Migrants’ social-class

transformations are not

unidirectional but multiple,
including complex
movements between social
fields and geographic
locations, often connecting
various class- and
place-based structures.
Migration and Social Class in Africa:
Class-Making Projects in Translocal
Social Fields
Cati Coe and Julia Pauli

Increasing interest in the middle class in Africa and the

Global South has prompted new discussions of social class
since 2010; however, this literature does not adequately theo-
rize migration, despite the role that global flows play in cul-
tivating class aspirations. Migration complicates the concept
of social class as a stable identity, in that migrants usually
have multiple class statuses across their lifetime and in dif-
ferent social fields and geographic locations. Furthermore,
class remains undertheorized within the literature on African
migration and migration in general, despite the fact that
class-making projects are central to migrants within, into,
and out of Africa. The introduction to this special issue con-
tends that migration and social class should be considered
together.

Introduction

Cameroonian migrants host conspicuous school-starting parties for their

children in Berlin, while Senegalese migrants invest in multiple middle
classes in France and Senegal. As London-based Nigerians network transna-
tionally through prestigious boarding schools in Nigeria, Chinese migrants
in Lesotho work for a better future for their children back in China. Namib-
ian urbanites celebrate middle-class weddings in their rural homes, middle-
class Kenyan pensioners hope to prevent downward mobility by moving to
the countryside, and Ghanaian care workers in the United States mitigate
work-related humiliations by building houses in Ghana. The ethnographic
accounts presented in this special issue of Africa Today provide new insights
into multiple ways in which migration and social class are entangled.
Increasing interest in the middle class in Africa and the Global South
has prompted new discussions of social class since approximately 2010;
however, migration has remained underresearched and undertheorized in the

Africa Today Vol. 66, Nos. 3 & 4 • Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • DOI: 10.2979/africatoday.66.3_4.01
 new literature on the African middle classes. Two recently edited volumes
on African middle classes hardly mention migration at all (Kroeker, O’Kane,
and Scharrer 2018; Melber 2016b). This is remarkable, as remittances play
a crucial role in explaining economic dynamics in many African countries,
including the formation of middle classes. At the same time, migration
research has paid little attention to social class, as Van Hear (2014) has
africa today 66(3 & 4)

recently argued. In an overview on immigration and social class, Yakushko

comes to the conclusion that “social class experiences of recent immigrants
have not been the focus of extensive research by scholars” (2013, 522).
Pointing out how this gap could be overcome, Yakushko suggests examining
migrants’ social-class transitions “from their home to their host society”
(2013, 523). But this is only one possible direction that changes in migrants’
social class could take. As the papers in this special issue show, migrants’
social-class transformations are not unidirectional but multiple, including
4

complex movements between social fields and geographic locations, often

connecting various class- and place-based structures. Consequently, in this
Migr ation and Social Cl ass in Africa

special issue we argue that migration and social class have to be considered
together.
Analyzing the relationship of migration and social class reveals
insights that are important for understanding migration and its link to
global capitalism, both in Africa and globally. Class is central to “the
experiential contradictions” of global capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff
2000, 298). The dispersal of flexible commodity chains and geographically
decentered production regimes has resulted in an unevenness in the global
distribution of capital in which Africa has been largely passed over (Ferguson
2006; Harvey 2005), which Africans attempt to resolve through migration.
Simultaneously, migration heightens one’s sense of the unevenness.1 As
capital moves offshore, specialized labor markets, as in home care, have
developed in wealthier nations, where the demand for cheap immigrant labor
is intense. Understanding the relationships between migration and social-
class formation is critical to understanding these transformations in global
capitalism. Further, reflecting on Egyptians’ appropriations of global middle-
classness, Schielke has argued that the “enormous urge toward migration,
whatever the cost, among the less affluent middle classes and those aspiring
to join them, . . . is first and foremost an attempt to realize some of this, to
become part of an imagined yet genuine middle” (2012, 49); being part of a
local and/or global middle class implies both wealth and respectability (2012,
51). Similarly, Lentz stresses that “globally circulating concepts of middle-
classness play an important role in contemporary middle-class formation”
(2016, 38)—and, one wants to add, they play an important role in migra-
tion. The intersection of such macrostructures and the lived experiences of
migrants with their aspirations and hopes, but also their failures to belong
through and while in movement, inform the papers in this special issue.
Focusing on migration and social class adds to a better understanding
not only of migration, but also of social class. Thus far, much class analysis
takes place within national boundaries and often assumes rather stable class
identities. In productive ways, migration complicates concepts of social
class. As Barber and Lem have discussed, “class relations are rendered more
complex through migration” (2008 9). Comparing the making of different
middle classes historically, Liechty has observed that “to an unprecedented
degree, neoliberal globalization produces new global spatialization (and seg-
regation) of class that increasingly neutralizes what were once visceral (and

africa today 66(3 & 4)

politically charged) local interclass relations” (2012, 294). Similarly, Lentz
(2016, 38) highlights the importance of better understanding the intersec-
tions of transnational, national, and local spaces of class formation and
reproduction. An analysis of social class that is geographically limited and
blind to migrants’ movement into and out of various class structures misses
these important dynamics.
To provide a conceptual frame for a joint analysis of social class and
migration, we first briefly discuss concepts of social class, followed by a

5
focused discussion of migration. This will lead us to the consideration
of both concepts in conjunction. As the papers in the special issue show,

Cati Coe and Julia Pauli

social class cannot be understood as a stable identity across the life course
and across different geographic contexts and social fields. How then can we
understand it in migratory contexts? We argue that it is a cultural project
pursued by migrants and their significant social others. What we mean by
this is that social class is aspirational and goal-oriented, but not necessarily
that it is consciously strategic and purposeful in its planning and perfor-
mance. From the perspective that it is a project that is engaged in by people,
we draw four related points: that class is relational, can change across the
life course and social fields, is performed, and is learned and unlearned.
Some of these arguments have already been rehearsed in the literature on
social class, but bringing them together and illustrating them in migrants’
everyday lives is new. All in all, we are interested in social class as lived, in
its “mundane everyday reflexivity” (Reay 2004, 437). As a concept, it can
be made empirical only by being grounded in specific contexts and interac-
tions (Collins 1981). This we do by understanding migrants’ lives, both on
the African continent and beyond.

Understanding Social Class

Social class is one way of assessing people’s differential status, finances,

and social positions, which may influence their individual and collective
behavior and affiliations. Membership in class is normally thought of as
relatively permanent across the life course, with household members shar-
ing the same social class and with parents transmitting their relative social
class status to their children. As is well discussed in the literature on social
class, Weber and Marx had different conceptions of what social class meant,
according to their view of capitalism (Devine and Savage 2005, 11–15;
Heiman, Liechty, and Freeman 2012, 8–12). Marx saw production as para-
mount, dividing the social classes according to their relations to production,
 in essence differentiating between a proletariat who sold their labor power
and the owners of capital. Weber, in contrast, was more concerned with
market exchange as the central economic realm, in which social status and
consumption had greater prominence.
Bourdieu’s work (1977, 1986, 1989, 1996) developed a theory of class
stratification and its reproduction based on differential access to material
africa today 66(3 & 4)

and cultural capital and the convertability of one kind of capital to the
other. Besnier takes from Bourdieu’s work that “class is formed by both the
material and the ideational, and that neither necessarily precedes the others,
although either may become more primordial in particular social configura-
tions” (2009, 217). This lack of theoretical precision, rather than a deficit,
captures the inherent complexity one sees on the ground, argues Besnier.
According to Carrier and Kalb, social class is an analytic window onto
“the interlocking exploitative, extractive, uneven, and constantly transfor-
6

mative relational antagonisms that fire up and refuel the variable engine
of global capitalism” (2015, 14). The study of class is therefore a way of
Migr ation and Social Cl ass in Africa

identifying “the processes and relationships through which people produce

and acquire what they need to survive” and of examining the nature and
bases of inequality (Carrier 2015, 33). Class helps us understand the con-
flicts and tensions within global capitalism. Barber and Lem go so far as to
say: “Migration and the forces that produce and shape geographic mobility
are also the forces that produce and reproduce class distinctions and differ-
entiations in different locations” (2008, 8). Our own sense is that there is
not quite so tight a fit between the forces shaping migration and the forces
shaping class distinctions and differentiations, but that we need to analyze
the relations between these forces.
In African studies, there has been a long discussion of whether social
class, a concept developed in the context of nineteenth-century Europe, is
an appropriate unit of analysis. The rise of the middle class in Europe was
shaped by legal consecrations granted by the state, setting them in opposi-
tion to the working class (Boltanski 1987; Kocka 1981). Early analyses of
class in Africa were similarly focused on the class produced by the state,
known variously as the elite, the civil service, and the ruling class (Cohen
1981; Lloyd 1966; Markovitz 1987; Oppong 1974). The state has therefore
been central in creating, maintaining, and weakening this particular class,
for instance through neoliberal reforms (Neubert 2014, 28). But in all these
studies of elites and civil servants, it has become clear how they maintained
connections to poorer people, through child fosterage, support of poorer kin,
political ties mobilized through ethnicity and hometown associations, and
marriage outside their social class, thus creating households composed of
people of different social classes and diluting the extent to which one social
class can be distinguished from another.
These characteristics are particularly evident in the case of the indus-
trial working class in southern Africa—employed in the factories and mines
in the industrial belts like the Rand and the Copperbelt—who were deeply
connected to the rural proletariat (Mamdani 1996; Meillassoux 1981; Murray
1981; Schapera 1947). While men migrated, they left behind aging parents,
siblings, wives, and children, who engaged in subsistence farming subsidized
by remittances from the migrants in the mines and cities. At the same time,
those working in the urban and industrial zones were dependent on the rural
areas, for the industrial and commercial enterprises in the cities and mines
did not provide adequately for these workers’ retirement or disability. As

africa today 66(3 & 4)

a result, when workers were too old or sick to work any longer, they lost
their employment contracts and had to return to their so-called homelands.
Anthropologist Claude Meillassoux concludes, “Preservation of the relations
with the village and the familial community is an absolute requirement for
the wage-earners, and so is the maintenance of the traditional mode of pro-
duction [farming] as the only one capable of ensuring survival” (1972, 103).
Though workers could develop an urban, cosmopolitan style in contrast with
the rural areas, they did so at some cost to their social security in case of

7
retirement, disability, or mine layoffs when the global market price for pre-
cious metals declined (Ferguson 1999). The class of industrial workers was

Cati Coe and Julia Pauli

thus a stage in the (male) life course and deeply interlinked, economically
and socially, to peasant farmers.
O’Kane and Scharrer, in a critical overview of anthropological class
research in Africa, come to the conclusion that “the rise, decline, and rebirth
of class research in Africa has happened more than once” (2018, 99). The
most recent return of class in the anthropology of Africa is happening in the
form of research on the middle class. Lentz (2016) has pointed out that much
previous research on elites, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, is now
being labeled middle-class research. Empirical findings on African middle
class(es) are still not numerous, but the theoretical debates are already quite
pronounced. There is, on the one hand, a debate on the “myth” of the “Africa
rising” narrative and, on the other hand, the question of how far there really
is something like an African middle class (Darbon 2018; Melber 2016a).
Melber, for example, is skeptical of the spread of the African middle class
and suggests that a lot of discourse on African middle classes is just an “ideo-
logical smokescreen” and “propaganda” (2016, 8). Darbon asks if concepts
like the middle class are not simply turning “the poor into something more
inspiring” (2018, 35). Melber’s and Darbon’s critiques resonate with Kalb’s
more general notion (2014) of the state’s promotion of middle-classness
as some sort of false consciousness to mask potential tensions between
the working and capitalist classes (Lentz 2016, 37). These rather extreme,
often macrolevel, approaches are met with more cautious usages of middle
class(ness) as a heuristic device in anthropological microlevel studies (e.g.,
Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 2012; Kroeker, O’Kane, and Scharrer 2018;
Lentz 2016; Spronk 2012, 2018). Studies focusing on the situated and lived
experiences of (middle) class(ness), though they are skeptical of too general
notions of the middle class, nevertheless see the potential of the concept as
a lens to study cultural practices and aspirations (Pauli 2018; Spronk 2018,
316). This leads to a second prominent debate in middle-class research in
Africa: the question of defining the middle class.
 Definitions based on economic indicators like income distributions
(Southall 2016) are in general rejected as too reductionist by anthropologists
(Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 2012; Kroeker, O’Kane, and Scharrer 2018;
Lentz 2016). Instead, much anthropological work settles for definitions
that highlight the incoherence of the category (Spronk 2018, 312) but stress
“some sort of conscious ‘inbetweeness’ and active ‘boundary work’” (Lentz
africa today 66(3 & 4)

2016, 41), often as an expression of the hope for a better future.2 Rather than
the middle class, there is middle classing; rather than a feeling of belonging
to a class, what is viewed are efforts to prevent falling out of a class or to rise
with a class (Chipnik 2012, 43). Those who see themselves as being part of
the middle class—and those who aspire to it—draw boundaries against those
people they perceive above and below themselves. In these attempts, status
is often as central to people’s class longings as power and wealth (Ridgeway
2014). Spronk (2012, 2014, 2018) and others thus define middle-classness
8

as an aspirational category and practice of distinction. Lentz extends this

conceptualization, highlighting that aspiration has a strong “normative
Migr ation and Social Cl ass in Africa

dimension,” which motivates practices and has to be further explored (2016,

41). Migration is one of the most important ways to achieve the symbols,
practices, and objects linked to middle-classness, yet it complicates the
concept. For migrants, the inbetweeness and the boundary work that Lentz
has identified as central features of the middle class(es) are not restricted to
one place and social order, but may be embedded in multiple geographies,
reference groups, employment and legal regimes, and social structures. A
close look at different forms of migration is therefore crucial.

Understanding Migration

Because wealth is unequally distributed worldwide and within African

countries, migration—to urban areas or other countries—is one of the fun-
damental ways by which Africans pursue social mobility. The question of
who can move and who cannot illustrates capitalism’s unevenness (Barber
and Lem 2008; Ferguson 2006). People may even speak of social-class mobil-
ity through the language of geographical mobility, particularly in places like
South Africa, where residential neighborhoods are strongly associated with
particular social positions (Krige 2015). These kinds of cultural, social, and
economic resources shape migrants’ migration routes and life chances fol-
lowing migration (Van Hear 2014). Class is “fundamental to the character
of all global mobilities” (Barber and Lem 2008, 6).
Migration is central to both urban and rural African livelihoods (de
Haan 1999). Studies of global migration tend to ignore processes of rural–
urban migration (exceptions include Coe 2013; Feldman-Savelsberg 2016;
Hirsch 2003). This lacuna occurs despite the fact that in many parts of the
world, transnational migration is largely preceded by internal migration
to factories and plantations and broader economic changes, such as export
agriculture (Sassen 1998; Trager 2005). Many of those who can migrate
internationally are urban residents, the children of rural migrants to the cities
(Buggenhagen 2012; Mains 2011). Internal migration within African states, a
much more widespread phenomenon than international migration, has been
increasing rapidly. Migration between rural areas, as well as to urban areas, is
commonplace across Africa. Indeed, mobility has long characterized African
social life, and migrants and refugees have historically been valued as sources

africa today 66(3 & 4)

of new knowledge, skills, and resources, as illustrated by the epic Son-Jara
(Sisòkò 1992). Furthermore, though the literature on African transnational
migration emphasizes migration to the most prestigious destinations of
Europe and North America, extensive migration occurs across the African
continent, raising some of the same issues of belonging and family separation
(Whitehouse 2012). Migrants themselves are often comparing options within
the continent to countries farther afield and engaging in stepwise migrations
(Abdi 2015; Schielke 2012; Steinberg 2014). It therefore makes sense to think

9
of intercontinental migration in parallel to intracontinental, subregional,
and internal migrations. There is a large literature on rural–urban migration

Cati Coe and Julia Pauli

in Africa, from the 1960s onward, that we draw on in this special issue to
understand the processes occurring in transnational migration.
The growth of the middle class in Africa is enabled by remittances
from transnational migrants (Lentz 2016), yet the literature on the middle
classes pays scant attention to migration, whether transnational or urban.
Learning and performing classness are deeply caught up with translocal
flows, including the migration of persons. For example, young professionals
in Nairobi are inspired by diasporan Kenyans, as well as working alongside
expatriates and engaging with global investment and media (Spronk 2014,
102).3 Cosmopolitan capital in Cairo entails fluency in English and the abil-
ity to use a mix of Arabic and English, as well as knowledge of the West,
Western consumer culture, and fashionable elite dress codes that reference
global fashions (de Koning 2009). Finally, the middle class is perhaps the
likeliest to aspire to migrate abroad, as illustrated by the aspirations of nurses
in South Africa—where nursing is a historically middle-class occupation for
women: migration exemplifies “an alternative claim to status, based on new
mediums of wealth creation associated with the post-apartheid opening up
of labor markets, and beyond the scope of that offered by the South African
workplace” (Hull 2017, 188). Furthermore, as the middle class grows larger
in Africa, greater resources are available for migration internationally, as
well as increased interest in return by those already abroad. Class-making
projects are central to Africans’ migratory trajectories inside and outside
Africa, yet such projects remain undertheorized within the literatures on
African migration and transnational migration more generally.

Understanding Migration and Social Class

Migration complicates the concept of social class as a stable identity. As we

emphasize here, migrants usually have multiple class statuses across their
 lifetime and in different social fields and geographic locations. This multi-
plicity creates contradictions in their quest for social mobility, generating
tensions in the kinds of cultural and social capital they might pursue, with
multiple class boundaries and distinctions at play. It stimulates anxiety
about how they might pass along some or all of their achieved class status
to the next generation. We argue that these issues have broader significance
africa today 66(3 & 4)

beyond the context of migration, illustrating the complexity of social class

in the contemporary globalized world, for migrants and nonmigrants alike,
whether in Africa or elsewhere.
As already noted, social class is usually analyzed solely within a
national frame of reference (Carrier and Kalb 2015), yet people’s own self-
descriptions of social class often reference their surrounding, more local
communities, rather than a national class model (Krige 2015): “Middle-class
identities, therefore, not only reflect the material reach that social location
10

confers, but also the width of the social view that different social locations
permit” (Phadi and Ceruti 2011, 102). The nation-state remains the most
Migr ation and Social Cl ass in Africa

important framework within which people negotiate their own place in

society and imagine a desirable, just social order; at the same time, we need
to pay attention to “the transnational dimensions of these negotiations and
imaginations” (Lentz 2016, 38–39).
An alternative, more transnational framework on social class focuses
on the globalization of social class (Amit 2002; Elder 2012; Ong 1999; Sassen
1998). Given the distribution of global trade and the global dispersal of
production, it makes sense that class is increasingly related to geographical
location, in which, for example, workers were in the sugar plantations of the
Caribbean while the owners of sugar capital were in England (Carrier 2015;
Mintz 1986). The ruling class has therefore never been entirely confined to
the nation-state (Harvey 2005). At the top of the current global economy is
a small capitalist class, which moves easily between the financial sectors
of global cities, perhaps holding multiple passports. Lower down are those
working in manufacturing and service sectors worldwide, who experience
limited economic mobility and few political rights, a global precariat who are
relatively immobile (Ong 1999) and in a state of “waithood” (Honwana 2012)
for a better future. Others have posited the emergence of a new global middle
class, promoted by states, which participates in transnational conceptions
of family life and consumption (Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 2012). The
global care chain literature illustrates a globalized class structure, in which
women from the Global South migrate to provide care services in the Global
North, creating care gaps and class hierarchies in their own households,
which they resolve by employing servants for their own families (Ehrenreich
and Hochschild 2002; Parreñas 2001). In contrast to Lentz (2016), others, like
Kalb (2012) and Liechty (2012), place more emphasis on global dynamics than
nation-states. Kalb concludes:

Now, 20 years later, the nation-state and its classificatory

apparatuses may still seek to intervene, purport to manage,
 help to legitimize or protect—often in neoliberal, inequitable
and punitive ways—but the reality is that class formation
processes are broadly set in motion within and are structurally
driven by global capitalism, and not quite as a “coherent and
monolithic project.” (2012, 325)

africa today 66(3 & 4)

Within this global, rather than national, perspective, those who migrate
might be members of a cosmopolitan elite, a global middle class, or a global-
ized working class.
We find that neither a system of global social hierarchy nor one of
separate national social hierarchies entirely makes sense of the experiences
of African migrants or other migrants from the Global South in Africa. As
studies of transnational and rural–urban migration show, many migrants
from and in Africa manage dual or multiple social fields simultaneously,

11
maintaining ties to their hometowns or countries of origin while being
engaged in new relations in their place of migration (Ferguson 1999). In the

Cati Coe and Julia Pauli

context of political action, transnational migrants may operate in conjunc-
tion with those who remain behind (Van Hear 2014). Migrants thus have
multiple class statuses, participating in various sociocultural milieus and
“small lifeworlds” (Neubert and Stoll 2018), in which people operate simul-
taneously. In this formulation, class becomes “a bundle of discourses and
performances” generated with others (Lentz 2016, 42). Our focus on multiple
frames of reference, implicit in migration, challenges the stability of social
class and scrutinizes the intergenerational formation of persons into particu-
lar social-class statuses. As the papers in our special issue show, Carola Lentz
may be right to say that, insofar as class is an aspirational process, people
may be more concerned with their place in a particular nation, even if the
nation-state is not the primary driver of class formation and even if they are
not currently residing within that nation.
We want to suggest that class aspiration is only one, albeit very
important, dimension of national and transnational class dynamics. People
not only aspire to belong to a certain class: they may also be afraid of losing
their class position(s). It is remarkable that the desire to move up is so
much more prominent in research on African (middle) classes and migra-
tion than the desire to consolidate and protect a particular class position.
Stereotypes of Africans as poor have arguably fostered such perceptions,
despite the complex and heterogeneous history of African class dynamics.
Speaking of the “tale of two middle classes,” Milanvic (2014) has offered
another, more general explanation for this bias: though at the moment in
Africa and, more generally, in the Global South, class formation often fol-
lows a narrative of rise and aspiration, middle classes in the Global North
are viewed through the lens of decline and downward mobility. Contrary
to this emphasis on aspiration, several of the papers in our special issue
directly address the importance of class consolidation through migration
and the fear of losing an already achieved class position in African migra-
tion contexts.
 Class-Making Projects in Translocal Social Fields

Our major point is that social class cannot be understood as a stable identity
across the life course and across different geographic contexts and social
fields. Instead, following Liechty’s work in Nepal (2003), we see the impor-
tance of class-making projects, in which social class is pursued, but never
africa today 66(3 & 4)

fully achieved. From this central point, we draw four implications.

First, we examine social class as relational. One can speak of social
class only in relation to other classes, as noted in scholarship on the South
African middle classes who define themselves as “neither rich nor poor”
(Phadi and Ceruti 2011; see also Smith 2015). The local context—and whom
one compares oneself to—matters, and social actors engage in boundary
work to differentiate themselves from others and connect themselves in a
particular way to social-class others, as patrons or beneficiaries, for example,
12

through various social performances (Lamont and Molnár 2002).

This point means that people can change their social-class position
Migr ation and Social Cl ass in Africa

in different contexts, where different “others” are pertinent. Transnational

migrants may experience “a status paradox” (Nieswand 2011), or a “con-
tradictory class mobility” (Parreñas 2001), in which migrants have a low-
paying but high-status job in their home countries and a higher-paying but
low-status job abroad, which some may convert into high status at home.
In these different contexts, migrants and those around them draw different
class boundary markers. All chapters in this special issue discuss social class
as relational, in particular Chelsie Yount-André’s contribution on university-
educated Senegalese in Paris and Sarah Hanisch’s discussion on Chinese
migration to Lesotho.
Second, social class can change across the life course through migra-
tion. For example, many of the so-called new middle classes in Africa were
not born into the middle class (Southall 2016). They may experience social-
class decline upon retirement or return migration, due to changes in global
trade and the global economy (Ferguson 1999), or through indebtedness
(James 2014; Krige 2015). Preventing downward mobility may be one of the
key attributes of the middle class in Africa, in a situation of economic and
political volatility (Kroeker 2018). Some kinds of social-class expressions
may be indicative of a certain phase in the life course (Neubert 2014), such
as living in one’s own house in retirement in Benin (Alber 2018; Mercer 2014)
or being a young professional in Nairobi (Spronk 2014). Because people may
operate simultaneously or sequentially in different social-cultural milieus
associated with class status, they may engage in class-switching, as proposed
by Julia Pauli in this special issue, or use different geographical locations
to maintain their class status, as shown by Lena Kroeker and Pamela Kea,
or mitigate their low-class status in one context by investing in another,
as illustrated by Cati Coe. Several of the papers illustrate the limits of the
ability to switch, as when the class markers in different social fields differ
too much (Yount-André), or when parental migration prohibits the intensive
parenting style associated with the middle class (Hanisch).
 Third, social class is performed. Performances can be embodied, affect-
ing the bodily routines and tastes of the habitus, as at a child’s public
recital or an adult’s declaration that he drinks wine. They can be performed
through material objects outside the body, which take on some aspects of
the self, like houses and possessions. Class is performed in more ephemeral
social interactions on public streets and in schools (Hanisch, Kea); through

africa today 66(3 & 4)

rituals like weddings, funerals, and children’s parties (Feldman-Savelsberg,
Pauli); and through more material instantiations and long-term projects
like houses (Coe, Kroeker, Yount-André). Middle-classness in particular is
a project pursued through the domestic realm—through education, gender
relations, and family lifestyles (Donner 2015) centered on food, language use,
domestic space, and parenting styles. Children become significant in these
class performances not only to generate a particular class position for them
in the present and in the future, but also to perform their parents’ social

13
class, as several of the papers in the special issue show (Feldman-Savelsberg,
Hanisch, Kea). These objects of class-making projects—whether children or

Cati Coe and Julia Pauli

houses or rituals—are intended to stabilize class over time and location and
require deliberate, conscious investments of material and cultural capital
directed at particular class goals. Housing, in particular, is significant in the
construction of the middle class, as a strategy to reproduce certain assets
(Alber 2018; Chipkin 2012; Mercer 2014). This point, like that of relational-
ity, highlights the situationality of class, but shows also that investments in
class projects can be made in more durable and less reversible ways, making
class-switching and flexibility less available as certain investments are
chosen over others (Yount-André).
Both the images and objects associated with social class travel, in part,
but not only, through migration, as Buggenhagen (2012) shows in her discus-
sion of Senegalese women’s consumption and distribution of cloth in Dakar
and abroad: these performances require an audience, who can acknowledge
or denigrate their value. Sometimes, performer(s) and audience of class
rituals are the same, creating and experiencing feelings of common class
identities (Feldman-Savelsberg). Sometimes, class performers and audience
are distinct, highlighting inequality, boundaries, and exclusion (Pauli 2018).
Differences in what is valued as cultural capital, social networks, economic
capital, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986) and performing and trans-
forming such capitals in different locations—as in religious movements or
through education—highlight the contradictory class statuses with which
many migrants grapple (Kea, Yount-André).
Finally, social-class projects are learned and, by extension, unlearned.
The processes of class making are shaped by larger histories, in which par-
ticular experiences, embodied memories, and stories of success and failure
are learned and shared within social networks, becoming both a topic of
conscious reflection and more unconsciously an embodiment in the habi-
tus (Bourdieu 1989). Migration complicates the learning and unlearning, as
one has to manage multiple class-making projects, including transitioning
between them. Some of the papers address moments when class-making
 projects fail, or when people are experiencing downward mobility, as after
the economic crisis in Europe, the United States, and Asia in 2008, and
others illustrate moments of great hope, as after independence in Namibia,
when many anticipated that everyone would experience new opportuni-
ties. Several of the articles highlight the critical role played by colonial
and postcolonial relations between nation-states, and state investment and
africa today 66(3 & 4)

disinvestment in the middle class. Thus, the papers attend to the temporal
moments in which their study takes place, examining the historical events
that undo or enable class-making projects, in which people’s learning of class
making is rewarded or remade, or in which they realize they need to rethink
what they are doing.
All in all, we want to show the processes by which social-class statuses
in Africa and of Africans are performed, made stable, and undone through
migration. The focus in the special issue on different forms of migration—
14

rural–urban (Kroeker, Pauli) and transnational (Coe, Feldman-Savelsberg,

Hanisch, Kea, and Yount-André)—helps move migration research away from
Migr ation and Social Cl ass in Africa

national and ethnic group delimitations toward processes of social-class

formation and reformation that are occurring broadly and at different scales.
We examine the strategies of class-making projects across the life course and
between different generations: in childhood and youth (Feldman-Savelsberg,
Hanisch, and Kea), in middle age (Yount-André and Pauli), and among older
adults (Kroeker and Coe). We cover different regions of the African continent
(West, Central, East, South), as well as migrations to and from China, France,
Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The contributions to
this special issue thus examine the ambiguities of social class in the lived
experience of migrants as they navigate different locations and social fields
across the life course.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This special issue arises from a panel on “Migration and Social Class” at the
American Anthropological Association in December 2017. We are grateful
to the original participants and audience members and especially to our
discussant, Jeffrey Cohen. Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg gave us excellent
suggestions and comments on an early version of this introduction.

NOTES

1. Although the Comaroffs (2000) argue that the global dispersal of manufacturing is likely to
fragment class consciousness, class alliance, and class antinomies, the articles in this special
issue find that class consciousness grew as a result of migration (see also Barber and Lem
2008).
 2. Additionally, Lentz rightly observes that “if middle class is to serve as an analytical term that
enables historical and transnational comparison, some ‘hard’ criteria regarding education,
occupation, and income have to enter the definition” (2016, 41, italics added).
3. Similarly, in Tonga, Besnier (2009) talks about the middle class’s reliance on extralocal resources
and claims to cosmopolitanism.

africa today 66(3 & 4)

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CATI COE is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. Her research

focuses on transnational migration, care, and education in West Africa. Her
current book project is on changes in aging and elder care in Ghana. She is the
author of The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African
Immigrant Home Care Workers (2019) and The Scattered Family: African
Migrants, Parenting and Global Inequality (2013).

19
JULIA PAULI is a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the
University of Hamburg (Germany). Her main research interests are trans-

Cati Coe and Julia Pauli

national migration, social class, gender, and kinship. For Anthropology
Southern Africa, she has coedited a special issue on continuity and change
in southern African marriages, with Rijk van Dijk (2016–17). Recently, she
has published a monograph on the decline of marriage and the rise of class
differences in Namibia, The Decline of Marriage in Namibia: Kinship and
Social Class in a Rural Community (Columbia UP, 2019).
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