Social class and the cultural turn: Anthropology, sociology and the post-industrial politics of 21st century Britain

Abstract

The social science of the contemporary moment in Britain, and Europe, requires an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study of social class. The time is ripe for a mutually critical conversation between sociology and anthropology about the cultural turn in the study of social class. This matters, because the cultural turn in the social sciences must be adequate to the task of charting the potential threat to progressive society posed by the cultural turn in the general population and in politics. The political vacuum in post-industrial cities has led to emergent forms of cultural nationalism that flirt with fascism and give rise to a populist challenge to the political establishment and the cohesion of a class-based configuration of collective action under the conditions of advanced capitalism.