Aztlan for the Middle Class

This anthropological chapter analyses how members of the Namibian middle class have thoroughly changed the form and meaning of important rites of passage from open ceremonies to exclusive pathways into and for the middle class. The term ‘middle class’ is used as an analytical category to describe social differentiation and inequality. The author also looks at practices of ‘being and becoming middle class’, blending approaches that perceive ‘middle class’ as an aspirational category with those that focus on boundary making aspects of ‘middle class(es)’. In addition, the term elite is used to mark social differentiations that depend on context and scale. During apartheid, only a small indigenous elite existed within the artificial ‘homelands’, while a ‘white’ minority occupied national elite and middle-class positions. With independence in 1990, a new, ‘black’ middle class emerged in urban areas, which is still strongly connected to its rural ‘homeland’. The author suggests labelling this group as ‘class commuters’. When visiting their rural ‘homelands’, they blend into the local rural elite. But during most of their time, they are part of the urban Namibian middle classes.

The plight of the “middle class” has been a constant theme in political discourse and business press during the turn of the 20th century. Some argue that the “middle class” has been shrinking, while others contend that it is sinking or losing its ability to maintain its lifestyle. Those in the first camp see the “middle class” as a malleable cohort that can expand/contract in size over time, while those in the second group seem to define the “middle class” as a constant cohort whose income, wealth and consumption patterns vary over time. This lack of a consistent, objective and implementable definition of the “middle class” adds ambiguity to the controversy around this important segment of our society. In this study, we propose a metric for socioeconomic stratification, based on the theoretical concept of Permanent Income, which we use to classify households into the upper, middle and lower socioeconomic classes, using data from the Survey of Consumer Expenditures (CEX), gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 1982 and 2010. Our analysis of the three major socioeconomic strata in America over the past three decades produces interesting and valuable insights into how the different strata in our society fared in the last three decades. First, we find that, despite the current debate on the plight of the “middle class” in America, households in the two middle quartiles of our society have seen some improvement in income, wealth and consumption, albeit not in the same extent as the upper quartile. Our empirical results show that the one stratum clearly left behind in the past three decades is the lower quartile, which did not see any significant improvements in income or wealth, and in fact saw a decline in their consumption budgets.We find that the most visible shifts in the past three decades were observed on consumption, particularly on the consumption of positional (conspicuously consumed non-essential) goods and services, where the gap between the upper, middle and lower quartiles of Permanent Income have grown more dramatically. We see these discrepancies as a major source of discontent by the “middle class,” for two main reasons. First discrepancies in consumption are more visible than discrepancies in income or wealth. Second, discrepancies in the consumption of positional goods are exacerbated by their signaling value, which results into welfare gaps not only on the direct utility of consumption but also in terms of positional losses.

Objective: This study aims to conduct a brief literature review on post-COVID-19 complications in obese patients.Design: A literature review based on a narrative synthesis.Data Sources: The databases consulted include Science Direct, Scopus, Scielo, Google Scholar, and PubMed.Study Selection: Multiple articles were selected, applying inclusion criteria focused on post-COVID-19 complications in obese patients, with publications ranging from 2020 to 2024. Irrelevant studies were excluded. The final selection included articles from 10 different countries.Data Extraction: From each study, key data were extracted, including research design, population characteristics, and main reported complications. The information was organized narratively to facilitate comparison of findings across studies.Results: Out of 261,357 articles, 15 relevant articles were selected for the review. These articles were published in 10 countries, as follows: Spain (3 middle-income and 1 lower-middle income), Italy (1 lower-middle income, 1 high-income, and 1 mixed-income), India (2 middle and lower income), Russia (1 middle income), Japan (1 high, middle, and low income), Germany (1 middle income), United States (1 middle income), Mexico (1 middle income), Brazil (1 middle income), and China (1 high and middle income). The findings indicate that socioeconomic inequalities tend to increase the risk of COVID-19-related mortality.Conclusion: COVID-19 is associated with type 2 diabetes, an increased risk of coronary problems, hypertension, and nerve damage such as polyneuropathy, affecting muscle strength and increasing the mortality rate in respiratory diseases such as COPD, leading to lung damage and fibrosis. Treatment should be comprehensive, including vaccines, respiratory exercises, and physiotherapy, where the drug Veklury (remdesivir) has shown efficacy in accelerating recovery and strengthening the immune system. Additionally, post-COVID conditions such as anxiety, depression, and persistent respiratory issues should be addressed.

This article aims to identify and characterise the Chinese urban middle class. We propose to improve the description of the middle class using an innovative approach combining an economic approach (based on income) and a sociological approach (based on education and occupation). The empirical investigations conducted as part of this research are based on the China Health and Nutrition Survey (2009). First, we define the middle income class as households with an annual per capita income between 10,000 yuan and the 95th percentile. On this basis, approximately 50% of urban households may be said to belong to the middle class. Second, we use information on employment and education to characterise the heterogeneity of the middle income class. Using clustering methods, we identify four groups: (i) the elderly and the inactive middle class, mainly composed of pensioners; (ii) the old middle class, composed of self-employed workers; (iii) the marginal middle class, composed of skilled and unskilled workers; and (iv) the new middle class, composed of highly educated wage earners in the public sector. We show that the different groups have distinctive features based on variables such as housing and household appliances and equipment.

“What’s in the middle”: Scratching beneath the surface of the middle class(es) in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Turkey and Vietnam

This study was conducted to understand the infant (0-12 month) feeding practices among different classes' mothers in Dhaka city. The study was carried out among the 183 mother-infant pair of the upper, middle and lower socio-economic classes in Dhaka city and purposive sampling method was applied. The study was conducted at following areas in Dhaka city which were selected purposively. The mean age of upper class, middle class and lower class were 35±4, 25±3 and 21±7 in years. Regarding first feeding it was observed that upper (75%), middle (85%) and lower class (48%) first gave colostrum. It also observed that 18% of upper class mother first gave powder milk, while in case of middle class it was 5%. In lower class preference of giving honey and sugar water were 21% and 12% respectively. The starting time of breast feeding indicated that in upper classes (74%) breast feeding initiated within one hour, while in middle (75%) and lower classes (84%) it was given within 12 hours. It was highlighted that 44% upper and 36% lower class mothers started complementary feeding at 3 month of the baby respectively, while in middle class 61% mother started complementary foods at 5 month of their baby. In case of duration of breast feeding practices, middle and lower classes breast-feed continued longer time than upper class. Majorities of the upper class prefered egg, soup, fruit juice while middle class liked meat-fish, egg, khichuri, fruits. On complementary feeding the lower class choiced mainly rice-potato, dal, khichuri or vegetables. The study result should not be generalise and need further large scale research. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/akmmcj.v5i2.21124 Anwer Khan Modern Medical College Journal Vol. 5, No. 2: July 2014, Pages 5-8

Implementation science and breast cancer control: A Breast Health Global Initiative (BHGI) perspective from the 2010 Global Summit

^ r N BRITISH politics the middle class is a label or slogan thrown about in public discussion rather than a precisely defined unit. The followng , zexamples of propositions commonly uttered will be familiar: That this or that stands for the middle (or by contrast the working) class. That a should not act as a class party in the sense of favounng one or other class group. That the middle class deserves consideration in government policy, or at least that its interests ought not in justice to be disregarded. Alternatively that the middle class is an important section of the electorate, especially in marginal constituencies, and that any would be wise to avoid antagonizing it. More speculatively, that the middle class occupies a middle position in the system of choice, and may hold the balance of electoral weight. As soon as one begins to examine these assertions it becomes evident that a merely abstract or arbitrary definition of the middle class will not suffice. One has to get at the meaning intended. Since those who advance the opinions are seeking to carry conviction rather than establish an exact science, they do not usually supply the precise formula of the mixture in the bottle. Indeed the danger is that if political spokesmen are-pressed too far on the road to exact statement they cease to be interesting. One might say of this, as of other concepts in political thought, that the greater the precision the greater the exTor. Accordingly we are led back to the sources of public utterance to inquire what are the senses ln which politicians and political publicists (hence presumably the less articulate electors) understand the term. After studying a large collection of articles and speeches and a quantity of literature I have classified the various senses of the term in three general groups: (a) Income Descriptions. Usually persons with a comfortable, though not extremely high, standard of life by contrast with '! the poor ; not usually including manual wage earners although occasionally it is argued that well-paid skilled men ought to be considered middle class.

1. Imagining the 'middle class': an introduction Part I. Against the Tide: Prelude to the 1790s: was the French Revolution a 'bourgeois revolution'? 2. The uses of 'middle class' language in the 1790s 3. Friends and foes of the 'middle class': the dialogic imagination 4. The political differentiation of social language: the debate on the triple assessment Postlude to the 1790s: the uses of 'bourgeois revolution' Part II. The Tug of War: 5. Taming the 'middle class' 6. The tug of war and its resolution Part III. With the Tide: 7. The social construction of the middle class 8. The parallels across the Channel: a French aside 9. The debates on the Reform Bill: bowing to a new representation of the 'middle class' 10. Inventing the ever-rising 'middle class': the aftermath of 1832 11. 1832 and the 'middle class' conquest of the 'private sphere' Epilogue.

The Middle Class:Political, Economic, and Social Perspectives Dennis Gilbert (bio) The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies. By Sebastián Carassai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 357. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822356011. Latin America’s Emerging Middle Classes: Economic Perspectives. Edited by Jeffrey Dayton-Johnson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xxv + 209. $100.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781137320780. Latin America’s Middle Class: Unsettled Debates and New Histories. Edited by David S. Parker and Louise E. Walker. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2013. Pp. viii + 236. $34.99 paper. ISBN: 9780739168530. Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food. By Rebekah E. Pite. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. xv + 326. ISBN: 9781469606903. Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968. By Louise E. Walker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. xviii + 321. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804781510. Three myths haunt the scholarly literature on the middle class in Latin America: (1) the middle class is impossible to define; (2) the middle class is “anxious” because it is endangered, fragile, and maybe even disappearing; and (3) the middle class is the progressive hope for (or the reactionary impediment to) political and economic change. Of course, there is some truth in each of them, as there is in most myths. But they can be misleading and therefore deserve scrutiny. myth one: the undefinable middle class This is an old issue. Marx puzzled over bourgeois society’s growing “horde of flunkies, the soldiers, sailors, police, lower officials … mistresses, grooms, clowns … lawyers, physicians, scholars, schoolmasters and inventors, etc.” Vague references to the middle classes, middle bourgeoisie, intermediate strata, and similar concepts abound in his writings.1 A century and a half later, there is no standard definition or even consensus over what to call the mixed bag of people in the middle of the class structure. Among scholars, there are disciplinary differences [End Page 255] in the ways the middle class is conceived and counted. Economists have relied on income ranges; sociologists have traditionally focused on occupational categories; and historians, inspired by the “cultural turn” in the historiography of recent years, have understood middle class in terms of the way groups of people imagine and speak of themselves. Many scholars, including Louise E. Walker and Sebastián Carassai, authors of two of the titles reviewed here, have abandoned the singular “middle class” for the plural “middle classes” to emphasize the heterogeneity they see in this category. The implication is that the middle class is somehow more heterogeneous than any other class. But perhaps it only appears so because we who write about class are typically middle class and, like most people, inclined to perceive finer social distinctions in closer proximity to ourselves. At the beginning of her book on the Mexican middle class after 1968, Walker defines her subject with list of occupations including lawyers, doctors, teachers, white-collar workers at various levels, technical workers, and small business owners—in short, the people we might think of when we visualize the middle class. In an appendix, Walker thoughtfully compares various twentieth-century definitions and population estimates of Mexico’s middle class, all based on some combination of occupation and income. She is correct in her conclusion that “even the most rigorous quantitative … estimates are partly subjective” (211). Walker’s conception of her own subject matter is expansive, stretching well beyond groups of people defined by jobs and pay. Middle class, she writes, refers to “a set of material conditions, a state of mind, and a political discourse” (2). Reflecting these different concerns and the shifting character of her sources, Walker’s sense of the middle class changes from chapter to chapter. Carassai, writing on Argentina in the 1970s, draws on Pierre Bourdieu to define middle class as “a theoretical construction based on the objective existence of differences and differentiations that in turn are expressed in different dispositions or habitus. In other words, people can be aggregated together in ‘classes’ or ‘groups’ because, in order to exist socially, they distinguish themselves from others” (7). Whatever the value of this conception of class...

In the last two decades there have been several social changes, such as the rise of industries based on sharia provisions from banking products, cosmetics, as well as Sharia tourism. Along with this growth, there have also been changes in attitudes and lifestyles such as the widespread use of the hijab which is often called the hijab revolution. This does not only occur in the lower economic class but also in the middle economic class. The economic lifestyle of the Muslim middle class also affects the demand for halal products. This paper aims to explain the relationship between the lifestyle of the Muslim economic middle class and its relationship with the opportunities for the halal tourism industry in Indonesia. The research method used is qualitative with a literature study and a descriptive approach. The results of this study are the relationship between middle class status, lifestyle and sharia products in Indonesia is very close. Halal tourism is also part of an industry that seeks to capture the opportunities generated by this market. Seeing the relationship between the middle class and the opportunities possessed by Halal Tourism is very large, and in the future it is expected that various industries that support sharia tourism will emerge, from lodging, restaurants, to various types of culinary delights that adapt to the needs of the Muslim middle class, which is always growing from year to year.

Chutes & Ladders: Middle Class in Motion

Continuity of the hegemony is largely achieved by the socialization process and construction of the social consciousness in the process.While hegemony provides a window to see the world through the eyes of the ruling class, it also prevents ideas that are harmful to it from spreading, studied and accepted. So it is unrealistic to expect a social consciousness that was constructed in favor of the ruling class to include class consciousness. Foundation of the class consciousness is the feeling of belonging to a class. However the class consciousness is a threatening element to hegemony. So this study was done believing that social consciousness acts for the continuity of the hegemony, based on ''an ordinary person doesn't have a clear 'social class concept' in their mind, which brings belonging feelings and class consciousness, the notion is vague in their minds.'' hypothesis. In a research that was conducted between March-July 2019 by stratified random sampling method, the participants were asked in an open ended way ''Which class do you feel belonging to?''. Instead of a question aiming to make the participants choose between multiple answers of already existing class templates, the open ended question aimed to discover what the participants know about class structures that are used in defining them and how they interpret these classes in their minds. During the study it has been observed that one third of the participants didn't have a meaningful interpretation of the class concept corresponding in their minds thus being unable to answer the question. Nearly half of the participants who answered the question stated they think themselves as ''middle class''. Among the participants who stated they belonged in the ''middle class'', it is remarked that a quarter of them never once bought a book, 31 percent never visited the theatre, 6.7 percent never traveled out of their city and 5 percent never dined in a restaurant in their lives. When evaluating the income level of the participants who thought they belonged in the ''middle class'', it was discovered that 45.3 percent of the participants were of minimum wage to lower or no income for themselves while 51 percent of the participants had an income of minimum wage to 6k liras which showed that over half of the participants who thought themselves belonging in ''middle class'' were on the border of the poverty threshold. When factors like education, income level, social and cultural way of life considered, it was understood that the participants who gave the response ''middle class'' were implying the middle class of their vicinity, not the middle class defined by ranking of 20 percent income groups.

The present study investigates the characteristics of class in two transitional societies as based on interviews in 474 homes. The author examines certain hypotheses (communication, mobility, rationalism, kinship, conformity, optimism, and marital adjustment) by which the middle class may differ in behavior from the lower class. While most of the hypotheses were supported statistically, the middle and lower classes in Central America vary greatly according to traditions and social pressures. J t has been popular to ask whethler there really exists a middle class in Latin America and hiow it may be defined.' The present article assumes the existence of the middle stratum and is concerned with some of its social and psychological characteristics. Interest is focused in the behavioral and attitudinal variables to be found in the lower and middle classes of two transitional societies. The discussion is primarily directed to the so-called middle class.2 It is the author's contention that this new stratum is a product of urbanization and industrialization abetted by commercialism and education. Although this thesis is hardly novel, it merits further investigation. However, the emphasis of the present study is directed to a comparison of class subcultures, rather than their development historically, in El Salvador and Costa Rica. The sample included 79 middle class interviews and * The present study developed out of a SmithMundt visiting professorship at the University of El Salvador in 1958 and a Science Research Council grant to return to Central America in 1960. The author is indebted to many individuals in both El Salvador and Costa Rica for the completion of this study. For some of the statistical calculations the author is grateful to Curtis R. Miller of Pacific State Hospital and to John R. B. Whittlesey of Questionnaire Analysis Program I of the University of California Medical Center, Los Angeles, California. 1 A few of the references on middle class would include Theodore R. Crevenaa, ed., Materiales para el Estudio de la Clase Media en la America Latina, 3 vols. (Publicaciones de la Oficina de Ciencias Sociales, Union Panamericana, Washington, D. C., 1950) ; Ralph L. Beals, Social Stratification in Latin America, The American Jotrnal of Sociology, LVIII (January 1953), 327339; Gino Germani, La Clase Media en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Sociologia, 1952); and Andrew H. Whiteford, Two Cities of Lati America: A Comparative Description of Classes (Beloit, Wisconsin: Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College, 1960), pp. 53-55. 2 Mario Monteforte Toledo, Guatemala, Monografia Sociologica (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Sociales, 1939), pp. 261-262. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.215 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:18:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

This article attempts to change our thinking about the formation, development, and growth of the middle class(es) in Indonesia during the early Suharto regime. In the dominant story about the formation of the Indonesian middle classes, a particular configuration of economics and politics caused the formation of the middle class, and shaped identities, values, and behaviors. According to analysts, these middle classes were heavily dependent on the state, and politically ineffectual. To challenge that notion, this essay studies how the pop music magazine Aktuil (1967–84) addressed its readers, and shows how this treatment allowed certain people to feel as if they were part of a tangible social entity that inhabited a middle social space, between the state and the masses. This is an important and necessary intervention that recognizes the significance of media and popular culture in the construction of identities. The author positions Aktuil in the context of the radical reorganization of the press and of popular music, which enabled the quiet evolution of the Indonesian middle class—a cohort constituted not only by musical taste, but also by the practice of reading. Aktuil gave rise to a virtual social entity heralded into being by overlapping modes of address, that is, those that touched not only on a rhetoric of print, but also on discourses of popular music genres. By proposing that the middle class was a virtual entity, the imagination of which was enabled by the reorganization of the press and of popular music, this essay departs from a dominant perspective that attributes to the state a pivotal role in the tangible growth of the middle class in the 1970s.