The Anthropological Study of Class and Consciousness

1. Introduction

— 1 — 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. steinbeCk, 1939:477 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: 324–325): 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. o n e introduction e . P a u l D u r r e n b e r g e r — 2 — e . P a u l D u r r e n b e r g e r 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 Steinbeck’s day, but from Latin America where great corporations have replaced the great owners of Steinbeck’s 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 (Smith 1990; Hart 1973, in press) or young peasant women working in factories in China and Southeast Asia (Pun Ngai 2005; Mills 1999; Wolf 1994) or Mexican people reorienting their lives from production on their own land to industrial agriculture (Zlolniski 2010) or factories (Heyman 1991) and in whole regions as they adjust to the new economic structures (Narotzky and Smith 2006). The global flows of capital escape ethnographic attention because they are not localized to any one place for us to see (Durrenberger 2004; Durrenberger and Erem 2010). But we see the results wherever we look (Lewellen 2002; Truillot 2003; Nash 2007; Nordstrom 2004, 2007). When we can look ethnographically at Steinbeck’s “batteries of bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss,” (1939:317) as Gillian Tett did, we can see their thought processes at work if not the results of their actions as they try to create wealth out of nothing (Tett 2009). These financiers succeed in benefiting themselves richly at great cost to the rest of us, leading to increased global repression, hunger, and war as the works of Carolyn Nordstrom (2004, 2007) 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 (Bakan 2005; Anderson, Cavanagagh, and Lee 2005). In the United States they have forged a cul- — 3 — i n t r o D u C t i o n tural revolution to make these processes appear to be natural and inevitable (Doukas 2003; Fones-Wolf 1995) and to encode these tenets in a mindless media state (deZengotita 2006). The owners have learned the third of Steinbeck’s historical lessons. While one of the chief instruments of mind control of ancient states was to insist on belief in counterexperiential religious doctrines (Durrenberger and Erem 2010), modern corporations rely on media manipulations of reality that they can own. Classes vanish in this fog, and all too often contemporary scholars...