The middle class as a culture structure: rethinking middle-class formation and democracy through the civil sphere

Class as Collective Representation: Lessons from Wagner and Bayreuth on the Discrete Harms of the Bourgeoisie

“…As I put it in a recent volume (Smith 2020: 185), Durkheim has been 'reinterpreted in light of the cultural turn' not only in the Strong Program but also more widely 'as a flexible, dynamic, exciting scholar of myth, ritual, classification, and the sacred'. Under this late-Durkheimian perspective 'class' can be taken as a discourse in a wider field of representations, likely structured by binary opposition (see Villegas, 2019). It would operate as a somewhat arbitrary signifier in a game of social classification involving efforts at critical reflexivity.…”

“…For individuals, organizations and social movements, classes-as-signifiers are a cultural problem or a solution, an opportunity or a constraint depending on the representations at play in the political field. As Villegas (2019) shows, for effective mobilization of the leveraging force of the civil sphere ‘middle-class social movements’ in the Global South need to appeal to the sacred side of nationally specific binary codes that form an enduring culture structure for talk about class. The beneficial typification qualifies them as strong, active, democratic and autonomous rather than as weak, dependent and self-interested.…”