose in class discourse: ‘an understanding that there have been centuries of injustice may give rise to a revolutionary narrative . . . ’ (ibid: 310). We need to be reminded of Wendy James’s argument in an earlier debate: different ideas of right and obligation are closely tied to different collective 144 JeffPratt ideas of the nature of personhood (James in Ingold 1996: 111). And further, ‘identity’ implies a relationship of (collective) self to other groups inside a social order—and therefore strong statements o f ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’. Pratt underscores these concepts forcibly when he writes that ‘in both movements the translation of economic processes into a moral drama [was] essential in generating revolutionary politics’ {ibid: 311). Such discursive dramas implicate the dramas of groups against which workers contest. Thus, their literacy campaigns involved major critiques of Catholic teaching and practice (including Church teaching on gender). We need to more comprehensively read the moral drama and the moral construction of persons back into the concept of culture. Then we might see more clearly how the paradigms of culture and class are necessarily related. Perhaps it is needful to add that here, the distinction between classes ‘in-themselves’ and ‘for-themselves’ (which Kasmir notes and Pratt implies in their discussions) remains conceptually important. But once ‘culture’ is read as ‘moral construction’ ’, then culture links necessarily with class-asmovement (or even with ‘class consciousness’). By elucidating the moral constructionism in discourses of class and of ethnic or national movements, the barrier is broken to a common analysis of both. Using the language of Pratt’s reply to his discussants, the old set of categories is indeed dissolved. A new, unifying paradigm would focus on the links between economic process, the collective definition of per­ sons, and moral demand. We might in this way reinterpret Pratt’s thick description of ‘temporality’ in the discourses of workers’ movements. It is not so much the loss of a future time dimension, as the loss of a moral narrative, which has resulted from the economism of communist and so­ cialist parties in many places. These ideas emerge from my reading of Pratt’s coda: Rather than explore...

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