Societies, Class

The word class comes to us from the Latin classis, which referred to the division of Romans according to property. It takes on its modern sense in English from the late 18th century, when the profound sociopolitical upheavals associated with the French and Industrial Revolutions redrew the social map of Europe. Prior to this time “rank,”“estate,” and “order” were more commonly used to speak of the exploitative self-differentiation of society into functionally interrelated and hierarchically organized sociocultural groupings. Subsequently, most of these meanings were subsumed within “class,” though precisely with the difference that the term no longer automatically connoted a natural or divinely ordained social layering.

Given this volatile history, it is no surprise that there has been little consensus on the definition or even existence of classes. Indeed, it has been argued that class is so hard to define because the meaning of the concept is itself a stake in class struggles. Naturally, many would disagree (perhaps thereby proving the original point).

These conceptual tensions are in play in the anthropology of class and class societies, along with an additional problem. The word, together with its contested meanings, carries the birthmarks of the European sociocultural realm from which it sprang. How then are anthropologists to treat the question of class?

Three basic options may be mentioned. Class can be quietly set aside as insignificant for anthropology on the grounds that the comparatively economically undifferentiated societies traditionally studied by ethnographers are not class societies. Alternatively, class can be employed, but within a restricted compass. Finally, the concept can be wrestled into a new form in the attempt to make it adequate for various kinds of non-Western societies.

The principal social scientific approaches to class have come out of political economy, sociology, and above all, Marxism. For Karl Marx (1818–1883), to speak of classes was to speak of distinct groups of people defined by their ownership and control over productive property or by their lack of it. Class division was the defining aspect of any complex social order and the ruling ideas the ideas of the ruling class.

Neither this, nor any other conception of class, has been central to the main current of anthropological thought. Where appeal has been required to kindred phenomena, categories like stratification, status group, and hierarchy coming out of the Weberian tradition have often been found more serviceable. It is a moot point, however, whether this has been a matter of choosing concepts most appropriate to non-Western societies, as thinkers like Louis Dumont (1911–1998) have argued, or of ignoring class, as Talal Asad has charged.

The point proved especially moot from the mid-1960s on, as increasing political militancy both at home and in the newly postcolonial countries radicalized many anthropologists. Their discipline, some came to think, had historically made class politics disappear behind dubious assumptions about order and consent in traditional non-Western societies.

The evolutionary model of 19th-century anthropology, and the work of Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) [Page 2100]in particular, had an ambiguous effect in this regard. To the one side, it furnished arguments accounting for the historical emergence of property-owning classes. To the other, it suggested that the most primordial societies would be classless. The latter was a logical if not an empirical requirement of the model, since class is a social differentiation, and by definition the undifferentiated ultimately predates that which is differentiated. With this supposition in hand, “survivals” of classlessness could be freely discerned in existing “primitive” societies.

Source: © iStockphoto/Diane Diederich.

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