Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges

Abstract

Like many key terms in history and the social sciences, ‘middle class’ is at once a category ‘of social and political analysis’ and a category ‘of social and political practice’, in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper's terms – two aspects that were, and continue to be, entangled in complex ways. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’, or the ‘middling sorts’, has been a catchword in political discourse, and it became one long before scholars defined it in any systematic fashion. Once it became a more or less well-established conceptual tool of research, however, it began to take on an academic life of its own, with scholars also using it to describe people who did not invoke this category for their own self-description. But scholarly terms could – and indeed did – also feed back into folk understandings of social stratification. In particular, the recent global popularity of the term ‘middle class’ seems to be at least in part a result of the appropriation of academic categories by policymakers. This article contributes to the discussion on African middle classes by tracing the genealogy of theoretical perspectives on class and by outlining some findings from studies of the history of European and American middle classes as well as recent research on middle classes in the global South. I discuss both the history of scholarly debates on the middle classes and what empirical studies tell us about people's contested self-categorizations, and how their understandings and practices of being middle-class have changed over time. The article argues that future research on the dynamics of African social stratification has much to gain from a regional and historical comparative perspective.

Morality in the middle: choosing cars or houses in Botswana

“…While anthropologists have noted that middle-income, middle-class people in Africa often continue to distribute to a range of relatives (see Lentz 2020), it is also notable how a new material plenty allows more intensive friendship work (see, for example, Bocast 2017; Moore 2018). Houses house not only nieces and nephews needing places to stay while at school or looking for work, but also many friends from childhood, schools, or even work.…”

Flight and fortitude: the decline of the middle class in Zimbabwe

“…Carola Lentz (2020) highlights the important role played by the state in the global South in either making or breaking the middle class (or classes). In a significant number of African countries, neoliberalism, promoted by institutions such as the World Bank, has fostered the growth of middle classes as an accompaniment to structural reforms away from state-led development to market-led growth (Deloitte 2013).…”

“… 1 Space limitations necessitate a very pragmatic use of the highly contested term ‘middle class’. A discussion of past and present debates around middle classes is provided in this issue by Carola Lentz (2020). …”

Never enough: neoliberalizing Namibian middle-class marriages

“…: 432). These accumulations signal middle-class status through their mobilization in 'bundles of discourses and performances' (Lentz 2020: 459) in specific situations of 'doing being middle-class' (Lentz 2020).…”