Anthropology and The Concept of Social Class: Further

Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1984.
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ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE

CONCEPT OF SOCIAL CLASS
Raymond T. Smith
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago,
Illinois 60637
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1984.13:467-494.
INTRODUCTION
Is "class" an appropriate concept for anthropological analysis? Toward the end

of his life, Lloyd Fallers concluded that "social stratification" (which he took to
include class) does not exist (3 1 , p. 3), or at least the tenn is so loaded with
cultural bias that it should be abandoned. This parallels Needham's discovery
that kinship does not exist (75 , p. �) and Schneider's apology for having
worked most of his life on the same nontopic (86) . One is reminded of Sahlin's
rhetorical question: has one hundred years of anthropological research been
nothing but "a grand intellectual distraction, bourgeois society scratching its
head"? (83, p . 2). Still, the concept of social class is relatively new to
anthropological theory. Unlike "marriage ," "family," "culture ," "race ,"
"ethnicity ," or even "social classification ," it has not been SUbjected to pro
longed debate and refinement; usages have been adopted from other social
sciences. "Class" was used rarely in Europe until the late eighteenth century,
when its increased circulation coincided with the social transfonnations accom
panying the growth of capitalism (111 ; pp . 51-59). As the expanding frontiers
of capitalism (or a world system that originated in capitalism) enclose an
increasing proportion of the world's popUlation, class becomes the universal
mode of social organization, according to one view. But if anthropology has
contributed anything to the discussion of class , it is a recognition that societies
are differentially "inserted" into the world system, that the cultural or ideolo
gical dimension of class relations (if that is what they are) is more important
than is often assumed , less easy to understand, and has a transfonnative
capacity that complements and often exceeds that of technological change.
Given that class is widely used by anthropologists , and increasingly so , what do
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468 SMITH
they mean by it? To find an answer some recent work is examined, without
either summarizing class theory (see 1 9 , 76) or covering the literature.
EARLY ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF CLASS
Social Stratification and Social Class
The idea of "social mobility" embodies a belief in the constant movement of

individuals into greater prosperity; over their own life cycle, as one generation
succeeds another, and across space as new opportunities are sought. In the
United States "social mobility" and "social stratification" have been preferred
over "class" for describing inequality . In the 1 968 edition of The International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. the article on "Social Class" (65) was a
subcategory of "Stratification , Social."
Lloyd Warner's studies and those of his associates (24, 54, 1 0 1 - 1 04 ,
1 09)-justly criticized but hardly surpassed-ran counter to the myth o f a
classless United States. Warner followed a tradition of community culture

studies that began in 1 906 with James Williams's An American Town ( 1 1 0),
and included fieldwork in agricultural communities directed by the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics (45). However, Warner raised such crucial theoretical
issues as what is the appropriate unit of study, and how are class symbols
related to processes of change'? His decision to study a small New England town
accorded with the assumption that modem industrial societies, like primitive
ones, are organized around common values and symbolic structures. Looking
for an integrating principle analogous to kinship in "primitive" societies , he
thought first of money, but experience in Newburyport pointed from money to
class, perhaps because the upper class was no longer very wealthy and the
wealthy not yet properly upper class. The idea that class can integrate society is
central to structural functional stratification theory.
Two early papers by Goldschmidt summarize key aspects of this view of
class in the United States (45 , 46). Voicing the standard criticism of Warner ,
that local communities are not a primary referent for restless Americans and do
not contain the totality of American culture, he advocates a more "dynamic"
approach , but it is to be gained only by fragmenting society into atoms and
restating the traditional view of American society as open , restless, frontier
oriented, striving; a view reflecting the ideology of unlimited scope for
achievement and personal responsibility for one's status. Individuals are said to
be mobile , and their interaction spread over a wide area, blurring class bound
aries . There is gradation of statuses but no sharp breaks, and no agreed-upon
classes. In a moment of self-contradiction, he identifies four broad class
entities, representing a "class system [which is] emerging, though it is not yet
clearly defined" (45 , p. 494). These "entities" are found in subsequent writing
on American class. An elite of money and power , trying to be an aristocracy, is
SOCIAL CLASS 469
constantly thwarted by democratic process. The middle class , individualistic

and egalitarian , is preoccupied with occupational gentility and conservative
support of the elite. The working class rejects individual achievement in favor
of trade unions or other forms of collective solidarity , but it is equally oriented
to material comfort and wealth . Finally, there is a degraded, decultured ,

hopeless , lowest segment of the laboring class .
These themes remained central to anthropological work in the United States
in the years that followed Goldschmidt's and Warner's work, though the civil
rights movement and awareness of urban poverty made "ethnicity" and "the
culture of poverty" into special fields of investigation. Since it appeared that
most inhabitants of the decaying inner cities were either unable or unwilling to
realize "the American dream" by moving up the ladder of occupational success,
special theories explained how and why these populations remained outside
"the mainstream" of American life (see 80 for a typical controversy).
Miller (72) argued that urban low-skilled laboring classes in industrial
societies are always characterized by an array of ten cultural features including:
low educational levels; low income "commensurate with low levels of occupa
tional skill"; a particular kind of family situation with minimal male participa
tion; the pursuit of pastimes involving stimulation and immediate gratification;
dependence on welfare; and criminal activity . Low-status populations do not
share the values of the middle class, because classes are functionally special
ized segments of society that develop cultures appropriate to their situation.
The implication is that the "middle class" is adapted to mobility and the
lower-preferably thought of as a series of ethnic groups-is adapted to
poverty and stagnation . During the 1 970s , theories of "adaptation" often
celebrated lower class culture as an expression of strength in difficult circum
stances (7 , 92); they also assume culture to be a bounded system of traits
through which a defined population orients and adapts itself to life in a
particular environment . Class (if it is not abandoned in favor of ethnic group)
becomes just another word for culture-bearing group. At the center of'these
debates was a serious question about the nature of modem industrial society
itself; it was generally overlooked in the busy, sometimes ingenious , but
essentially trivial , pursuit of better ways of describing the observed "facts" of
class difference.
The only serious objections to stratification theory came from Marxist social
scientists and from Louis Dumont. These objections were fundamental.
Comparative Social Stratification

Decolonization after World War II accelerated the developing anthropological
interest in social change and acculturation in "the Third World," including the
process of class formation as it related to tribe , race, and nationality. Cross
cultural extensions of stratification studies assumed that modernity requires
specialists and must reward them with status and wealth. The difficulty of
470 SMITH
measuring status intervals--drawing a picture of the ladder of success-is

insurmountable, even in one society as Shils (87) has shown, but this has not
halted studies of the rates at which people move up and down those imaginary
ladders . More cautious anthropologists recognize the difficulty of quantifica
tion but accept universalist assumptions. Thus, Berreman describes the Indian
caste system in terms of a universal theory of social stratification (11).
A society is socially stratified when its members are divided into categories which are
differentially powerful, esteemed, and rewarded. Such systems of collective social ranking
vary widely in the ideologies which support them, in the distinctiveness, number, and size of
the ranked categories, in the criteria by which inclusion in the categories is conferred and
changed, in the symbols by which such inclusion is displayed and recognized, in the degree
to which there is consensus upon or even awareness of the ranking system, its rationale, and
the particular ranks assigned, in the rigidity of rank, in the disparity in rewards of rank, and in
the mechanisms employed to maintain or change the system (II, p. 385).
Such variation notwithstanding, he concludes that "all systems of birth

ascribed ranking are systems of social stratification, and any theory of social
stratification must encompass them" ( 1 1 , p. 388); race relations in the United

States and caste in India are one subtype of social stratification .
One of the most ambitious comparative programs was launched by The
Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of
Chicago (39, 57). Created by Edward Shils, Clifford Geertz, Lloyd Fallers,
and David Apter, the Committee based itself upon work already accomplished,
such as Geertz's studies in Java and Bali (3�38), but grew to include econom
ists, political scientists, lawyers, and other specialists, all sharing a broad
allegiance to the theoretical paradigm laid out by Parsons and Shils in Toward a
General Theory of Action (77) . The project disintegrated along with the
paradigm that had informed it.
Comparative studies have come to be dominated by scholars who, claiming
Marx as their inspiration and class as their master concept, attempt (with
varying degrees of success) to transcend the limitations of previous theories .
Few, i f any, early anthropological studies viewed the developing societies of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America through the lens of a Marxist theory of class
conflict. Plural society theory as formulated by Fumivall (34, 35) was closer to
Marx than its derivative versions (62, 88). Insofar as anthropology was influ
enced by Marx it led to reformulation of broad sequences of evolutionary
development, an interest which has continued, stimulating protracted (and
often tedious) debates about such things as the Asiatic mode of production and
its position in the sequence of development of social forms, or the precise way
in which "peasants" are to be treated in studies of the modem world system.
Often reflecting more of Engels (28) than of Marx, these questions play a
prominent part in recent studies of class formation, and it is to their considera
tion we now tum.
SOCIAL CLASS 47 1
CLASS AND THE PERIPHERY OF THE WORLD SYSTEM
In the flood of publications marking the centenary year of Marx's death, the
most distinguished testament to the enduring quality of his thought was a book
by an anthropologist, according to Hobsbawm (53, pp. 1 1 81-82). He referred

to Europe and the People Without History (115), the culminating statement of
Eric Wolf's views on culture history . Wolf says that modem industrial capital
ism engages in a ceaseless process of expansion "by which new working classes
are simultaneously created and segmented," a process which has "continued
down to the present," and which recruits "these working classes from a wide
variety of social and cultural backgrounds, and inserts them into variable
political and economic hierarchies" ( 1 1 5, pp. 38 1 -83) . This approach promises
to bring the whole universe of the anthropologist' s concerns into a comprehen
sive and comprehensible framework, since no society is now untouched by the
modem world system. Systems of relationship and systems of symbols and
ideas are assumed to be erected upon underlying processes of production which
find appropriate cultural expression. Anthropology has come a long way from a
view of the world as a mosaic of discrete cultures exchanging ideas, blows, and
diseases, but what does the idea of a universal working class contribute to our
understanding of that world?
A search of the literature yields many examples of anthropologists' aware
ness of the way in which a spreading worldwide system of economic and
political relations impinged upon the primitive world. Joan Vincent reminds us
that in the 1 920s Leonard Woolf and Lord Olivier (Sydney H. Haldane) ,
influenced by Lenin' s views on imperialism , claimed international capitalism
as the proper context for colonial study (99, p. 4) . In 1941 Godfrey Wilson
wrote that
the inhabitants of an African territory are members of a huge worldwide community . . . their
lives . . . bound up at every point with the events of its history . . . Their standard of living
now depends on economic conditions in Europe, Asia and America to which continents their
labour has become essential. Their political development is largely decided in the Colonial
Office and on the battlefields of Europe, while hundreds of their one-time separate tribes now
share a single destiny. They have entered a heterogeneuus wurld stratified into classes and
divided into states, and so find themselves suddenly transformed into the peasants and
unskilled workers of a nascent nation state ( l l3, p. 12; quoted in 99, p. 4).
It was recognized that foreign influences were mediated by the cultures

and social systems in place, so that "culture contact" or "acculturation"
were complex processes requiring careful study in their own right (7 1 , 82) .
However, there is a difference between general awareness and incorporat
ing these factors into theoretical approaches of the kind now being devel
oped.
472 SMITH
Culture, Structure, and Class
The strengths and weaknesses of the "the world system" approach can be seen
in two recent class-oriented studies: Kathleen Gough's Rural Society in South
east Asia (48) and Joan Vincent's Teso in Transformation (99). Vincent
"throws down a gauntlet" against those who attach no importance to the
development of capitalism, against the neglect of history, and against mod
ernization theory and all "cultural explanations." "An emphasis on cultures
places a value on custom, fosters a heuristic bias toward the isolation of systems
and the static, and tends to be conservative" (99, p. 8). Whether true or not,
there is little discussion of culture theory in this book. "Process theory,"
represented by Victor Turner, is acceptable because it deals with processes
deemed valid universally, and demonstrates that "there are more similarities
between fishing communities in Labrador, Brazil, and Portugal than there are
between those communities and upcountry villages within the same cultures
within the same societies" (99, p. 8). "What, then," she asks, "are the
components? What process are we addressing?" (99, p. 8). To answer, as she

does, that the components and processes of social life to which anthropology
should address itself are the development of capitalism and the workings of the
global system, can lead to myopia of a kind that led one misguided anthropo
logist to title his book on Barbados, English Rustics in Black Skin (49).
Gough throws down no gauntlets but gives no weight either to "culture." In
1952 "the religious moment dominated the political and economic moments in
village social life" (48, p. 289), but religion gets little attention. Indian
ethnography raises all the important theoretical issues pertaining to class, and
one could easily devote a whole review to it. Weber (106) showed how caste
ideology sustains the system of status groups and accommodates secular
change without fundamentally altering religious values. He knew that "west
ernization" could change India, by creating elites with a ncw ethic of indi
vidualism: not the indigenous notion of escape from involvement with the
world, but the bourgeois capitalist concept of individual action in the world.
Hindu reform movements, including anti-Brahmanical and anti-caste sects,
appeared throughout India's history, but European influence and new modes of
production, dislocating population and creating new urban elites, sets in train
entirely new forces. Less certain than Marx that India would soon be shaken out
of its "backwardness," Weber recognized that new economic classes chal
lenged the authority of caste.
A later generation of Indianists mostly saw caste as nothing but a particularly
rigid form of class; a structure produced historically out of a division of labor
that either had been arrested in process of development or was merely awaiting
further technological change. Later still, Berreman sees Hindu religious and
caste values as the legitimating ideologies of the upper castes, not shared by
SOCIAL CLASS 473
everyone in the system. It "is advocated by those whom the system benefits, but
is widely doubted, differently interpreted, or regarded as inappropriately ap
plied by those whom the system oppresses" ( 1 1, p. 389). Caste, race, and
ethnic stratification are all phenomena of the same order and can be denoted
collectively by the term "caste" (see also 1 2) . Dumont's criticism of this view is
not as easily dismissed as Berreman suggests. Theories of stratification, says
Dumont (27, pp. 247-66), are Eurocentric; the hierarchy of Indian society can
be understood only in terms of the ideology that generates the principles of
social order. While acknowledging the growing importance of economic,
political, and other secular values, Dumont insists that they are "encompassed"
by the religious values of caste, and are in fact subordinate to them.
At least two sets of issues are involved. One is cultural difference and the
problem of interpretation. Inden and Nicholas (55) argue that interpretations of
Hindu kinship that assume individual action, individual motivation, or aggre
gates of individuals to be the components of social action, falsify Indian data,
since Hindu culture contains no such units. A young Hindu husband, his wife
and their children, occupying a separate house , may appear to fit the Euro
American definition of a "nuclear family ," but for Hindus, this is part of one
body, literally-belonging to the "master" of a larger unit-and is separable
neither physically or conceptually (55, p. 6). The implications for class analy
sis are clear, though this work-like that of Schneider (86) on which it is
based--does not analyze contexts in which meaning becomes relevant to
action .
The second question raised by Dumont's work is more complex and has to do
with the meaning of "structure ." For him, neither the totality of empirical
events nor the manifold facts of history can be made comprehensible except in
terms of the structures that motivate them. He employs a graphic image to make
his point. "A structure is either present or absent, it does not change." but he
wonders if "the caste order will not one day collapse like a piece of furniture
gnawed from within by termites" (27, p. 2 1 9). In this way he poses the problem
of understanding the interaction of different types of society, which in tum
raises the question of the relationship between ideology and "other aspects," for
here ideology constitutes the structure.
Capitalism, Imperialism, and Class

Gough's recent book (48) points up the significance of these questions. Mate
rial collected in the early 1 950s, when Gough was guided by structural func
tional theory, is reanalyzed in Marxian terms . This requires that the original
studies be widened to include the historical development of the villages , the
region, India as a whole and, to some extent, the whole capitalist world system,
using ideas derived from Frank (32, 33) and Wallerstein (100) . The structural
functional heritage is not entirely lost, and some final thoughts on class ,
474 SMITH
envisioning a vanguard element leading a misguided proletariat to revolution

ary change via an imputed class consciousness, modifies the materialist posi
tion that dominates the analysis.
The book's point of departure is less complex.
I use the tenn "class" in this book in the Marxian sense. Thus, to quote Lenin's formulation ,
"classes are large groups of people distinguished by the place they occupy in an historically
defined system of production , by their relations . . . vis a vis the means of production, by their
role in the social organization of labour, and by the modes of obtaining and thc importance of
the share of the social wealth of which they dispose" (48, p. vii).
Without quibbling over whether there is such a thing as the Marxian sense, the
definition conspicuously ignores ideology and class consciousness.
"Why do castes exist?" she asks, almost naively. Migration and conquest
have sedimented groups of different culture on top of each other, and a broad
status order has persisted from the early kingdoms, but caste derives from the
hegemony of the Brahmans whose task was (and still is) to explain and
elaborate the social structure, reconcile the lower orders to their lot, assist the
rulers in repressing the people, and prevent rebellion. This view does not flow
from the rich field observations, and one wishes that Gough had treated the
ideology of caste with as much care as Marx treated bourgeois ideology (for
example 70, p. 809) . Gough recognizes that the system codified by the
Brahmans has a life of its own, "a certain dynamic of its own" as she puts it, not
explicable in political or economic terms. Even so, the system was justified and
explained, the lower orders were reconciled to their lot, and the doctrines of
karma and dharma (fate and duty), while not entirely accepted by the lower
castes, still succeed in "rationalizing" the whole system. The Brahmans helped
repress the common people and prevent rebellion by a process of divide and
rule, setting castes and subcastes against each other in a scramble for status and
religious merit. All this obscured the class structure and discouraged "both the
aristocrats and the exploited from uniting against their rulers" (48, p. 27). This
seems to erase the difference between class and caste, but the problem is not
fully discussed, and there is remarkably little reference to previous work on
these matters. One need only compare Tambiah's (96) analysis of Thai reli
gion, politics, and ideology to realize how much is glossed over or ignored by
Gough.
A book should not be criticized for what is not in it. This book is crammed
with historical evidence testing hypotheses that link state formation and social
stratification (her term) to rainfall, temperature, nature of the terrain, and
demographic factors. Analysis of field material relates it to historical data, and
"village India" falls into place as part of more complex social formations. The
penetration of capitalism is charted in terms of changing forms of land tenure,
the introduction of wage labor, debt peonage, and the destruction of traditional
SOCIAL CLASS 475
craft specializations. For each phase of development-the Chola kingdom of

850- 1 290 AD, the period of shifting conquests until 1749, when the East India
Company established effective control, the Imperialist phase from 1 858 to
1 947, and of course the period of fieldwork in the early 1 950s--detailed lists of
classes are given for the villages and their regions. The classes are, in keeping
with her definition and following Mao's discussion of China, groups with
familiar names such as ,bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and proletarians
except for a few variants such as The State Class, The Nascent Bourgeoisie, and
The semi-proletariat.
In a short but crucial section, the question of boundaries is raised by asking
what mode of production is involved here? Thanjavur's (regional) "socioeco
nomy [is] a peripheral segment of the world capitalist mode of production and
social formation" (48, p . 1 35) . Other answers are listed and reasons given for
their rejection. Should the region be considered mainly feudal and semicolonial
with pockets of capitalist development, as the communists say? Does it contain
several precapitalist modes of production dominated by the capitalist periphery
as a whole, as Samir Amin (5) would have it? Was India before 1 947 a separate
"colonial mode of production" as Alavi ( 1 ) says? Or is it, and was it, "a
peripheral segment of the (changing) world capitalist system which is characte
rized by a single, although changing, mode of production and forms a single,
although changing, social formation, there being only one of it in the world"
(48, p. 1 36, my emphasis). Although the world system is not homogeneous and
it is necessary, though difficult, to sort out the precise nature of the world
hierarchy and "the interlocking of its component imperialisms" (48, p. 1 37),
this is the view that guides the analysis.
The status of the colonial mode of production is never fully resolved, though
it would appear to be crucial. It has some productive relations similar to early
core capitalism, such as debt service, sharecropping, and putting-out, but "we
must admit that India did not develop along the same path as Britain, as Marx
expected it to do, that it developed along a complementary and specifically
colonial trajectory, yet that it developed within the (single) capitalist mode"
(48, pp. 4 1 3- 14). What can this mean except that a description of India's
development necessarily differs from a description of British history? But
Gough insists the analytical categories are applicable universally; the only
problem is to sort out the "interlocking of . . . component imperialisms" (48, p .
1 37).
This book documents the problem of reconciling a world system approach to
class with tolerance for local hierarchies. The discussion of changes introduced
over hundreds of years, including the direct and indirect effects of capitalist
penetration, provide information enabling anthropology to break out of its
exotic parochialism and deal with major issues of our day. At the same time it
ignores, or minimizes, many of the most serious of those issues. And the most
476 SMITH
serious issue is the one to which anthropology ought to have most to contribute;
why has class consciousness failed to become an important factor in Indian
social and political life, and why does caste continue to be a "formidable"
barrier after 200 years of involvement in the capitalist mode of production?
Africa is the classical locus of structural functional anthropology, of lineage

systems and balanced oppositions, ancestor cults and legitimating symbols,
though lively debates on social change began before World War II. Ellen
Hellman's 1 930s research in a Johannesburg slum, Rooiyard (52), contained
most subsequent ideas about African urban problems: the idea that tribal
identity, though shattered by the process of "detribalization," was, or might be,
reconstituted into urban associations more important than class; the notion that
women assumed a disproportionate role in child care and economic responsibil
ity in a fragmented family; and the idea that "deviant" behavior such as illicit
alcohol distillation, witchcraft, and crime were compensatory activities in a
dysfunctional social milieu. The same ideas are found in urban studies in
America; their origin is in the literature on nineteenth century Europe.
An attempt to apply anthropological techniques to the study of urban and

labor problems in Africa and reshape anthropological theory for the study of
social change was made at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in then Northern
Rhodesia (43, 114). When its Director, Max Gluckman, was appointed to the
newly established chair of anthropology at Manchester University, that depart
ment became the center of a new "school," within structural functional anthro
pology, but interested in problems of change and enjoying the reputation of
being vaguely "Marxist." For the most part, Malinowski had more influence
than Marx; his statements on social change in Africa (68) emphasized the
dynamics of situations in which "natives" and representatives of the "superior
culture" interact, creating new social and cultural forms. The "realities" of the
situation could only be understood by focusing on the "anthropological no
man's-land" in which neither the tribal past nor the European present can
explain what is going on. This mandate informed the work of Gluckman and his
associates (see 44), eventually developing into such forms as "situational" and
"transactional" analysis (see Kapferer 60) . The empiricist bias, made explicit in
Barth's Models ofSocial Organisation (10), culminated in the proliferating, ad
hoc, analytical categories of studies of "local level politics . " Within this
framework studies were made of trade unions, industrial organization, and
class ( 1 7, 29, 59, 73, among others) .
Joan Vincent has some affinities with this school, though Teso in Trans
formation (99) takes an approach similar to Gough's, and the genealogy of her
thought is similar (claiming descent not only from Marx, Lenin, Engels, and
Luxemburg , but also from Baran, Frank, Cardoso , Wallerstein, and Samir
Amin). More precisely, "the theoretical underpinnings for the analysis of
agrarian change in Teso rest in European social and economic history and in
SOCIAL CLASS 477
European ethnography" (99, p. 7), and Teso, a district of modem Uganda

whose boundaries were established in 1 9 1 2 , replicates European history; one
finds wandering men, enclosures, the changing position of women, epidemics,
and the decline of artisans.
Cotton cultivation was introduced following the disruption of supplies to

Britain consequent on the American Civil War. The connection with Lan
cashire helps explain the fascination with parallels between African and En
glish labor history and admiration for E. P. Thompson's analysis of the making
of the English working class (98) . Uganda was rapidly and deeply influenced
by British colonial rule, becoming extensively christianized, and missionary
activity was more important than military conquest in the early period (99, p .
1 0) . But how valid i s the argument that class i n Uganda-the key t o under
standing culture and social structure alike-is an extension of the class struc
ture of core society, deriving its dynamic from the larger imperial system?
"Structurally, the pattern of Third World development is remarkably
homogeneous . . . . In Third World nations, as in the West, the emergence of
class comes to dominate history" (99, p. 3) . The anthropologist, with field

experience and theoretical catholicity, is best suited to "treat African and
European experience alike in categories derived from world history" (99, p. 3).
Quoting Geertz to the effect that what one sees in the broad sweep of social
history one sees first in the narrow confines of country towns and peasant
villages (99, p. 3), does not dispel the suspicion that her subsequent analysis is
based on the reverse sequence.
It is good to have an account of how Africans were forced or cajoled into
labor, of their position in the world textile economy , of the creation of a chiefly
class modeled on the English rural squire , and of the way in which education
and religion were used in the process of colonial rule. The weakness is in
reading local history as an extension of European history and skimming lightly
over the specificities of local culture and social structure . The danger of
imposing preconceived and inappropriate categories is evident, and at least one
reviewer has complained that:
Her interest lies in the discovery of parallels and not the exhibition of differences. Through
out references are made to processes which are decontextualised; comparisons are easily
drawn between the development of the peasantry in Africa and Brazil, for example. Local
conditions are filtered out by the lens of a formal theory whose end product, interesting as it
is, lacks both local history and ethnography (6 1 , pp. 630-31).
This is critical for an analysis of class and class consciousness that is not always
easy to follow. "The state of no-classness that Hobsbawm sees as a precapitalist
societal condition is here viewed as a global, nonstate, colonial condition-that
of transnational capitalism . . . " (99, p. 1 1 ) . The meaning of these phrases
becomes no clearer as the book progresses; I read them as saying it is useless to
478 SMITH
look for class in Teso district itself, since classes emerge only at the level of
capitalism as a whole-"transnational capitalism ." The decision to call the
local situation "no-class ness" comes after a search for evidence of class conflict
or class consciousness. Africans do not follow the path laid out by the English
working class, because:

The making of the English working class in eighteenth-century England was, in a world
systemic' sense, the crystallization of consciousness among a labor aristocracy-the pri
vileged and protected English workers within an imperial system where colonial labor
provided the economic undcrclass. It is in contradistinction both to the ruling, exploiting
class above them and to the inferior, exploited class below them (most visibly the Irish) that
the English artisan and shopkeeper gained his sense of self' (99, p. 259).
One suspects she means the nineteenth century, but in any case the explanation
ignores the fact that exploited classes abound in Africa, as elsewhere; one can
always find surrogates for the Irish if that is what it takes to gain a sense of self.
Undue concentration on the world system obscures the significance of colonial
ism as a social formation with its own hegemonic ideology , capable of produc
ing such parodies of the colonial official as Idi Amin. The killing of chiefs who
organized forced labor, the absconding of potential forced recruits for the
army, and outbreaks of religious separatism with an "Ethiopian" content are
passed over lightly as evidence of nascent class consciousness that fails to
ripen. The Malaki sect is interpreted primarily in terms of the world historical
forces that it supposedly carries (99, p. 245).
Whereas Gough has to conclude that caste is a formidable force to be
overcome in India, Vincent largely ignores African cultural forms as irrelevant
to the wider issues of class formation.
Development and the Bureaucratic Elite

Awareness of the world economy, and of parallels with Europe , need not
distract from the local. In the 1 950s, Watson began a book on the Mambwe by
saying, "The process of industrialization now taking place in Northern
Rhodesia is in some ways similar to the industrial revolution in Europe" ( 1 05,
p . 1), but he ended,
The effects of industrialism and wage-labour on the Mambwe suggest that in the process of
social change, a society will always tend to adjust to new conditions through its existing
social institutions. These institutions will survive, but with new values, in a changed social
system (105, p. 228).
Watson was unusual in regarding African urbanization as a good thing , a view

shared by Keith Hart (5 1 ) . For Hart, the world economic context is important,
but "any solution to the dilemmas of economic backwardness requires the
mobilization of endogenous social forces; . . . an undue focus on overseas
SOCIAL CLASS 479
factors leads West Africans to gloss over the massive impediments to growth
that originate in local material and social conditions" (5 1, p. 2). No less
convinced than Gough or Vincent of the parallels between early European
capitalism and the political economy of today' s peripheral nations (51, p. 3), he
suggests that West African planners have more to learn from Adam Smith than
from most development specialists. But, more optimistic about the long-term
effects of industrial transformation, Hart believes that large-scale commercial
agriculture is the key to an effective transition, a belief closely related to his
view of class formation.
He describes a pattern of establishment and consolidation of state structures
across the diverse ecological zones of West Africa, leading to the colonial
regimes and their modem successors, within which classes form. Aware, like
Vincent, that a chiefly class was created by British administration, he is less
inclined to see it as merely parasitic. Providing an essential level of local
government, it produced the first educated members of the salariat, the domi
nant class in all colonial successor states. Rulers now face the problem of
extracting from a backward, almost wholly agricultural, economy resources

sufficient for the running of a modem regime. Precolonial, colonial, and
successor states all developed at the edge of an expanding world system of
economic relations, but problems originate in the internal discrepancies be
tween the activities of the state and the economic base on which it depends.
This is not just a matter of the bureaucrat's corrupt appropriation of income to
buy expensive cars and Swiss bank accounts; the modem state, no matter how
corrupt, must provide education, health services, working transportation sys
tems, water, electricity, sewage disposal, and other amenities of twentieth
century living . It may do all these things badly, judged by some standards; that
it does them at all is remarkable. Inequalities in income, power, and prospects
within any West African state pale into insignificance beside the gross inequali
ties of rich and poor countries in the modem world.
Thus Hart directs attention to the most neglected aspect of class studies in
peripheral nations; the political, economic, and ideological constitution of the
dominant class, a class that is rarely "capitalist." Similarly, instead of the usual
picture of an uprooted and demoralized rural proletariat, he shows that wage
workers remain embedded in domestic, kinship, or religious groups . His
theoretical position is not easily pinned down, even by himself. Influenced by
such diverse figures as Sir James Steuart [author of Principles of Political
Oeconomy ( 1767)]. Karl Marx, Max Weber, John Stuart Mill, Lenin, and Sir
Arthur Lewis, his analysis includes the world economy while avoiding hand
wringing despair, condemnation of Third World leaders, or romantic expecta
tion of a revolution that will solve all problems, and concentrating on the
dynamics of the local and the particular.
480 SMITH
Culture History and the Modern World System
In writing about the East African extension of Polanyi's "Great Transforma

tion" (78), Joan Vincent says, "This is not new within anthropology: the Puerto
Rico research project of the 1 950s and (especially) the work of Eric Wolf and
Sidney Mintz then and now was about this very thing" (99, p. 9).
The plantation areas of Latin America and the Caribbean should be high on
the agenda of those interested in European expansion and the formation of a
universal working class, for here peoples of diverse language, race, and culture
were brought together under the discipline of plantation organization and
forged into new societies with distinctive hierarchies. Three major approaches
have been taken to understanding them. The Puerto Rico study, directed by
Julian Steward (95), is an example of the first, as is Redfield's classic study of
Yucatan (8 1 ); using a holistic approach to the study of culture, internal
differences are explained by arranging "subcultures" along an evolutionary, or
at least a developmental, scale. The second approach has come to be known as
"pluralism." It isolates unit "cultures" within complex societies and analyzes
each one as though its relation to the whole were either unimportant or mediated
solely by force (62, 88; see 90 for criticism) . Finally, there are studies that,
fully aware of the penetration of world economic and political forces, stress the
importance of "creole" society and culture (see 1 6 for a persuasive view of
Jamaica; see also 26, 56, 89) . These various approaches are distinguished less
by their differential recognition of the "facts" than by their theoretical presup
positions. No informed scholar ignores "creole" forms, but the significance
accorded them by the theoretical scheme affects the use of class concepts.
The People ofPuerto Rico (95) contains five separate studies, held together
by a general theory set out in its first chapter. Culture is a functionally
integrated whole consisting of socially transmitted or learned ideas, habits, and
so forth, expressible as a unique configuration. 'Terms that are used cross
culturally, therefore, have only very loose meanings if fundamental distinc
tions in the stages or levels of any developmental continuum from tribal to
civilized societies are not made" (95, p. 5). The problem of comparing unique
cultures is solved by creating an evolutionary sequence; new cultural forms are
new levels of sociocultural adaptation to, and exploitation of, environments
(see 30 for discussion of this procedure) . Modern nations are internally differ
entiated into subcultural groups such as communities, occupational classes,
ethnic minorities and the like, which may be studied by ethnographic methods.
The analysis constantly strains against these Boasian ideas. Classes are a form
of "horizontal segmentation" replacing local segmentation such that "the indi
vidual lives more and more in the context of a socioeconomic class, which has
certain uniformities of behavior or culture , rather than as a member of a
distinctive community" (95, p. 6), yet "cultural lag" (95, p . 7) ensures that
SOCIAL CLASS 48 1
while "classes are sociocultural groups or segments arranged in an hierarchi

cal order. . . . the hierarchy functions principally in the locality (95 , p. 8) .
This fragmentation of the whole into segments produces odd results; com
munity culture can consist of local aspects of "formal" national institutions,
but some things, the family and social classes for example, are purely a local
matter--except for a national upper class treated as a separate sociocultural
segment.
Wolf studied San Jose, a coffec growing municipality, where the classes are
The Peasantry, Middle Farmers, Agricultural Workers, and Hacienda Owners,
based on the amount of land owned or worked, whether labor is employed or
not, lack of land and need to sell labor power, or possession of capital and
access to credit. He analyzes Puerto Rico's domination by different sovereign
powers, each imposing forces that reverberate down the social hierarchy. The
anthropologist sees these effects in the form of "subcultures exemplified in the
local community" (95 , p. 263). "Each major change within the local commun
ity corresponds to a major change within the island as a whole. . . . Each change
of sovereignty brought a major realignment of markets . . . each change thus

tended to call forth new cultural adaptations, based on . . . one crop rather than
another . . . As one adaptation was emphasized, others declined. Hence
changes in market demand have produced uneven changes in culture" (95, p.
263). Classes are emergent sociocultural segments most significant at a local
level, but as each crop is "imposed," it demands a new mode of sociocultural
adaptation. Thus the theory tends to squeeze out local influences in social
change.
Twenty-six years later Wolf's view of culture has contracted to accommo
date the enlarged position occupied by the forces of the world economy, but he
is not ready to dispense with it altogether ( 1 1 5, p. 425). The concept of culture
emerged when European nation states were engaged in political struggle for
dominance or a place in the sun. More appropriate to our times is "mode of
production," which consists in the forces that "guide" the alignments of social
relationships which constitute "society." 'To speak of a mode of production . . .
draws attention to the ways in which human beings confront their world in order
to modify it in their favor. . . . Each mode of production gives rise to a
characteristic conjunction of social groups and segments . . " (115, p. 368), a
.
definition which makes mode of p roduction very similar to "level of sociocultu

ral integration" used in the earlier work. "Once we locate the reality of society
in historically changing, imperfectly bounded, mUltiple and branching social
alignments . . . the concept of a fixed, unitary, and bounded culture must give
way to a sense of the fluidity and permeability of cultural sets. .. . 'A culture' is
thus better seen as a series of processes that construct, reconstruct, and
dismantle cultural materials, in response to identifiable determinants" ( 1 1 5 ,
p. 387).
\
482 SMITH
The evolutionary sequences are looser, but culture is not just a collection of
shreds and patches; those "identifiable detenninants" are crucial. The ability to
bestow meanings is the ability to name things, and that is a source of power.
"Control of communication allows the managers of ideology to lay down the
categories through which reality is to be perceived . Once things are named . . .

power is required to keep the meanings so generated in place . . . The
construction and maintenance of a body of ideological communications . . .
cannot be explained merely as the fonnal working out of an internal cultural
logic" ( 1 1 5, p. 388) . The element of truth in this statement should not obscure
its oversimplifications . Some ideologies come neither from the managers of
meaning nor from those consciously trying to usurp their place. "Sets of ideas
and particular group interests . . . do not exist in mechanical one-to-one
relationships. They fonn an 'ecology' of collective representations and the
construction of ideology takes place within a field of ideological options in
which groups delineate their positions in a complex process of selection among
alternatives" ( 1 1 5, p. 390) . This "ecology of collective representations" and
"field of ideological options" blurs, but does not change, the idea of detenni
nants, and allows precious little room for cultural creativity as is evident from
the final, summary, paragraph of the book.
It has been an argument of this book that we can no longer think of societies as isolated and
self-maintaining systems. Nor can we imagine cultures as integrated totalities in which each
part contributes to the maintenance of an organized, autonomous, and enduring whole. There
are only cultural sets of practices and ideas, put into play by determinate human actors under
determinate circumstances. In the course of action, these cultural sets are forever assembled,
dismantled, and reassembled, conveying in variable accents the divergent paths of groups
and classes. These paths do not find their explanation in the self-interested decisions of
interacting individuals. They grow out of the deployment of social labor, mobilized to
engage the world of nature. The manner of that mobilization sets the terms of history, and in
these terms the peoples who have asserted a privileged relation with history and the peoples to
whom history has been denied encounter a common destiny" (115, p. 390-91).
Ritual, Creole Culture and Class Consciousness

Gough, Vincent, and Wolf treat class , in varying ways, as hierarchical occupa
tional differentiation created within the world economic system. Before con
sidering anthropologists' treatment of ideology and class processes, let us take
a brief look at Ken Post's Arise Ye Starvelings (79), a book using a modified
Althtisserian reading of Marx (3, 4) to understand the social origins of the
Jamaica labor rebellion of 1 938. Relevant here is the analysis of "Ethiopian
ism," that is, ideas and doctrines about race, Africa, and the spiritual destiny of
black people, constituting an important part of the cognitive structures that,
along with economic and political structures , make up the Jamaican social
fonnation. The beliefs are carefully examined but are dropped into the struc-
SOCIAL CLASS 483
tural analysis without adequate consideration of the meaning of race in the

constitution of class . Post sees class as the fundamental expression of the
discontinuities and contradictions within a social formation, rooted in the
organization of economic practice, the economy being the dominant structure
around which all others take shape. Patterns of consciousness relate to class
actions that, while following regular patterns, may not relate to class interests
directly. "In the Jamaican context, the most significant form of disguise was the
reflection of perception and displacement of action onto racial issues" (79, p.
468) .
The problem for Post, and for this kind of analysis generally, is: why did
working class Jamaicans believe in such doctrines as the divinity and redeem
ing power of Haile Selassie instead of flocking to leaders with an explicit
socialist or communist view of the 1930s situation? The tentativeness of his
answer is seen in this sentence: "Determination of social perception and action
may follow regular patterns, but that does not imply determinism" (79, p. 468) .
It is followed by a discussion of the way in which unevenness of class formation
leads to a "variety of refractions and refocusings within each [class] and a range
of class consciousness from the most primitive 'common sense' and retreatist
ideology to militancy which was a little short of revolutionary theory-but with
the balance very much to the former" (79, p. 469). And if this were not enough,
then the clinching argument is that the backward agrarian capitalist class that,
along with colonial administrators, dominated the social formation had itself
failed to develop a proper class consciousness or practice, thus inhibiting the
pure expression of opposition by a working class.
Post's book is a major contribution to Caribbean political science, but
anthropology could provide a different perspective on ideology. Several studies
point the way. June Nash, studying tin miners in Bolivia (74), relates the
analysis of class formation to a description of community solidarity and the
ideological functions of ritual, while Michael Taussig compares Nash's mate
rial with data he collected among Afroamerican sugar workers in the Cauca
Valley of Southwestern Colombia (97) .
Nash worked with people of diverse Aymara and Quechua origin who now
tend to speak Spanish and behave according to the norms of "cholo" social
identity. They consider mine work modem and prestigious, likely to lead to
further social mobility, though Nash emphasizes this less than the adaptive
features of chola culture . "[Culture] is the generative base for adapting to
conditions as well as for transforming those conditions . . . . a tool for analyzing
processes of change rather than an ideology for confirming the status quo" (74,
p. 311) . This puts cultural content into the local segment of the world working
class, giving anthropological study special relevance for class analysis. Reduc
ing culture to adaptation diminishes that relevance . Why are these upwardly
mobile miners lacking in militancy? They are better informed on world affairs
484 SMITH
than American or European workers, and understand the exploitative nature of

capitalism and big power politics (74, Chap. 9).
Chola culture is an adaptive mode for adjusting to an industrial scene, but it does not provide
the basis for changing the scenario. The fluid social ties, the coca chewing, the stress on
commercialization are adjustive mechanisms to maintain humanity in inhuman working and
living conditions . . . . Instead of confronting the power structure that made the conditions of
exploitation, it [the old Indian culture] provided the myths that justified the polarized wealth
and cultivated a desire on the part of workers to become a part of that dominant group (74, pp.
3 1 8- 1 9) .
Even so, class consciousness develops because the mining community is a

"milieu in which cholos become conscious of their class position and identify
their frustrated mobility with a common understanding of their problems" (74,
p. 3 1 9). The world view of the miners manages to accommodate without stress
traditional religious figures such as Huary, Pachamama and the devil, along
with Christ, the Virgin Mary, Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung, in a determined
effort to resist and overcome alienation, a situation made possible because of
the "sense of self as members of a community" (74, p. 320).

Communal solidarity explains both resistance to the Barrientos regime and
inactivity. "The resistance to military repression by men and women of the
mining community came from these deep wells of cultural identity that gave
them a sense of worth and the will to survive when they recognized the
genocidal power of the Barrientos regime" (74, p. 3 1 8). It is both the locus of
an emergent class consciousness and the opiate of the people .
Taussig, in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (97), adds
new interpretive dimensions to the relation between class consciousness and
religious belief. His object is to unlock the secret meaning of relations in his
own capitalist society. "To the critic who can stand outside this mutually
confirming system of signs the money form of the world of the commodities is
the sign that conceals the social relations hidden in the abstractions that society
takes to be natural phenomena" (97 , p. 10). Where can one find such a vantage
point? Why, in South America of course. "Certain human realities become
clearer at the periphery of the capitalist system, making it easier for us to brush
aside the commoditized apprehension of reality" (97 , p. 1 0).
Unfortunately, the exercise brings no revelations; on the contrary, Taussig,
treading a well-worn path in the steps of many predecessors (notably Karl
Polanyi), would be quite unable to interpret his South American data in this
way without a prior knowledge of capitalism's commodity fetishism. The
novelty is the idea that "certain fantastic and magical reactions to our nonfan
tastic reality [are] . . . part of a critique of the modem mode of production" (97,
p. 1 0). The idea may have been implicit in some discussions of revitalization
movements, and even in Weber's slender hope for a charismatic outbreak
against the iron cage of commodities ( 1 07), but it has not-to my knowledge
received the kind of formalization it does here.
SOCIAL CLASS 485
Taussig claims no special gifts for his South American "peasants" (a curious
designation for tin miners and plantation workers); they follow precedents set
by all those in the history of Western thought who opposed usury, profiteering ,
and unjust exchange . Only people on the threshold of capitalist development
are able to develop interpretations that hit the nail on the head; the folk beliefs of
peasants, miners , seafarers , and artisans involved in the transition process
embody a perception of capitalism expressed in terms of a precapitalist idiom,
rooted in a more organic and humane way of life. The backward-looking
emphasis is clear; both Taussig and his informants (according to him) have a
positive view of peasant life. Referring to the sugar workers of the Cauca
Valley as "displaced peasants" may strengthen the argument that they are
precapitalist, but it obscures the complexity of their social position, first as
slaves, then as part-time workers , cultivators of cash crops, and traders.
Beliefs are analyzed concerning the use of supernatural power to gain
money; either by entering into a contract with the devil directly or by substitut
ing money for the infant at a baptism, thus selling the child's soul for money
capable of reproducing itself. The wealth so gained is believed to be barren;

crops or progeny from land or livestock bought with it will wither and die. The
person making the contract will die prematurely and in pain. The Bolivian tin
miners , referred to as "displaced Indian peasants" rather than upwardly mobile
aspirants for middle class status, also have developed rituals of sacrifice to the
devil who is the true owner of the mine; they do this to maintain production, to
find rich ore-bearing veins, and to reduce accidents. This capsule description of
the beliefs does considerable violence to the richness of the data and the
subtlety of the interpretation, but it will have to suffice .
How are these beliefs to be explained? Interpretations based on the anxiety
thesis, following Tylor, Frazer, Malinowski, and others, are dismissed. The
particular beliefs must bc cxplained. Are the beliefs part of an egalitarian ethic
that attributes antisocial meaning to people who do well? Plausible, but it does
not explain the specificity of the beliefs nor the absence of such actions (or
assumed actions) in the peasant mode of production; "these rites refer to the
global political-economic relationship of contested social classes and to the
character and meaning of work" (97, p. 1 6) . Functionalist explanations are
insufficient because they attribute a bourgeois way of thinking to the peasant,
reducing the complexity of real life to one relationship of utility. The beliefs
evolve from conflicts in meaning as the culture organizes new experiences into
a creative vision. They are "poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the
innermost course of the world. Magic takes language, symbols , and intelligibil
ity to their outermost limits, to explore life and thereby to change its destina
tion" (97, p. 1 5). Marx' s Hegelian , rather than positivist, influence is apparent.
The argument of these sections does not prepare one for material on the
history of the Cauca Valley and its relation to national economic and political
life. New light is thrown on the position of the blacks, dispelling the notion of
486 SMITH
their being "peasants ." The struggle between ex-slaves and planters in the
Cauca Valley resembles that found in the West Indies . Moving off the planta
tions they developed, on free land, what is questionably termed a "peasant
mode of production. " African beliefs were fashioned into new forms , often
with the outward appearance of Catholic doctrine. Ramon Mercado, Liberal

Party governor of the state from 1850-1852, thought it was "Christianity in its
true sense that was astir among the oppressed classes as a result of their
condition and the authorities' abuse of doctrine" (97, p. 46) . The rest of the
nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth, have seen bitter struggles
between the Liberals and the Conservatives, with the Liberals articulating an
ideology that is part utilitarian individualism and part Catholic precapitalist
romanticism. Taussig interprets these struggles in a peculiar way.
Rather than blindly follow a mystifying ideology imposed on them by an elite or be forced
into struggle without moral conviction. they [the peasants] forced the elite to respond to a
peasant anarchism fired by a hatred of landlords and fanned by millenarian dreams. Heroical
ly stimulated but forever crippled by vagueness of doctrine . this is the social basis that largely
accounts for the bewildering tumult of caudillo realpolitik . . . . That the peasantry could not
constitute itself as a class for itself, although it came close. does not justify theories that
exclude class conflict and class alignments (97. p. 61).
The Liberal Party , led by members of the "lower stratum of the upper class,"
clearly was the vehicle for black lower class political aspirations, borne along
on an ideology combining communist and Catholic doctrine even then . In view
of this well-documented history of conscious ideology formulation by an
intelligentsia, it is difficult to understand why Taussig concentrates upon
certain folk beliefs in order to extract a hidden critique of "capitalism." He
seems to have tilted toward anthropological idealism.
Structure and Process in Class Formation

In discussing chola culture, Nash brings out some important elements in the
structuring of class consciousness and its subtle interweaving with racial and
kinship concepts. For example, "Within the same family, sisters will often
have different styles of dress and identify with an entirely different segment of
the national culture because of educational differences. Children of the same
parents may be labeled differently on their birth certificates as 'blanco, '
'mestizo,' or even ' indio' " (74, p . 3 1 2).
The interpenetration of class and kinship is always noted by class theorists
but rarely receives the attention given by such authors as Tocqueville (25) or
Weber ( l 08) [there are exceptions: Warner ( 1 0 1 , 1 02) and Geertz (40) , for
example] . Even the poorest states are expected to provide educational and
mobility opportunities these days , but we no longer believe that this destroys
kinship, race, and ethnic distinctions . A growing literature clarifies the relation
between kinship, class, and economic development in Europe-Goody (47)
SOCIAL CLASS 487
and Macfarlane (67) are two recent examples. Martinez-Alier's analysis of

kinship, class, and race in nineteenth century Cuba (69) shows how racial
ideology reinforced class structure as it was woven into the most intimate
details of family life, and her more recent work extends and deepens the
understanding of women, labor systems, and kinship (93, 94) . Kinship can be
mobilized for economic success, as is shown by the study of an upper class
Mexican industrialist family (66) . Other work in Latin America and the
Caribbean, especially Jamaica, Colonial New Mexico, and Peru, shows the ties
between hierarchy, economic activity, and the cultural aspects of kinship (2,
50, 9 1 , 1 1 2).
The relation between the cultural domains of class, race, education, and
kinship are discussed by Austin in a paper (8) anticipating a longer study to be
publis.hed early in 1984 (9), as she examines how concepts embedded in the
"vocabulary of class" are woven into, and derive their meaning from, social
practice. The point of departure is Bloch's attempt to break out of the impasse
created by theories asserting the social determination of ideas ( 14) . Bloch's
discussion of practical reason and ritual cognition need not detain us; Austin's
argument that "symbolic legitimation can be a dimension of thought even in
areas of practical activity" (8 , p. 499) is unassailable, having been noted in
many different contexts since Marx's discussion of the way in which capitalism
comes to seem natural to all those involved in it (see 1 8 for a fuller discussion) .
Research in Jamaica shows
that various ideas, encoded in a restricted terminology, can be used to represent Jamaican
class relations as a natural and timeless state of affairs. This conservative ideology encom
passes practical activity, and influences the apprehension of class relations even among
workers well aware of their dispossessed position (8, p. 499) .
The paper outlines: concepts of race accepted by all Jamaicans, even at the
moment of protest against conclusions drawn from them; the way in which
education came to signify transformation from savage to civilized; and the way
in which the contrast of "inside" and "outside" reverberates through all the
domains of culture to imply hierarchy-being born inside as opposed to outside
wedlock, having an inside job as opposed to an outside one, living in a house
with inside bathing, washing, and toilet facilities . These mundane distinctions
are relational, not absolute markers of group status, and they are all-pervasive
in everyday life. In terms of these symbolic meanings the working class, whose
members "perform subordinate and inferior roles , . . . nevertheless have a
natural relation with the middle class through kinship. The ideology thus
suggests that political subordination for the working class is a morally accept
able state because ultimately there is a natural relation of superior to inferior
between middle class and working class" (8, p. 509). Social institutions are
suffused with relations of "dependency," economic, political, cultural, con-
488 SMITH
gruent With the major premises of the ideology; "a worker's most common
claim is not that he is exploited, but that he is 'not recognised' and not 'helped'
by those in power" (8, p. 5 1 1 ) .
Austin's data, though not addressing the issue directly, suggest that
"Ethiopianism ," neither persistence of tradition nor compensation, is a rhetor

ical language of protest that makes sense only within the discourse of a society
whose dominant ideology is built on premises of racial difference. Lower class
Jamaicans who assert the divinity of Hai1e Selassie are (or were before Rastafa
rian symbols were appropriated by dominating ideologies) explicit in their
rejection of participation in Jamaican political life , because they understand the
position within that order of poor, uneducated, black people . Striving for
mobility into the middle class involves acceptance of a system in which
symbolic blackness has to be converted into cultural whiteness , a process akin
to what has been described as "sanskritization" in India [see ( 1 3) for a discus
sion of the interweaving of caste and class in India, and (56, 58) for Guyana] .
In papers (20-23) anticipatirig a forthcoming monograph, Culture and
Class: an African Peasantry in Transformation (in preparation) , John Com

aroff also explores the relation between generative structures and social prac
tice in the development of modem Tshidi class society. Individualism often has
been noted in African social life (5 1 , 99), but Comaroff (discussing the
Barolong boo Ratshidi, a gro�p of Tswana peoples residing in modem Bots
wana) makes utilitarian individualism a key aspect of traditional social orga
nization and ideology alike; one of a pair of forces "dialectically" determining
the configuration of social arrangements at any given time. Noting a resem
blance to Leach's model of the oscillation between egalitarian and aristocratic
social fonns iIi Bunna (63), Comaroff argues that the transfonnational potential
of the structure cannot be contained within a two-system model, and certainly
not within one that ignores the impact of exogenous forces such as the world
system. Labels such as Large Farmer, Middle-range Farmer, Small Farmer, or
Non-farming Labourer are applied by natives and observers alike, "But each of
these categories exists-and has come to be constituted-by virtue of its
relations to the others in a historical movement; a movement, it is to be stressed,
which is incomplete and will in due course transform the categories themselves
as its logic is worked through" (20, p. 1 00) . Before considering the way in
which he combines this structural analysis with a phenomenological emphasis
derived from his earlier "transactional" phase, it is necessary to say a few words
about the Barolong economic system.
Before the 1 960s, the backwardness of Barolong agriculture was linked to its
involvement in the South African labor market, government intervention in
agriculture , and so on, but external forces also launched the campaign to
increase productivity of peasant agriculture , "and to encourage the emergence
of a peripheral agrarian capitalism" (23, p. 1 64) . An extension service was
SOCIAL CLASS 489
established, new marketing outlets provided, and a mill was built. Agrarian
capitalism flourished as a native utilitarian individualism was liberated from the
constraints of community obligation; an efflorescence of one structural poten·
tial. A nascent class of capitalist farmers detached themselves from reciprocal
obligations and paid for the labor of marginal farmers. Good seasons and low
wages led to capital accumulation , permitting the purchase of more machinery;
more land had to be acquired to keep it fully occupied, and so the process
spiraled upward . The wealthy consolidated their position by well-known
methods, from sharecropping to the fraudulent use of politics to dispossess
small farmers. "A new formation, which reconstituted the social field and
political economy of Barolong along class lines, was in process" (23 , p. 1 67).
Comaroff's description of this "peasant·capitalist" formation is straightfor
ward enough, could be paralleled in many parts of the world, and described
conventionally. Indeed it could be phrased in "modernization" terms as a
transition from particularism/ascription to universalism/achievement values
(77) . The difference is the analysis of its origin in the historical conjuncture of
exogenous forces and the internal logic of the Barolong sociocultural formation
(assuming the accuracy of his discovery of utilitarian individualism as a
dimension of traditional culture) . Unlike Hart, he does not provide a compre
hensive account of regional political and economic forces within which Baro·
long transformations occurred , but he discusses in more detail the theoretical
assumptions which underly his view of the indigenous system and the way in
which that system interacts with outside forces. World historical forces are not
ignored, but he pursues a "complementary agenda" by analyzing the structure
in place (20, p. 86, fn. 2) .
The local structures of traditional Barolong included a sociocultural domain
and a political economy similarly structured. The constitution of the sociocultu·
ral order configured both social practice and individual experience. Or to put it
another way, centralization and individuation, political economy and
sociocultural order are dimensions of a single dialectical system. This
was founded upon constitutive principles which expressed themselves as prescriptive cate
gorical oppositions at the cultural level, as contradictions at the structural level, as irreconcil
able demands at the level of experience, and as positive if conflicting values at the level of
intentional activity. As this suggests, its construction established the meaningful terms of
social practice, just as it articulated individual experience and the structural order; and
practice in turn, realized surface social, productive and political arrangements, arrangements
which might vary widely over time and space (23, p. \59).
The Tshidi universe (not clearly demarcated) was "manifestly contradictory. . . .

On one hand, it was apprehended as a structured order of relations regulated
by mekgwa Ie melao ('law and custom'). Yet , on the other, it was explicitly
viewed as individualistic , enigmatic and utilitarian in c haracter" (23, p. 1 50) .
Elsewhere he argues that any "encompassing system" exists both as "a constitu-
490 SMITH
tive order; that is, . . . a set of related principles which give fonn to the
socio-cultural universe" and as a "lived-in, everyday context which represents
itself to individuals and groups in a repertoire of values and contradictions,
rules and relationships, interests and ideologies" (21 , p. 33).
Oscillation between the potentialities of the system could be affected by

many factors, both natural and social, local and more general. Some communi
ties were hierarchical and others egalitarian, "contrasting historical realizations
of dialectical systems with a complex internal logic," although "ideologies of
egalitarian individualism and hierarchical centralization could co-exist. Both
were false--or, more accurately, partial---:-representations of the manner in
which the system configured the lived-in universe and the social experience
within it" (23 , pp. 159-60). Either one could appear as an hegemonic official
ideology at a particular time.
The rapid development of a class-structured "peasant-capitalist" social
formation results from a conjunction of: (a) accelerating external pressures to
improve farming, and (b) the fortuitous swing of the internal oscillation toward
the individualistic and utilitarian elements in the indigenous system. Each

reinforced the other to produce a genuine restructuring of the social fonnation
as a whole.
Whatever the accuracy or adequacy of Comaroff's analysis it attempts to
reconcile macro- and micro-analysis , historical and ethnographic research . A
number of problems are left untouched. The economic miracle of Barolong
agricultural development appears to have run'its course. Yields are in decline.
Is this a function of the general inefficiency of large-scale, as opposed to
peasant, agriculture? Does it result from another oscillation within the tradi
tional system? Or has it to do with the forces of the world system mediated
through neighboring South Africa? No doubt these issues will be more fully
addressed in the longer study.
CONCLUSION
Class is an appropriate concept for anthropological analysis and, in some

circumstances, an indispensable one . The problems surrounding its use are
those of theoretical specification. One can solve them by relying upon what
Geertz optimistically calls an ethnographic sensibility, taking comfort in the
fact that "the problematic relationship between rubrics emerging from one
culture and practices met in another-has been recognized as neither avoidable
nor fatal in connection with 'religion,' 'family,' 'government, ' 'art, ' or even
' science' " (42, p. 1 68) , refining one's interpretive understanding by "hopping
back and forth," or, in a modified metaphor, "tacking between" whatever
points of view are involved (4 1 , 42, p. 1 5) . The widening of focus to include
the structured dispositions of a world system of economic and political relations
SOCIAL CLASS 49 1
is neither new, avoidable, nor fatal; that it provides the key to understanding
local structures is not demonstrated. The theoretical concept of class embedded
in Marx' s study of capitalism cannot easily be detached from his model of
complete transformation effected by concentration of capital through expropri
ation of capitalists, and the disciplining of an ever-growing, international

working class, "united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of
capitalist production itself' (70, p. 837) . This needs considerable revision
before it can be applied to the modem world; that much is generally agreed . It
also seems that "revision" will be interpreted by some as the search for more
accurate assignment of social formations to existing categories: is this system
feudal? is that one based on an Asiatic mode of production? are these peasants
or are they a rural proletariat? This is another form of positivist butterfly
collecting (See Leach 64 , pp. 2-3 ) .
The most promising development i s t o define a special place for anthropolo
gy in the study of class, a place in which ideological or cultural processes are
salient, and in which the particularity of "component imperialisms" or "local
knowledge" [to be even-handed between Gough (48 , p. 1 37) and Geertz (42)] ,
is accorded proper attention. Programmatic statements such as those of Bloch
( 1 4) and Asad (6) consider the pertinent issues, but few studies yet achieve
Bourdieu' s transition "From the mechanics of the model to the dialectic of
strategy," a move that requires analysis to construct the
generative principle [of practices) by situating itself within the very movement of their
accomplishment, [thus making) possible a science of the dialectical relations between the
objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge [such as structuralism) gives
access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which
tend to reproduce them ( 1 5 , p. 3).
Sahlins' s recent work (84 , 85) shows the difficulty of setting structures in
historical motion and integrating them with an adequate theory of "interests,"
or "structured dispositions," through a detailed examination of practices in the
moment of conjuncture. Fine-grained analyses of class formation in the modem
world have not reached the necessary degree of ethnographic specificity, but
there is nowhere else for anthropology to go unless it is to become sloppy (or
even good) economic history, or a monotonous recitation of the by now all too
obvious fact of the importance of the world system.
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Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1984.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE

Is "class" an appropriate concept for anthropological analysis? Toward the end

EARLY ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF CLASS

Social Stratification and Social Class

The idea of "social mobility" embodies a belief in the constant movement of

classless United States. Warner followed a tradition of community culture

constantly thwarted by democratic process. The middle class , individualistic

to material comfort and wealth . Finally, there is a degraded, decultured ,

Comparative Social Stratification

measuring status intervals--drawing a picture of the ladder of success-is

Such variation notwithstanding, he concludes that "all systems of birth­

stratification must encompass them" ( 1 1 , p. 388); race relations in the United

CLASS AND THE PERIPHERY OF THE WORLD SYSTEM

by an anthropologist, according to Hobsbawm (53, pp. 1 1 81-82). He referred

It was recognized that foreign influences were mediated by the cultures

Culture, Structure, and Class

components? What process are we addressing?" (99, p. 8). To answer, as she

Capitalism, Imperialism, and Class

envisioning a vanguard element leading a misguided proletariat to revolution­

craft specializations. For each phase of development-the Chola kingdom of

Africa is the classical locus of structural functional anthropology, of lineage

An attempt to apply anthropological techniques to the study of urban and

European ethnography" (99, p. 7), and Teso, a district of modem Uganda

Cotton cultivation was introduced following the disruption of supplies to

class comes to dominate history" (99, p. 3) . The anthropologist, with field

working class, because:

Development and the Bureaucratic Elite

Watson was unusual in regarding African urbanization as a good thing , a view

extracting from a backward, almost wholly agricultural, economy resources

Culture History and the Modern World System

In writing about the East African extension of Polanyi's "Great Transforma­

while "classes are sociocultural groups or segments arranged in an hierarchi­

of sovereignty brought a major realignment of markets . . . each change thus

definition which makes mode of p roduction very similar to "level of sociocultu­

categories through which reality is to be perceived . Once things are named . . .

Ritual, Creole Culture and Class Consciousness

tural analysis without adequate consideration of the meaning of race in the

than American or European workers, and understand the exploitative nature of

Even so, class consciousness develops because the mining community is a

the "sense of self as members of a community" (74, p. 320).

capable of reproducing itself. The wealth so gained is believed to be barren;

with the outward appearance of Catholic doctrine. Ramon Mercado, Liberal

Structure and Process in Class Formation

and Macfarlane (67) are two recent examples. Martinez-Alier's analysis of

"Ethiopianism ," neither persistence of tradition nor compensation, is a rhetor­

Class: an African Peasantry in Transformation (in preparation) , John Com­

The Tshidi universe (not clearly demarcated) was "manifestly contradictory. . . .

Oscillation between the potentialities of the system could be affected by

the individualistic and utilitarian elements in the indigenous system. Each

Class is an appropriate concept for anthropological analysis and, in some

ation of capitalists, and the disciplining of an ever-growing, international

Families in Chicago . New York: Holt, tinuum: A theory of intersystems. Man

ton, Jamaica: The Culture and Class Scientific. Chicago: Kerr

in the present . Man (NS) 1 2:278-92 Cambridge Univ. Press

bridge Univ. Press Cambridge Univ. Press

Early History of the Sandwich Islands Calif. Press

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Such variation notwithstanding, he concludes that "all systems of birth

envisioning a vanguard element leading a misguided proletariat to revolution

In writing about the East African extension of Polanyi's "Great Transforma

while "classes are sociocultural groups or segments arranged in an hierarchi

definition which makes mode of p roduction very similar to "level of sociocultu

"Ethiopianism ," neither persistence of tradition nor compensation, is a rhetor

Class: an African Peasantry in Transformation (in preparation) , John Com