Afterword: The Hodological Challenge: Exploring Middle-Class Pathways and Their Biography

Introduction

Exploring the present-day situation of middle classes in Africa and their empirical study, the articles compiled in this Special Issue have in common a shared interest in investigating the social biography of societal stratification. This biography narrates the trajectories of the rise of middle classes in various African contexts across time and space. These middle classes often pursue upward social mobility via migration to other places and back again. This Special Issue thus contributes to a growing understanding of how this rise has been evolving over the course of several generations while it draws attention to the ways in which these classes traverse different spaces as they migrate along routes of rural to urban and from national to international locations—and vice versa for that matter (see Kroeker in this special issue).

In the process, the picture of middle-class identities, livelihoods, social positionings, and relationships becomes progressively unstable. As this collection posits, as middle classes travel, their passage across time and space renders their class position increasingly uncertain (Pauli and Coe in this special issue middle-class subjects may find themselves reaching higher levels of social positioning in terms of upward social mobility, thanks to the possibilities of accessing resources elsewhere, yet the same travels may render them subject to processes that seem to locate them on lower spurs of the social ladder in either the home or the host situation (Carling and Schewel 2018). As concepts such as “class-switching” (Pauli in this special issue) and “status paradox” (Nieswand 2011) indicate, nothing about their relative positioning, either at home or abroad, remains certain, making middle class nothing less than a relational term, whose meaning is highly dependent on external factors of stratification and its politics, rather than internal factors that display particular lifestyles or entertain specific interests.

The African situation is a complicating factor—to say the least—in scholarly attempts to narrate a biography of the social life of the middle classes. As this collection of articles convincingly demonstrates, the existence, growth, and importance of the rise of middle classes can no longer be denied, but the volatility of many African economies makes the application of World Bank–based definitions (Ravallion 2009) of when and where a middle class can be found virtually impossible, and yet, as Scharrer et al. (2018) on the basis of more emically and culturally informed notions indicate, in many cases a middle class can be argued to exist, when one considers the accumulation of specific forms of social, cultural, and economic capital. The African experience of the rise of middle classes is located in this multiplicity of the accrual of these different modalities of capital. As a result, a singular and monolithic biography of the middle class in Africa cannot be written, making it pertinent to speak of middle classes as an essentially pluralistic phenomenon (Scharrer et al. 2018). These articles fundamentally show why acknowledging the diversity in these biographies is required to reach a better understanding of their current significance. For example, a biography of cultural capital accumulation, across time and space, which leads to specific middle-class positionings (by acquiring educational skills and sophistication) is indeed very different from a biography of the accumulation of social capital that explores how middle-class locations in society are determined by increasing or expanding networks and what Bayart (2000) insightfully called extraversion.¹ One form of capital accumulation does not automatically lead to another: while a middle-class position may be decided by, say, cultural capital, it does not automatically mean that the same person belongs to a middle class when viewed from the perspective of an economic form of accumulation. The articles demonstrate how this diversity emerges when considering, for example, increasing access to education and skills, which in Africa does not automatically lead to progressively upward mobility from the perspective of economic success and prosperity. As Kea (in this special issue) and Hanisch (in this special issue) show, investing in education and skills does not always lead to prosperity and class stability; in these situations, good education goes...