The Emergence of Class in a Tunisian Town

Abstract

Anthropological interest in the concept of “class” and in the constellation of related concepts such as class consciousness and class conflict has increased in recent years as part of the upsurge of interest in ideas drawn from the Marxist tradition to analyze and interpret societies that anthropologists have conventionally been interested in. Yet much of this research and thinking has focused on the relevance of the different modes of production for an understanding of cultural history or, more recently, on analyses derived from dependency theory suggesting a global application of the notions of class and class conflict. Both these approaches neglect the usefulness of notions of class derived from the Marxist tradition for providing frameworks for the gathering of anthropological field data or for its analysis. It is true that work in cultural ecology and economic anthropology has frequently had a materialist bias, but it has rarely gone beyond an emphasis on the links of causality running from material factors to the superstructure to a test of the concepts of the Marxist tradition as a model increasing our understanding of the ebb and flow of human life. Even rarer has been the use of anthropological field data to evaluate and refine the concepts themselves.