Class, Community, and Crisis in Post-Industrial Britain

THEME SECTION

Class, community, and crisis in post-industrial Britain

Edited by Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith Introduction: The middle class-ification of Britain

Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith

Abstract: The articles collected in this special section of Focaal capture, ethno- graphically, a particular moment at the end of the New Labour project when the political consequences of a failure to address the growing sense of crisis among working-class people in post-industrial Britain are being felt. These new ethnographies of social class in Britain reveal not only disenchantment and disenfranchisement, but also incisive and critical commentary on the shifting and often surprising forms and experiences of contemporary class relations. Here we trace the emergence of controversies surrounding the category “white working class” and what it has come to stand for, which includes the vilification of people whose political, economic and social standing has been systematically eroded by the economic policies and political strategies of both Conservative and New Labour gov- ernments. The specificities of class discourse in Britain are also located relative to broader changes that have occurred across Europe with the rise of “cultural fun- damentalisms” and a populist politics espousing neo-nationalist rhetorics of ethnic solidarity. This selection of recent ethnographies holds up a mirror to a rapidly changing political landscape in Britain. It reveals how post-Thatcherite discourses of “the individual”, “the market”, “social mobility” and “choice” have failed a significant proportion of the working-class population. Moreover, it shows how well anthropology can capture the subtle and complex forms of collectivity through which people find meaning in times of change. Keywords: Britain, community, crisis, culture, ethnicity, multiculturalism, race, social class

Anthropologists tend not to set out to study so- other kinds of group orderings such as kinship cial class, but find that it emerges as relevant in (e.g., Edwards 2000; Strathern 1981; Young and the process of investigating human collectives Wilmott 1953); community and place (Edwards of other kinds (Smith 1984). Important about et al. 2005; Evans 2007); gender (Day 2007; this is the opportunity anthropological analysis Green 1997; Hart 2005); race, religion and eth- of Britain provides for reflection on the inter- nicity (Alexander 1996; Banton 1955; Baumann section of the socio-economic, political, and 1996; Shaw 1988; Werbner 2002); cultural and cultural hierarchies of class with a diverse set of material practices (Gillespie 1995; Miller 2008;

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 62 (2012): 3–16 doi:10.3167/fcl.2012.620101 4 | Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith

Wulff 2002); and parallel and co-existing polit- warded self-actualization, but turned out to be ical economies (Ballard 2005; Werbner 1990). nothing more than a pipe dream for a signifi- The anthropological preoccupation with cant part of the population. Even erstwhile al- persons as the emerging outcome of complex lies of New Labour in the social sciences, such collective histories, rather than as mainly de- as Anthony Giddens, appeared to have been fined by the specificities of class, allows for an seduced during this period by the possibility of interrogation of what difference it makes to an a wholesale abandonment of class as an ex- analysis of human social life to bring class and planatory framework for understanding the for- capital’s ordering and reordering effects in and ward moving dynamics of British social life. out of focus. Ethnographic examples make pos- The vision of a world in which the Third Way sible a critique of those accounts that assume and increasingly reflexive individualism tran- class to be always and everywhere paramount scend the limits of traditional collective associ- no matter what, and at the same time they allow ation failed, however, to anticipate some of the for an interrogation of those analyses in which most astounding political developments of early class is deemed to be irrelevant just because re- twenty-first century Britain. The rise in popu- search subjects do not “talk class” or use it as a larity, over the past decade, of the far-right primary frame of reference. British National Party in England, for example, This collection of articles looks in detail at has highlighted the extent of alienation among the contours of social class as they are rendered Labour voters in the post-industrial cities of visible and mobilized (or not), in the UK, in the Britain. This has revealed a profound yearning first decade of the twenty-first century. To- and nostalgia for ties of community and ethnic gether they provide a fine-tuned analysis of the group in place of what is perceived to have been economic, political, and socio-cultural effects of lost, which is working-class respect. change in several post-industrial neighbor- The articles collected here are concerned hoods of England and Scotland, and examine with a growing state of crisis in some of the discourses that either mobilize idioms of class poorest areas of Britain’s urban neighborhoods. or transform them so as to obscure the histori- The ethnographic analyses reveal the extent of a cal significance of class for specific political growing sense of disenchantment and disen- purposes. franchisement and provide a context for greater This theme section is timely for several rea- understanding of the widespread riots in Eng- sons: the past two years in the UK has seen both lish cities in August 2011. This period of unrest the final demise of the New Labour project and has focused further national attention on what the birth of subsequent attempts at reinvention has arguably been neglected for the past thirty of a new leadership and core values. This is the years of British politics, which is the experience moment in which a Labour leader—Ed Mili- of life of a neglected post-industrial working band—dares to try to do again what the previ- class (Jones 2011). More specifically the hetero- ous leader, Gordon Brown, was shot down for geneity of case study material presented here, in 2008: to make room in his vocabulary for about what it is like to be working class in that term of collective economic and political Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first cen- description—“working class”—which was so tury, interrogates a relatively recent discursive dramatically stripped of its significance by the move in the cultural politics of Britain, namely Thatcherite government of the 1980s and 1990s a reframing of the working class as homoge- and then made taboo in the 2000s by New nous and white. It is salutary to trace precisely Labour. In the determination to hold the center when and for what purposes the racial epithet ground the Labour government took its tradi- “white” was conjoined with “working class” tional supporters for granted, perpetuated when few people, if any, use the term to identify monetarist economic policies and promoted the themselves and when, over the same period, myth of a middle-class meritocracy, which re- neither the idiom of “white middle class” nor Introduction: The middle class-ification of Britain | 5

“black or Asian working class” or, indeed, “mul- 7/7, the Labour government’s support for multiracial working class” gained the same traction. ticulturalism was strong and community life for black and Asian people living in relatively poor neighborhoods was configured not through “White Working Class” language pertaining to the socio-economic commonalities of a multiracial British working Gillian Evans (2007; see also this volume) ar- class, but through dominant discourses of gues that the emergence of the category “white racial, ethnic, and cultural distinctiveness (Bau- working class” is symptomatic of a complex mann 1996).1 Thus, as long as it is not discur- combination of factors relating to thirty years of sively possible to imagine the collectives that British political and socio-economic history. define black and Asian life in Britain as also First, it speaks of the malaise typical of those working class, the working class becomes, by predominantly working-class neighborhoods definition, white. and communities of Britain that were politically, economically, and culturally dispossessed by processes of de-industrialization in the 1980s The anthropology of Britain and 1990s, exacerbated by Thatcherite policies. Second, it relates to the efforts of New Labour to Anthropological studies in Britain that have fo- continue to de-politicize the working class and cused mainly on black and Asian migrants from recruit them to a mission of individualized aspi- Commonwealth countries have also tended to ration and social mobility, which, after the dis- concentrate on racial, ethnic, and cultural dispossession of the Thatcher years, was perceived tinctiveness. Where the classed contours of race to be a greater betrayal and seen as the aban- and ethnicity have become relevant this has donment of the working class by its own lead- rarely translated into either an explicit anthro- ers. As New Labour moved toward the center pological position on race relations in Britain ground and confidently courted the middle (Mills 2008) or a public discourse about the class vote, it declared in 1998: “We’re all middle- black or Asian working classes in Britain. And class now”. But, unsurprisingly, not everyone despite the fact that there is an increasingly agreed. Despite current misgivings about aca- multiracial “youth culture” which transcends demic use of the term, which risks reifying a distinctions of class and race, and which is con- problematic category of classification, the mate- stituted through shared forms of language (He- rialization of the concept “white working class” witt 1986; Wulff 1988) and consumption, such is arguably critical to a public and academic de- as musical appreciation (see Cohen 2007; Evans bate that forcibly reintroduces the idea of the 2006), there has been relatively less anthropolog- ongoing existence of the working class in defi- ical focus either on everyday relations between ance of the twenty-first century middle class- white, black, and Asian residents of particular ification of Britain. Third, it is important to urban neighborhoods or between the working understand that the emergence of the idea of and middle classes except perhaps in the spe- the working class as “white” is a reflection of the cific ethnographies of places of work (Cassidy fact that while the Labour movement has been 2002; Mollona 2009; Ouroussoff 1993). Notable gradually undermined, the self-organizing eth- exceptions include Katharine Tyler (2003) on nic collectives of multiculturalism have re- the articulation of ideas of whiteness, coloniality mained politically and economically viable and and social class across rural and urban locales are a legitimate means for black and Asian peo- in Britain; Susan Benson (1982) on “interracial ple in Britain to struggle for greater racial equal- marriage” in 1970s Brixton; Sandra Wallman ity and harness economic resource from the and Ian Buchanan (1982) on the development state. Despite the controversies of the Rushdie of a proud multicultural community in Bat- Affair and the terrorist bombings of 9/11 and tersea, London; and Georgie Wemyss (2009) on 6 | Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith the hidden histories of black and Asian workers executives and white-collar employees; on the at the heart of the working-class community in other were the wage labourers. The former were Lon don’s docklands. Two articles in this theme regarded as outsiders, a characterisation under- section contribute to this literature. Penny lined by the prevalence among them of English Howard examines workplace cosmopolitanism, as their first or sole language; on the other were and its limits, among Scottish fisherman, and the villagers (‘insiders’), most of whom spoke Jan Grill explores the relations between Slova- Welsh as their first language. Interestingly, this kian Roma and white working-class residents of latter group might include the doctor (if he was a neighborhood in post-industrial Glasgow. local) and the Baptist (‘Chapel’) minister. It was The inter-relatedness found in these and other likely to exclude the teachers and the Anglican studies confounds the proliferation of distinct (‘Church’) minister (although the incumbent in ethnic classifications such as those made mani- Frankenberg’s time was a Welsh-speaker).” fest in the multitude of British population sur- veys that make diversity in Britain appear to be Cohen points to a layered, always local, analysis the sole preserve of black and Asian people and of class, which does not map directly onto a that, by default, lend an unfounded and imagi- straightforward division between working and nary homogeneity to white British-ness (Evans middle-class residents (and this is before, or 2010). without, consideration of how Pentrediwaith Anthropological studies that have focused women experience, narrate, or contextualize on white people in Britain have, however, un- class). He suggests a shifting and mobile class dermined the imagined homogeneity of white sensibility which more recent anthropological Britishness, particularly with respect to differ- studies of Britain also highlight (Edwards 2000; ences of class and territorial affiliation. For ex- Evans 2007; Rapport 2002). Now that the idea ample, Ronnie Frankenberg’s (1957) ethnog - of locality (Savage et al. 2004; see also Edwards raphy of a mining village in North Wales in the this volume), nation (Glick Schiller 2006), and 1950s showed sharp divisions, made locally, heritage (Macdonald 1997) are widely under- between insiders and outsiders, and this divi- stood to be the constantly reworked product of sion is repeated over again in subsequent ethno- globalization, transnational connection and graphic examples from Britain (e.g., Edwards global flows of both information technology 2000; Rapport 1993; Strathern 1981). Anthony and capital, rather than the straightforward ex- Cohen (2005: 608) writes this, retrospectively, pression of primordial belonging, it may be that about Frankenberg’s classic ethnography: “neighborhood” as the site of multiple kinds of residency, sociality and group collectivity, “At the core of his analysis of Pentrediwaith, a might better serve the analytical purposes of remote and declining North Wales valley com- cross-cultural comparison than ethnic group or munity divided by language, denomination, working-class community have so far allowed gender and kinship, was class. The key discrim- in the anthropological study of Britain. inant between the relatively powerless and egal- Alas, few anthropological studies of the itarian village men—who were forced to travel British upper classes exist (for a notable excep- long distances to work outside the village and tion, see Crewe 2007) and only a few focus the valley—and those who they believed to oc- specifically on the middle classes (see, e.g., Eade cupy positions of power and authority was eco- 2002; Firth, Hubert, and Forge 1969). More nomic power and all that went with it. This was studies are needed on emergent and developing not a restatement of the more stereotypical ru- relations between upper-, middle-, and work- ral hierarchies of landowners and the rest, or ing-class people, and between black, white, and even of a petty squirearchy. Rather, on the one Asian people, living in both rural and urban side were self-employed businessmen, salaried neighborhoods. Introduction: The middle class-ification of Britain | 7

Middle class and ethnic nic self-respect, dignity, and community resources. Evans sees an example of this in Ber- Although black and Asian activists of the 1970s mondsey where civic leaders have gone to and 1980s had perceived themselves to be black considerable lengths to organize and seek fund- and working class (Ramdin 1987), by the 2000s ing for an annual music festival. They perceive it was clear that the fight for racial equality their task, in part, to be about demonstrating through multiculturalism had become discur- the viability of Bermondsey “culture” by com- sively unhooked from a La bour movement that peting against the Latin American and black no longer spoke the language of the working music festivals for funds and audience num- classes. Evans (this volume) explains how, by bers. This does not mean that the line-up of acts default, this left a significant number of work- in the Bermondsey music event is not racially ing-class white people in a political vacuum. diverse; it is just that multiculturalism, in this Not only did their whiteness not matter in mul- context, is not about multi as in everyone com- ticulturalism, but also their working class self- ing together, but rather about diverse groups identification no longer mattered to New learning to compete against other “cultures” for Labour. Rather than being renowned as the pri- self respect and community resources. This mary movers against unfair hierarchies in raises the question, and not just for Bermond- Britain, working-class white people became per- sey, of when and in what situations the fluidity ceived, ironically, as a block to equality. This was and interrelatedness (described above in terms either because many among them were resisting of collectivities around music, kinship, and what it means to become equally middle class in work) morphs into reified and fixed ethnic contemporary Britain or because they were com- boundaries and vice versa. As the contributors peting against black and Asian people for scarce to this theme section show these are not mutu- resources in impoverished post-industrial neigh- ally exclusively (either/or) collectivities, but borhoods and, as a result, were publically la- rather co-existing ones, implicated in each beled as outmoded and racist. other, and mobilized for different purposes. It seemed, by the end of the first decade of There are two inherent problems for work- the twenty-first century, that the only way to be ing-class white people in the ethnic diversifica- a viable person in Britain was to be middle class tion of the working class. First, ethnicity is or “ethnic” and for the majority of Brit ish peo- popularly associated with the racial and cultural ple this appeared to be an ideological and prag- difference of black and Asian people and sec- matic bargain they could live with. However, for ond, white people’s culture is dominantly asso- a minority of working-class people who either ciated with the “high culture” of white middle lacked the financial, educational, and social and upper class distinction. This means there capital for self-contained individual success are few things about white working-class life (and were culturally blamed, by Conservative that are recognized as either properly ethnic or politicians, for being resolutely “underclass” properly cultural and consequently publically and the cause of Britain’s “broken” moral econ- valued. As a consequence, the efforts of work- omy), or who could imagine nothing worse ing-class white people to claim legitimate eth- than being identified as or self-identifying as nic and cultural distinction for themselves are middle-class, it came to seem as though the often either pitied and defended (by misguided only way to fight back, was either to reclaim, re- public champions) or mocked and publically define and revitalize the Labour movement or derided as a national disgrace (see Skeggs start to learn, through the rhetoric of multicul- 2009).2 turalism, “how to have a cultural identity”. By This does not go unnoticed by the people implication, this meant having to learn how to who feel that their lifestyles are not publicly val- compete against black and Asian people for eth- ued. As Shawn explains to Katherine Smith 8 | Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith

(this volume), classing people entails judgment The Far Right and classing them as working-class entails neg- ative judgments. Shawn is well aware of what These examples from Britain are to be under- meanings are currently getting packed into the stood in relation to broader changes globally appellation working class. His strategy is to re- and in Europe. For example, Verena Stolcke fuse to be classified. Jeanette Edwards (this vol- (1995) describes as “cultural fundamentalism” ume) also writes about working-class responses the replacement of the idea of “racial difference” to the constant and invidious misrepresenta- with “cultural distinctiveness” which is the new tions and misreadings of the English working modality for inclusion and exclusion in the Eu- classes. Residents of northern English towns, ropean polity (see Taylor 2009). Anthropolo- which have been left relatively untouched by the gists have also turned their attention to the rise busy urban regeneration of neighboring cities, of ethnic and religious neo-nationalism across display an astute awareness of histories of injury Europe and to the upsurge of populist parties and dispossession (see also Harrison 2011). The that have been more or less successful in na- hidden histories they excavate, however, pro- tional and local elections (e.g., Gingrich and vide readings of class that run against the grain. Banks 2006; Kalb 2011)4 and Douglas Holmes They manufacture histories of labor replete (2010) explains the shifting politics of race and with dignity and pride and which show the va- class across Europe as a reaction to the transfor- garies and accidents of social class. Their re- mational effects of what he describes as “fast working of history and reimaginings of the past capital”. For Kalb (2011: 1), the growing influ- render visible a richer, more textured and nu- ence in Europe of “working class neo-national- anced present than the flat and monochrome ism is the … traumatic expression of material images of the “white working class” currently in and cultural experiences of dispossession and circulation. Their research uncovers the “hid- disenfranchisement”. A common concern in the den histories of dispossession, disenfranchise- narrative of urban decline has been the distri- ment and subalternity” that Don Kalb (2011) bution and allocation of state resources. Loïc calls for and, in so doing, posits alternatives. Wacquant has pointed out how, in American The sense of insult and injustice that vilifica- and French cities, “the new urban” questions of tion gives rise to is to be explained by emphasiz- “joblessness, housing deg radation, violence, ing that for working-class white people to isolation and immigration” produced new “fan- imagine themselves as a new “ethnic other” rel- tastical discourses” about the “black working ative not only to black and Asian people, but class” (1993: 130–132).5 also to white middle-class people, is not only to In this theme section, too, contributors are strip class of its political and economic conno- interested in the relationships between neo-na- tations, making it seem like the difference be- tionalism and the post-industrial, post-socialist tween the classes is now simply a cultural one, demise of a localized politics of and for the but also to make working-class white people working classes. In Britain, the concept of class feel other to a nation that they defiantly per- has been characterized by ambivalence toward ceive to be their own. It is important to note its social, economic, and political implications, here the difference between England, where and urban decline and distribution of resources these discursive moves vis-à-vis the white work- have also become racialized processes. This am- ing class are more obviously played out and bivalence has been coupled with a general sense contested, and Scotland where working-class of politicians’ irresponsibility as public sector pride remains strong even among the middle services and living conditions in many urban classes who tend to respect their working-class areas in Britain have deteriorated. histories and where socialist politics remains Addressing the emergence and influence of visible.3 the far-right British National Party (BNP) in Introduction: The middle class-ification of Britain | 9

England, both Evans and Smith explore the and the way in which people understand, expe- emergence of an economic and political void, rience and perform classed positions, which the sense of a lack of cultural legitimacy experi- they may, also, roundly reject? enced by working-class white voters and the attempts of the BNP to engineer an ethnic politics of visceral cultural nationalism. James Rhodes The case studies (2010) has made clear that a significant proportion of BNP voters in Britain are white, male, Not surprisingly, the contemporary moment in over thirty-five, skilled or semi-skilled workers British cultural politics feels, for some, like a who are inhabitants of post-industrial, formerly crisis of belonging. This theme section ad- Labour stronghold areas of the country charac- dresses this crisis. It demonstrates the emerging terized by Bengali, Pakistani, or black African tension between race, class, ethnicity, and cul- immigration and affected by socio-economic ture in Britain and reveals the highly specific deprivation. In line with Evans’s analysis (this and unpredictable ways in which people living volume) of the reasons for alienation from in post-industrial neighborhoods are surviving, Labour socialism of the more well to do mem- resisting, and giving meaning to the particular bers of the white working class, Rhodes (2010) challenges they face in contemporary times. explains the relevance of self-made distinctions Taking each article in turn and in the order between kinds of working-class white people to in which they appear, we begin with Evans’s the phenomenon of growing support for the analysis of the exclusionary ethnic rhetoric of BNP. Katherine Smith shows how residents of the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which mo- Higher Blackley in Manchester dread the BNP bilizes the language of post-colonial indigeneity and are astutely aware of the politics of hatred and attempts to identify and isolate a white they pedal but are, nevertheless, tempted to vote population perceived to be losing out to the for- for them—precisely because of the gap they are eigner, the immigrant, the non-white. Evans re- perceived to fill at the heart of a British politics lates this strategizing to a broader shift in the which has alienated the public and is desper- structure of British sociality away from the ately trying to reinvent itself. broader collective of class and toward a preoc- The articles in this volume both support and cupation with ethnic and cultural distinction. depart from this reading of the potentially neo- Evans explains how for the BNP there is little nationalist tendencies of the contemporary mo- mileage to be gained by pointing to the shared ment, showing evidence of a range of other socio-economic positions of working-class responses to post-industrial malaise. The diver- white, black and Asian British people, and their sity of analyses presented here shows above all potential solidarities are unhelpful to the BNP that it is a mistake to “lump” the “white working cause. Thus while the BNP appeals implicitly to classes” together and assume that they will re- the British working class as builders (literally) spond to contemporary political, social, and of nation and “the salt of the earth” and there- economic challenges in the same way. This raises fore legitimate and rightful heirs to the coun- the question of what anthropologists interested try’s resources, it explicitly forbids a class dis- in “class” see when they describe, ethnographi- course or analysis of its membership and the cally, or otherwise, the contemporary workings BNP’s focus on “ethnic” over-communication of class. What translation exercise is being per- obscures class domination (Eade 2002). Evans formed when they understand class as a defin- explains the alienation of more well to do white ing and structuring force in people’s lives, but working-class voters from Labour socialism when the people they study refuse class-ification? and shows how, in Bermondsey, through the What is the relationship between a political and appeal of politics as patronage, a politician seen economic awareness of capital and its disguises to have local interests at heart deflected the 10 | Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith claims of the BNP to speak and act on behalf of down working-class neighborhood of Glasgow the “downtrodden”, marginalized, and disen- that has over the years absorbed different immi- franchised majority. grant groups and prides itself on its multicul- Smith’s article also touches on the BNP from turalism. He shows how the attention paid to a different angle. She looks at the narratives and Roma as “the problem” displaces the responsi- local events that occurred around the by-elec- bility of both local and national government for tions in May 2007 and the general elections in the dilapidation of inner-city areas. If people are May 2010 in Higher Blackley, North Manches- experiencing the effects of high unemployment, ter, and describes how local people felt that a shortage of decent affordable housing, over- their vote in such elections no longer mattered. stretched education and other public and health What did matter, however, was whether or not services, a focus on the Roma deflects attention voters supported the BNP. The BNP came a away from social policies, which at best perpet- close second to the winning Labour Party in uate and at worst exacerbate the degradation. 2007 and fourth place in the general elections of Grill unpacks an intriguing story of how Slo- 2010 for this constituency, but Smith could not vakian Roma emerged as “one of the most con- always be sure from her conversation with indi- tested migrant groups on a socio-symbolic map viduals in Higher Blackley of who actually of Glasgow”. From being just one of a number of voted for the BNP. Smith’s concern is less about Eastern European populations that moved to why people would or would not vote for the Britain after the accession of new EU member BNP, and more about how, more generally, states in 2004 and unmarked as “Eastern Euro- working-class people have come to feel that pean”, the Roma got to be “discovered” after be- they do not matter. How these sentiments play ing relatively content not to self-identify as out in the ways in which people participate in Roma. They were “outed” mainly through the democracy is not, Smith argues, a reflection of previous knowledge of Roma that Slovakian and already existing prejudices, but rather, a “safe” Czech non-Roma immigrants brought to bear and noticeable expression of the anxieties and in their work as interpreters. The “socio-cul- experiences of white working-class residents. tural baggage” that educated Czech and Slovak She explores both the campaign messages of the citizens brought with them to the UK included BNP and the Labour Party as they were calcu- the opinion that the Roma were the most prob- lated to catch the imagination of a particular lematic minority in their countries of origin. sort of voter and she juxtaposes political mes- Once the Roma were singled out as potential sages with how everyday life experiences influ- challenges for health, education, and social ser - ence the ways in which persons participate in vices it was a small step for them to be linked to democracy. At the center of her analysis is the the decline of the neighborhood. Unlike the social concept of “fairness”. People in Higher Roma, the Scottish working-class residents of Blackley not only have a strong sense of “being Poundhill see themselves as “stuck”, unable to ignored” in a “multicultural Britain” but also leave or escape the “stigmatized neighborhood”: consider government and bureaucracy highly the area with a worsening public image which unfair because of how they mis-represent they cannot control. Like the Scottish fisher- “working class”, “white”, “English” or “inner men, described by Howard (this volume), they city” people. oscillate between embracing the wider public The conditions through which the rhetoric and political discourse of who is to blame and of blame is articulated become more compli- resisting the collective representation of Pound- cated as we describe the landscapes imagined hill as a problem. within these claims and the interconnections Waged and unemployed people in Britain that are created and circulated. Jan Grill focuses are starkly aware of the way in which both glob- on a relatively small group of recent immi- alization and EU expansion have put different grants, Slovakian Roma, to Poundhill, a run- kinds of pressures on existing resources in a Introduction: The middle class-ification of Britain | 11 time of cuts to jobs and public spending. Their shared experience of struggle against colonial commentary is an economic analysis of chang- powers, in this case the English. Paul Basu ing patterns and conditions of labor. Howard (2007) identifies something similar in the nar- reports on Scottish workers in the fishing, oil, ratives of white Australians who are searching and shipping industries, and her article pro- for their homelands in Scotland from which, vides an important antidote to arguments that they say, their ancestors were forcibly expelled. congeal the “white working class” as homoge- For Howard, acts of solidarity cross “gulfs of nous and racist. Howard writes of a working- global economic inequality”. This is important class cosmopolitanism developed through the in the light of what we know about the expan- international connections forged by Scottish sion, through globalization, of “the global seafarers who have traveled widely and who working class” (Kalb 2011) and of how the het- share the same experiences of harsh and precar- erogeneity of wage-dependent classes is as pro- ious working conditions with seafarers from nounced as ever. The articles in this theme other parts of the world. The men with whom section provide British examples of both global Howard worked both empathize with, and dis- and neo-liberal processes and forces, but they tance themselves from, foreign workers who are also point to less predictable responses and paid less than Scottish workers. Though they show how neo-nationalist populism is not the decry Filipino workers, say, for compromising only show in town. Smith, for example, de- the working conditions in the Scottish fishing scribes how individuals reject the “bundling” industry, they also celebrate and emphasize the effect of being labeled “working class”. Paradox- ties that link them. Howard identifies a working ically, the hierarchical and ideological underclass cosmopolitanism engendered over time pinnings of classed identities in Higher Blackley through a long history of labor migration from are rejected in some contexts in order to afford Scotland to many parts of the world. The a freedom of movement between class categories, knowledge that Scottish seafaring families have and used in others to demonstrate a moral com- of other parts of the world, concretized in their mitment to belonging, and being seen to be- collection and display of foreign artifacts and long, to the area. This raises the vexed political memorabilia, is today augmented by incoming question of who has the power to define and to labor: by Filipino, Romanian and Portuguese represent the working classes (Urciuoli 1993) at fishermen, for example, and Polish, Latvian and a time when their capacity to represent them- Lithuanian service workers. The Scottish fish- selves in British public life has been profoundly ing industry is suffering: there are enough jobs undermined. to go around, but costs and competition have For both Grill and Howard, Althusser’s no- increased, resulting in work that is increasingly tion of “interpellation” proves useful for under- more casual and temporary and outsourced to standing “multiple subjectivities”. For Althusser foreign crew on low wages. Howard cites one (1972) “individuals are always, already sub- young man who has worked on twenty-two dif- jects”: ideological state apparatuses, including ferent boats and argues that boat owners are kinship, political and economic institutions, now getting “two men for half the price of one”. have already, pre-birth, constituted the person, However his and his compatriots’ response to albeit in different ways. Grill and Howard’s eth - the threats they perceive from incoming labor nographic examples play on the duplex that Al- are multifaceted and go beyond simply blaming thusser acknowledges between the passive and the foreign worker for their plight. Howard ar- involuntary subjectivities into which people are gues that sympathy and empathy, built on the “hailed” (fixity) and the potential to orientation experiences of travel and of working in harsh rejection, defiance, and resistance around ideo- conditions, alongside people from different na- logical and dominant callings (mobility). Of in- tionalities, transcend difference. Of interest terest here are the ways in which people here is how Scottish laborers also point to a dismantle, problematize and challenge the iden- 12 | Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith tities attached to them. This theme continues (Strathern 1981)—with a model that fixes per- with Edwards’s article on family history and sons more firmly into classes circumscribed and genealogical research (family treeing)which bounded by behavior, appearance, preferences also focuses on ideas of mobility and fixity and and desires. The danger in the “cultural turn” is shows how people not only excavate hidden his- that classes are perceived to move, morph, tories but also reclaim dignity from laboring blend and mutate, while persons are fixed in pasts and challenge crass assumptions of the class categories not of their own making. “chattering classes” about the paucity of work- Anthropology’s historical engagement with ing-class culture. class can be characterized as a movement away Edwards argues that family treeing renders from viewing it only as a structured and strati- social class a more arbitrary and contingent fying dimension of social life toward under- phenomenon than the common political, aca- standing the creative and embodied relation- demic and public understandings outlined above ships that are forged in relation to and out of might allow for. Her focus on family treeing class categories. For Raymond Smith (1984: highlights the value of participant observation, 467), anthropology’s contribution to the discus- which lends itself to in-depth accounts of how sion of class was in its “recognition that soci- humans come to understand and experience eties are differentially ‘inserted’ into the world themselves to be particular kinds of people. For system” and in its insistence on “ethnographic anthropologists of Britain, this means that class specificity”. Previous critiques and debates is not always visible: it comes sharply in and out about the role of social class as an analytical cat- of view and to fix it long enough to pay close egory centered on the disconnection between analytical attention, requires screening out (al- ideology and material reality, the uncertainty of beit temporarily) the competing ways in which statistical analysis for an anthropological read- people know their place in the world. An ethno- ership whose focus was on the relationship be- graphic focus on the experience of what collec- tween action and meaning, cultural differences, tive distinctions are like to live through and and the multidimensional nature of social life embody, intersects with, compliments and cri- (Smith 1984). The cultural “stuff” which lies be- tiques the “cultural turn” in the sociology of yond class, was taken as a response to the re- class in Britain (Devine et al. 2004), which sig- ductionism of class analysis (Kalb and Tak nifies a shift in focus from the means of eco- 2005: 2). But more recent critique has focused nomic and political production to lifestyle, on the “cultural turn” (for which read also post- identity, consumption, behaviors, habits, ap- structuralist or post-modern) which according petites and desires. Edwards shows how an an- to some commentators has not only deflected thropology of social class in Britain can bring our attention from broader social and political balance to and complicate the more quantitative imperatives but has curbed anthropology’s ca- findings of sociological analyses, which in the pacity to address and intervene in pressing most recent versions of the “cultural turn” ex- questions at the beginning of the twenty-first plain class relations as a relative set of specific century. cultural proclivities (Bennett et al. 2009), but In response to what he sees as the tendency which could not necessarily anticipate the value on the part of anthropologists to misrecognise to English working class individuals of family class consciousness—“we have defined what it treeing as a significant enthusiasm in the face of is, then looked for it”, Sider (1996: 75) notes: profound economic change. Edwards’s analysis “we cannot define or mobilize what we have raises concern more generally about the shift called working-class people by any other means from class to culture which replaces the “old than through their sense of history—of the con- model” of class—where individuals were imag- nections between past, present, and impending ined as moving between classes that were fixed future, and their connections to each other— Introduction: The middle class-ification of Britain | 13 expressed not simply as abstract ideas but or ineffectiveness of the middle and upper through their actual social relations of work and classes. daily life”. The articles in this theme section do just that: they provide ethnographic examples of Acknowledgments how working-class people in Britain express connections between past, present and future This special section is one outcome of a panel through quotidian social relations of work and titled “In-migration, indigeneity and imagina- leisure. It joins other recent anthropological tion: Or class, community and crisis in Europe”, analyses of class that do not play off structures held at the biennial conference of the European of feeling, for example, against material forces Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) of history. Susana Narotzky and Gavin Smith in Maynooth, Ireland in 2010. The editors thank (2006) call for a double-plied approach: a focus Andre Gingrich, Auksuolė Čepaitienė, Katha- on the material forces of capitalist production rina Bodirsky, Alejandro Miquel, and Leonore which create particular kinds of places, and the Phillips for their contributions to the panel; the experiences and self-definitions of people in the audience for prescient comments; and the edi- localities in which they live. For them “place- tors of Focaal for their interest and support in ness” emerges from the tension, the entangle- taking it further. ment, between subjective sentiments of belonging and material forces of social reproduction. The articles in this theme section, taken to- Jeanette Edwards is professor of Social Anthro- gether, show a similar tacking between these pology at the University of Manchester. She has two poles. While class is just one of a number of published widely on kinship and assisted repro- braided strands of self-identity and is not al- ductive technologies and has a long standing in- ways mobilized as a significant mode of self- terest in the anthropology of Britain. classification, the material effects of expanding E-mail: [email protected]. global, diverse and flexible working classes im- pact on lives lived locally. Although the people Gillian Evans is Research Council UK Fellow who feature in these articles often identify more in the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural with places, pasts and patronyms than they do Change at the University of Manchester. Her re- with discrete, bounded and named classes, they search focuses on social change in post-indus- are also acutely aware of the flows of global cap- trial London. ital, the very real effects of accumulation by dis- E-mail: [email protected]. possession, and recognize the experience of the “underdog” be they Slovakian Roma or Filipino Katherine Smith lectures in Social Anthropol- fishermen. At the same time, however, changes ogy at The University of Manchester. Her re- over time in economic and political activity search focuses on local perceptions of fairness have not produced consistencies in the associa- and social equality, political correctness, and tions people may make between their own cir- social class in England. cumstances, how they think about them, and E-mail: [email protected]. the circumstances of others. Running through these articles is an inter-digitation between the classed experiences of people as they negotiate Notes the difficult terrain of post-industrial Britain and the social, economic, and political forces 1. We should note here that any gains made are that shape their senses of security, dignity, anx- currently threatened by the present govern- iety and anger about the apparent indifference ment’s attack on “state multiculturalism”, which 14 | Jeanette Edwards, Gillian Evans, and Katherine Smith

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