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Reviewed by:
  • The Anthropological Study of Class and Class Consciousness ed. by E. Paul Durrenberger
  • Les W. Field
E. Paul Durrenberger, ed., The Anthropological Study of Class and Class Consciousness (Boulder: University Press of Colorado 2012)

Paul Durrenberger’s edited volume comprises an eclectic collection of perspectives. Deploying Marvin Harris’ concept “cultural dreamwork,” or that which obscures the realities of people’s lives from them, Durrenberger’s introductory chapter expresses his alarm at the participation of anthropologists in the ideological obfuscation of capitalist politics and economics. He argues that recent anthropologists’ work dismisses class analysis as “an objectivist discourse” in favour of an approach that views class as “a culturally constituted identity.” In so doing, anthropologists have diverted attention away from class towards “identity issues.”

Durrenberger’s critique of anthropological interventions in the study of class targets the issue of class consciousness. “If we want to understand class in the United States,” he writes, “we must understand its role in the structure of the political ecology and not its role in the American dream. Thus what Americans think, if anything at all, about class is not relevant.” (5, emphasis added)

For Durrenberger, the study of consciousness hinges upon a strongly stated materialism: “Reasoning and reason are forms of consciousness, forms of thought that are determined by people’s experiences, which in turn are determined by their positions in economic and political systems, and which proceed to inform their actions.” (10) Yet even though he excoriates recent analytic trends in anthropology, he is neither doctrinaire nor a martinet by any means in what he includes in this volume, but rather is careful and scholarly in his selection.

In three archaeology-history chapters, the authors’ approach to class consciousness is isomorphic with the history of state formation and social stratification. William Honeychurch writes about how the centralized Mongolian state known as Xiongnu coalesced 2000 years ago from a society of nomadic herders. His main question concerns why nomads who can operate in an autonomous and independent fashion would assent to large scale state organization based upon social inequality and stratification. In his chapter, Douglas Bolender reconstructs the process of class formation in Iceland – “the transformation of a society dominated by independent freeholders to a highly stratified society with a small landowning aristocracy and a large class of tenant farmers” (80) – using historical sources and archaeological excavation. [End Page 312] Bolender seeks to focus upon questions of class consciousness with respect to the decisions made by tenant farmworkers vs. landlords, and the shift from a population dominated by independent freeholders to one composed of dependent tenant farmers.

In her study of Nuosu societies in southwest China, Ann Maxwell Hill describes the history of state formation and social stratification, and the problem of historical variation – periods when there were centralized government(s) and periods when there were not, notwithstanding the persistence of social stratification during both kinds of periods. Hill’s study of the stability of non-state stratified societies in relation to their proximity to states offers a commentary on Morton Fried’s assertion that stateless stratified societies do not last long. Hill’s study thus complicates assumptions about the relationship between class, social stratification, and states.

Moving into contemporary times, Paul Trawick develops a critical essay of global scope in looking at poverty and climate change in the context of the hegemonic economic models that assert the endless plasticity of “growth,” that is, of the creation of wealth. Trawick relies on a model of class allied to the Occupy Movement’s 99 per cent versus one per cent model; he enlists the idea of a transnational anti-capitalist class created by political activism. That activism relies upon a transformation of worldview with respect to what capital and wealth really are. In invoking a process by which people break through cultural dreamwork and “come to realize” the nature of their world, Trawick emphasizes how consciousness-raising and paradigm shifts can provoke social change.

It is also the future that concerns Dimitra Doukas’ analysis of the class nature of the imaginary of crash, collapse, and apocalypse. For her, the scenarios in this imaginary are productive of class consciousness: the dominant class envisions...

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