Recent middle class studies. Historical and ethnographic contributions for a renewed research agenda

##plugins.themes.bootstrap3.article.main##

##plugins.themes.bootstrap3.article.sidebar##

Publiée 27-03-2023
Sergio Eduardo Visacovsky

Résumé

This text presents the dossier Middle classes: recent historical and ethnographic contributions. The aim of this dossier is to present the renewed path taken by studies on the middle class carried out in the last twenty-five years. A significant part of this research is mainly (but not exclusively) historical and ethnographic and differs from pre-existing studies in its focus on the middle class and the questions it raises. What has characterized this field of studies is less the unified character of its theoretical-analytic perspective and more an agenda based on problems that the usual approaches have not been able to solve or even formulated. Basically, several aspects that had been taken for granted until then were problematized: the “given” character of the middle class; its universalism; the supposed correlation between objective conditions and ways of thinking and acting; and underestimation of internal heterogeneity. Instead, these studies addressed the processes of historical formation of the middle classes, the specificities of national contexts, and the diverse practices of identification and delimitation in everyday life. After the texts by David S. Parker and Mark Liechty in the Fundamentals section, the issue features contributions by Moises Kopper, Leela Fernandes, and Anna Jefferson and Charlotte Perez. The number also includes contributions by Marco Maureira-Velásquez y Diego González-García, Kristina Grünenberg and Anja Simonsen, and Pablo Francescutti in the research articles section, and by Luis Enrique Alonso and Carlos J. Fernández Rodríguez, and Ana Grondona in the Inherited Identity section. The issue also gathers, in the critical papers section, three contributions regarding middle classes (by Lucía Gandolfi Ottavianelli, Markus Shall Enk and María Florencia Blanco Esmoris) and two additionals by Ramón Ramos Torre, and María Martínez.

Abstract 251 | texto (Español) Downloads 559

##plugins.themes.bootstrap3.article.details##

References
Adamovsky, E. (2009). Historia de la clase media argentina: apogeo y decadencia de una ilusión, 1919-2003. Buenos Aires: Planeta.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Banerjee, A. V., & Duflo, E. (2008). What is middle class about the middle classes around the world? Journal of economic perspectives, 22(2), 3-28.
Barbosa Cruz, M., López-Pedreros, A. R., & Stern, C. (Eds.) (2022). The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices, and Genealogies. New York & London: Taylor & Francis.
Barr-Melej, P. (2002). Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). La distinción. Criterio y bases sociales del gusto. Madrid: Taurus.
Candina Polomer, A. S. (2013). La frágil clase media: estudios sobre grupos medios en Chile contemporáneo. Santiago de Chile: Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile.
Donner, H. (2017). The anthropology of the middle class across the globe. Anthropology of this Century, 18(1).
Dunlop, J., Harbison, F. Kerk, C., & Myers, Ch. (1967). El industrialismo y el hombre industrial: los problemas del trabajo y la dirección en el desarrollo económico. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.
Gobo, G. (1995). “Class” as Metaphor on the Unreflexive Transformation of a Concept into an Object. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 25, 442-467.
Fernandes, L. (2006). India’s new Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Freeman, C. (2015). Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Furbank, P. N. (2005). Un placer inconfesable o la idea de clase social. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Giddens, A. (1997). La estructura de clases en las sociedades avanzadas. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
Heiman, R. (2015). Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
Kocka, J. (1995). The middle classes in Europe. The Journal of Modern History, 67(4), 783-806.
Kopper, M. (2022). Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil’s Public Housing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lamont, M., & Molnar, V. (2002). The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 167-195.
Liechty, M. (2002). Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society. Princenton: Princeton University Press.
Lipset, S., & Bendix, R. (Eds.) (1963). Movilidad social en las sociedades industriales. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.
López-Pedreros, R., & Weinstein, B. (Eds.) (2012). The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. Durham: Duke University Press.
López-Pedreros, A. R. (2019). Makers of Democracy: a Rransnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press.
O’Dougherty, M. (2002). Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.
Owensby, B. P. (1999). Intimate ironies: Modernity and the making of middle-class lives in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mayer, K. (1963). The changing shape of the American class structure. Social Research, 30, 458-468.
Newman, K. S. (1988). Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: Collier Macmillan.
Parker, D. S. (1998). The Idea of the Middle Class: White-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900-1950. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Parker, D. S., & Walker, L. E. (Eds.) (2013). Latin America’s Middle Class: Unsettled Debates and New Histories. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Parsons, T. (1940). An analytical approach to the theory of social stratification. American Journal of Sociology, 45, 841-862.
Schielke, S. (2015). Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Stern, C. (2021). Entre el cielo y el suelo: Las identidades elásticas de las clases medias. Santiago de Chile, 1932-1962. Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores.
Thompson, E. P. (1989). La formación de la clase obrera en Inglaterra. Barcelona: Crítica.
Visacovsky, S. E. (2012). Experiencias de descenso social: percepción de fronteras sociales e identidad de clase media en la Argentina post-crisis. Pensamiento iberoamericano, 10, 133-168.
Visacovsky, S. E. (2014). Inmigración, virtudes genealógicas y los relatos de origen de la clase media argentina. En E. Adamovsky, S. E. Visacovsky & P. B. Vargas (Eds.), Clases medias. Nuevos enfoques desde la sociología, la historia y la antropología (pp. 213-239). Buenos Aires: Ariel.
Visacovsky, S. E. (2022). A middle class country. Social mobility, progress and genealogical origins in public discourse in Argentina (2002-2015). En M. Barbosa, R. López-Pedreros & C. Stern (Eds.), The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices and Genealogies (pp. 313-330). New York: Routledge.
Visacovsky, S. E., & Garguin, E. (2009). Introducción. En S. E. Visacovsky & E. Garguin (Eds.), Moralidades, economías e identidades de clase media. Estudios históricos y etnográficos (pp. 11-59). Buenos Aires: Antropofagia.
Visacovsky, S. E., & Garguin, E. (2020). Argentina y sus clases medias. Panoramas de la investigación empírica en ciencias sociales. Buenos Aires: Biblos.
Weber, M. (2002 [1922]). Economía y Sociedad. Esbozo de sociología comprensiva. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Weiss, H. (2019). We have Never been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads us. London & New York: Verso Books.
Wright, E. O. (2018). Comprender las clases sociales. Madrid: Ediciones Akal.
Wright Mills, Ch. (1951). White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zhang, L. (2010). In search of paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. New York: Cornell University Press.
Rubrique
Presentación