The uses of class: A Latin American anthropological reading of Marxist debates in the twentieth century

Abstract

The article takes up six Marxist-inspired debates that substantially impacted Latin American anthropological thought toward social classes in the twentieth century. The aim is to provide a summary of these uses and to situate their possible current applications. We will begin by covering Marxist discussions and categories, presenting a concise review of Marx’s debates on class, and their re-readings by European authors such as Lukacs and Gramsci. Then, we will discuss Weber’s principal criticisms of these arguments, referring to the theoretical underpinnings of social stratification. In addition, we will synthesize the critical turns of Marxism: feminist debates on social reproduction, the geographical discussion on the spatial configuration of class, Bourdieu’s articulationist proposal and re-readings of Gramsci’s works. Following these debates, we will analyze the six uses of the concept of social class in Latin American world-historical anthropology from the second half of the twentieth century. We group them by their central topic and by the national academia in which their articulation had institutional effects on the discipline (Brazil, Peru, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina). We end with a look at the debate’s outcomes in the twenty-first century, in the context of international crisis and its Latin American configuration, to propose a conceptualization that dialogs with the revised traditions.