Recent middle class studies. Historical and ethnographic contributions for a renewed research agenda

Abstract

This text presents the dossier Middle classes: recent historical and ethnographic contributions. The aim of this dossier is to present the renewed path taken by studies on the middle class carried out in the last twenty-five years. A significant part of this research is mainly (but not exclusively) historical and ethnographic and differs from pre-existing studies in its focus on the middle class and the questions it raises. What has characterized this field of studies is less the unified character of its theoretical-analytic perspective and more an agenda based on problems that the usual approaches have not been able to solve or even formulated. Basically, several aspects that had been taken for granted until then were problematized: the “given” character of the middle class; its universalism; the supposed correlation between objective conditions and ways of thinking and acting; and underestimation of internal heterogeneity. Instead, these studies addressed the processes of historical formation of the middle classes, the specificities of national contexts, and the diverse practices of identification and delimitation in everyday life. After the texts by David S. Parker and Mark Liechty in the Fundamentals section, the issue features contributions by Moises Kopper, Leela Fernandes, and Anna Jefferson and Charlotte Perez. The number also includes contributions by Marco Maureira-Velásquez y Diego González-García, Kristina Grünenberg and Anja Simonsen, and Pablo Francescutti in the research articles section, and by Luis Enrique Alonso and Carlos J. Fernández Rodríguez, and Ana Grondona in the Inherited Identity section. The issue also gathers, in the critical papers section, three contributions regarding middle classes (by Lucía Gandolfi Ottavianelli, Markus Shall Enk and María Florencia Blanco Esmoris) and two additionals by Ramón Ramos Torre, and María Martínez.