Skip to main content
Log in

Class in the USA

  • Published:
Dialectical Anthropology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

A Correction to this article was published on 23 January 2018

This article has been updated

Abstract

While many anthropologists in the USA have followed the ideological lead provided by the corporate-sponsored Great Cultural Revolution and denied the salience of class in the USA and in general, we argue that contra American exceptionalism, the capitalist economic system of the USA strongly entails class structures that affect all. To deny the existence and salience of class is to participate in a corporate-sponsored delusion to the detriment of the working class.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Change history

  • 23 January 2018

    The original version contained a mistake. Under The fall of labor heading, the correct sentence is “.. a process that continues to the time of this writing as a series of Republican state governors, attempt to obliterate public workers’ unions”. The original article has been corrected.

References

  • Armstrong, Karen. 2001. The battle for God. New York: Ballantine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bageant, Joe. 2007. Deer hunting with Jesus: dispatches from America’s class war. New York: Crown.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bakan, Joel. 2005. The corporation: the pathological pursuit of profit and power. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bigelow, Gordon. 2005. Let there be markets: the evangelical roots of economics. Harper’s 2005: 33–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and monopoly capitalism: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brodkin, Karen. 2000. Global capitalism: what’s race got to do with it. American Ethnologist 27 (2): 237–256.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carbonella, August, and Sharryn Kasmir. 2006. Rethinking the anthropology of social class. Anthropology News 47 (8): 8–9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carnegie, Andrew. 1900. The gospel of wealth and other timely essays. New York: The Century Co..

    Google Scholar 

  • Coke, Edward. 1648. Against monopolies, propounders, and projectors. In The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, 181–185. London: M. Flesher.

  • de Zengotita, Thomas. 2006. Mediated: how the media shapes our world and the way we live in it. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doukas, Dimitra. 1997. Corporate capitalism on trial: the hearings of the anthracite coal strike commission, 1902–03. Identities 3 (3): 367–398.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doukas, Dimitra. 2003. Worked over: the corporate sabotage of an American community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Durrenberger, E. Paul. 2001. Explorations of class and consciousness in the U.S. Journal of Anthropological Research 57 (1): 41–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Durrenberger, E. Paul. 2002a. The class of culture and the culture of class: thoughts on Marshall Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (1): 125–130.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Durrenberger, E. Paul. 2002b. Global processes, local systems. Urban Anthropology 32 (3–4): 253–279.

    Google Scholar 

  • Durrenberger, E. Paul, and Dimitra Doukas. 2008. Gospel of wealth, gospel of work: hegemony in the U.S. working class. American Anthropologist 110 (2): 1548–1433.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1990. Fear of falling: the inner life of the middle class. New York Harper Perennial.

  • Fadiman, Ann. 1998. The spirit catches you and you fall down: a Hmong child, her American doctors and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth A. 1995. Selling free enterprise: the business assault on labor and liberalism, 1945–60. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frank, Thomas. 2005. What’s the matter with Kansas: how conservatives won the heart of America. New York: Holt.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freid, Morton. 1967. The evolution of political society: an essay in political anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Griffith, David. Forthcoming. Immigrant heterogeneity and class consciousness in new rural U.S. destinations. In The anthropological study of class and consciousness, ed. E. Paul Durrenberger. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

  • Harris, Marvin. 1974. Cows, pigs, wars and witches: the riddles of culture. New York: Random House.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedges, Chris. 2005. Feeling the hate with the national religious broadcasters. Harper’s 55–61.

  • Hedges, Chris. 2011. Throw out the moneychangers. Truthdig.com.

  • Hofstadter, Richard. 1955 [1944]. Social Darwinism in American thought. Boston: Beacon.

  • Horwitz, Morton J. 1992. The transformation of American law, 1870–1960: the crisis of legal orthodoxy. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krugman, Paul. 1911. Let’s not be civil. New York Times April 17, 2011.

  • Lave, Jean. 1988. Cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lloyd, Henry Demarest. 1894. Wealth against commonwealth. New York: Harper & Brothers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maier, Pauline. 1993. The revolutionary origins of the American corporation. William and Mary Quarterly 50: 51–84.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the roots of terror. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCoy, Alfred W. 2003. The politics of heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug trade. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • McIntyre, Thomas J. 1981. The fear brokers. New York: Beacon.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moredock, Will. 2003. Banana republic: a year in the heart of Myrtle Beach. Charleston: Frontline Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moser, Bob. 2005. The Crusaders: Christian evangelicals are plotting to remake America in their own image. RollingStone.com. April 15, 2005.

  • Newman, Katherine. 1988. Falling from grace: downward mobility in the age of affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newman, Katherine. 1994. Declining fortunes: the withering of the American dream. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ortner, Sherry. 1998. Identities: the hidden life of class. Journal of Anthropological Research. 54 (1): 1–17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ortner, Sherry. 2005. New Jersey dreaming: capital, culture, and the class of 58. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. 1988. Why Americans don’t vote. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reich, Robert. 2008. Supercapitalism: the transformation of business, democracy, and everyday life. New York: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ricca, Joanne. 2002. Politics in America: the right wing attack on the American labor movement. Wisconsin AFL-CIO website.

  • Roy, William G. 1997. Socializing capital: the rise of the large industrial corporation in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Saitta, Dean. 2007. The archaeology of collective action. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwartz, Jonathan. 1998. High school classmates revisited: Sherry Ortner and Philip Roth. Anthropology Today 14 (6): 14–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shackel, Paul A. 2009. The archaeology of American labor and working-class life. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2002. Globalization and its discontents. New York: W.W. Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thu, Kendall M. and E. Paul Durrenberger 1998 Pigs, Profits, and Rural Communities. Albany, NY. State University of New York Press.

  • White, Jenny B. 2002. Islamist mobilization in Turkey: a study in vernacular politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yates, Michael D. 2003. Naming the system: inequality and work in the global economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul Durrenberger.

Additional information

The original version of this article was revised: Under The fall of labor heading, the correct sentence is “.. a process that continues to the time of this writing as a series of Republican state governors, attempt to obliterate public workers’ unions”.

A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9492-y.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Durrenberger, P., Doukas, D. Class in the USA. Dialect Anthropol 42, 1–13 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9479-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-017-9479-0

Keywords

Navigation