Class vs. Race

In a post entitled “Ethnographic study: Why the education system fails white working-class children” on :: antropologi.info ::, Lorenz blogs about class as a forgotten issue in our culture (or at least in the educational system in the UK). This post caught my eye as I’ve been writing a synthesis of how archaeologists have dealt with race and class as analytical constructs…I have found myself incorporating elements of John Hartigan’s Odd Tribes, despite that I still attempt to take an deliberate anti-racist stance (and thus attempt to keep race at the center of my work)…I’m still analyzing my theoretical position(s), but you can take a look at the post and see what you think….below is a snippet.

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“Our politicians are so obsessed by race that they have forgotten the importance of class”, writes Daily Telegraph journalist Andrew Gimson and points to a new book by anthropologist Gillian Evans called Educational Failure and Working-Class White Children in Britain.

Evans conducted fieldwork in families of boys who were highly disruptive at school. Among other things, she documents the importance of class and institutional class prejudices…read the rest of the post here.

Odd Tribes: New Book by John Hartigan

Check out John Hartigan, Jr.’s new book–just released. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People is available from Duke University Press:

Odd Tribes engages debates in history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies over how race matters. Hartigan tracks the spread of “white trash” from an epithet used only in the South prior to the Civil War to one invoked throughout the country by the early twentieth century. He also recounts how the cultural figure of “white trash” influenced academic and popular writings on the urban poor from the 1880s through the 1990s. Hartigan’s critical reading of the historical uses of degrading images of poor whites to ratify lines of color in this country culminates in an analysis of how contemporary performers such as Eminem and Roseanne Barr challenge stereotypical representations of “white trash” by claiming the identity as their own. Odd Tribes presents a compelling vision of what cultural studies can be when diverse research methodologies and conceptual frameworks are brought to bear on pressing social issues.

http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3597-2