A study of class and inequality from an anthropological perspective, bringing together an international team of researchers.

"Explains brilliantly the structures and processes of middle-class culture in historical perspective."--Robert Nye, Rutgers University " This] illuminating study of the Swedish middle class around the turn of the century . . . is one welcome sign that bourgeois, too, are once again recognized as parts of society worth studying . . . to be understood rather than to be savaged. Culture Builders is a welcome sign of yet another development: the ease with which historical studies may be integrated with neighboring disciplines."--Journal of Modern History "The authors take an impressively broad intellectual perspective. . . . The everyday routines of bourgeoisie, peasantry, and working class are dramatically portrayed through a skillful weaving together of excerpts from ethnological archives, schoolbooks, memoirs, novels, and etiquette manuals . . . provides insight into the sociocultural complexities, conflicts, and contradictions that are ignored in widely held national stereotypes."--American Anthropologist "Unites historical and ethnological approaches so as to present a way of life that will be of interest not only to scholars of Scandinavia but to historians, sociologists, and everyone trying to describe and interpret the bourgeois Western culture during the nineteenth century."--Ethnos Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lofgren teach in the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Lund, Sweden.

Despite international congresses and international journals, anthropologies of education differ significantly around the world. Linguistic barriers constrain the flow of ideas, which results in a vast amount of research on educational anthropology that is not published in English or is difficult for international readers to find. This volume responds to the call to attend to educational research outside the United States and to break out of “metropolitan provincialism.” A guide to the anthropologies and ethnographies of learning and schooling published in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Slavic languages, Japanese, and English as a second language, show how scholars in Latin America, Japan, and elsewhere adapt European, American, and other approaches to create new traditions. As the contributors show, educators draw on different foundational research and different theoretical discussions. Thus, this global survey raises new questions and casts a new light on what has become a too-familiar discipline in the United States.

In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.

"A book about theory and method in the humanities and social sciences. It reacts to what has become known as the "cultural turn," a shift toward semiotics, discourse, and representations and away from other sorts of determinations that started in the early 1980s and that has dominated social thinking for a long string of years. The book is based in a reconsideration of the meeting of two disciplines that helped to launch the cultural turn: anthropology and history. Specifically, it criticizes the ideas of hermeneutics and "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) that have come to play a key role in the encounter of anthropology and history and then in the cultural turn. It led to the renewed cherishing of what Gupta and Ferguson have called paradigms of "peoples and places," saturated pictures of universes, both small and large, of meaning ina more of less frozen standstill-an intellectual precursor to the cultural xenophobia of our times. Against this, the present book embraces praxis and "critical junctions": the connections in space (in and out of a relations of power and dependency, and what Eric Wolf has called the "interstitial relations" between apparently separate institutional domains. In this way the book adds to the current revival of institutionally based "global ethnography," which studies "up and outward" (the journal of Ethnography is a good example)."--Preface

Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of the Globalization presents an anthropological perspective on the various strains and disruptions caused by modern global systems.