On the middle class: Auto-anthropology and social class
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4431
Nota critica su Hadas Weiss, We have never been middle class, London and New York, Verso, 2019, pp. 176; Caitlin Zaloom, Indebted: How families make college work at any cost, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2019, pp. 280.
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Carlo Capello
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On the middle class: Auto-anthropology and social class
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Carlo Capello
2020/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4431
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On the middle class: Auto-anthropology and social class
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                                      2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2020: 161-169




                                                                   NOTE CRITICHE

On the middle class
Auto-anthropology and social class
Carlo CAPELLO
Università di Torino



Hadas Weiss | We have never been middle class, London & New York, Verso, 2019,
pp. 176.
Caitlin ZALOOM | Indebted: How families make college work at any cost, Princeton &
Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2019, pp. 280.



   Reading Hadas Weiss’s and Caitlin Zaloom’s books gave me the
opportunity to further reflect on some of the methodological and political
features that emerged during the inquiries I undertook as I prepared my Ai
margini del lavoro. Un’antropologia della disoccupazione a Torino (Capello
2020). I am referring to the potentialities and risks involved in any auto-
anthropology envisioned as ethnography at home, as well as to a renewed
interest in social class in contemporary anthropology (Carrier, Kalb 2015).
These two questions – closely interrelated – represent some of the main
strengths of the books under discussion which both aim to construct –
almost from scratch – an anthropology of the middle class.
   My inquiry among the unemployed was born from an urban anthropology
project about Turin – the city where I’ve been living and working for many
years. The choice of unemployment as the main subject was an attempt to
surmount some of the difficulties of any urban “ethnographic homework”.
My original interest was in the mutation of the city’s social and economic
scenario – a constant decline ideologically depicted as a simple change – but
I was in doubt about the fieldwork. Even for this reason, I chose to focus my
ethnographic eye on the adult, working-class unemployed. The latter indeed
emerged as the living symbol of contemporary Turin, which is characterised –

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Carlo Capello
On the middle class: Auto-anthropology and social class
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2020: 161-169.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4431
162                                                                CARLO CAPELLO


just like them – by a liminal condition of waiting and a lack of identity. The
decision to concentrate my fieldwork on the stories and problems of people
rejected at the very margins of the world of employment reflects the most
common strategy among anthropologists who investigate their own society.
Anthropologists tend, in fact, to look at social reality from the margins and
from the bottom, offering in this way representations that differ from and
oppose the hegemonic discourse. Although the potentialities of such an
approach are clear (Malighetti 2012), we can still ask ourselves: since the
scholars – due to their cultural, symbolic (and more often than not,
economic) capital – don’t share the same social environment of their
subaltern class interlocutors, can we still talk in this case of auto-
anthropology or of ethnography at home? In other words: don’t we risk, with-
out the appropriate awareness, substituting the classic cultural difference
with social distance? And last but not least, is studying from the bottom and
the margins – as fruitful as it is – really the only method at our disposal in
critically investigating our own society? Weiss’s and Zaloom’s volumes also
raise some questions about these methodological (and political) issues,
showing the potentiality of anthropological research conducted, not among
the subaltern, but rather in the “middle” – the potentiality of an anthropology
of the middle class and its myths.
   However, it is not easy to speak of perspectives from below and in the
middle, of subaltern classes and middle classes. With regard to this kind of
class definition and analysis, our conceptual limits converge with the
complex subjectivities of our interlocutors. My ethnographic subjects, for
example, were not prone to think of themselves in terms of class, and when I
pushed them, they tended to describe themselves as “middle class” or, in
their own terms, as simply “normal people” (Capello 2020). Doing this, they
were following a widespread trend, well synthesized by Weiss (2019: 3): “By
and large, many more people self-identify as middle class than would be so
identified by any other criteria”. We can then ask, along with her: why, in
late capitalism, does almost everybody tend to see themself as part of the
middle class? And what, exactly, does “middle class” even mean?
   Weiss’s line of inquiry revolves around that noun, “class”, which the
comfortable adjective “middle” tends to disguise. The focus on the “middle”
and on social mobility conceals the inequalities of power, resources and
opportunities of the economic structure that are at the centre of her critical
inquiry. This is why the scholar dedicates the first part of her book to a brief
but radical analytical reconstruction of capitalism, as a system based on the
accumulation of surplus, and of the concept of social class, shown as the
main expression of a social hierarchy of constraints and possibilities.


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ON THE MIDDLE CLASS                                                              163


   Because of her interest in the structural dimensions of capitalism, Weiss’s
analysis reminded me of the important book edited by Carrier and Kalb
(2015), with whom she shares the project of going beyond an exclusively
ethnographic approach to open up a wider – anthropologically minded –
theoretical discourse on the contemporary capitalist mode of production.
Furthermore, both works testify a renewed interest in anthropology for the
social class – as an analytical tool as well as an object of inquiry. Although
social inequalities have never disappeared from the anthropological horizon,
only in recent years has the issue of class returned to the forefront. At least
in part, the reduced interest in class analysis was due to the fact that the idea
of social class shifted, since the 1980s, from being an “experience-near”
concept to an “experience-distant” one. In political movements and
protests, the rebellion against economic dominance and exploitation left
room for other political claims and slogans, declined in terms of race,
ethnicity, gender or ecology. At the same time, less and less people
identified themselves in terms of class. However, although the issue of class
subjectivity remains problematic, the long economic global recession begun
in 2008 – which has done so much in showing the dark side of capitalism –
has in part contributed to a new rise in interest in the concept of class (Kalb
2015). Within this frame of re-emergence, the middle class matters could
play a crucial role. If, in fact, subaltern classes experience the inequalities of
the economic system directly, within the “normality” of the middle class the
contradictions of neoliberal ideology manifest perhaps themselves even
more clearly.
   This is exactly Weiss’s point of departure. The effects of the prolonged
global crisis, pervasive job instability, as well as the alarmist discourses
about the shrinking or disappearance of the middle classes are all
expressions of a simple truth, one that is consistently concealed by
dominant representations: the plain fact that “we have never been middle
class”, because actually “the middle class does not exist. For all the time we
spend talking about it, much of what we say is contradictory” (Weiss 2019:
1). Let’s consider, first of all, the difficulty in defining the middle class in
itself and establishing who is part of it and who is not. Actually, Weiss notes,
there is no sound parameter of classification and, in particular, no criterion
working both within advanced economies and in emergent countries. The
kind of occupation, qualifications, level of study, income – all appear to be,
to a critical eye, imprecise criteria with a strong political connotation.
Similarly, self-definition is even less trustworthy, since almost everybody
sees themselves as middle class, nowadays a synonym for “normality” in
everyday discourse. The idea of middle class is, therefore, rather vaporous;

                                   2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2020: 161-169
164                                                                CARLO CAPELLO


yet it enjoys enormous popularity, above all among politicians and
mainstream economists, who are always ready to praise its virtues and
defend its interests. All this stands, in Weiss’s opinion, as evidence that an
ideological discourse is at work. The middle class is an ideology. What Weiss
aims to do, then, is show the meaning and function of this ideology, above
all to an “implicated” audience, to a readership already influenced by the
middle-class rhetoric.
   In this sense, Weiss is proposing true, critical and engaged “auto-
anthropology”, based on her personal experience, enriched by ethnographic
fieldwork in her home-country – Israel – and in Germany. “Auto-
anthropology” that speaks to a public identified not in cultural or national
terms, but explicitly by class. To an “us”, as she states in the Introduction,
who could eventually be defined as middle class, due to the level of cultural
capital for example – and that for this reason could be easily deluded. Thus,
by deconstructing the same idea of middle class, she wants us to reflect on
this ideological illusion and its consequences for our political subjectivities.
What Weiss demonstrates is, in fact, that the middle class is the effect of a
false representation, centred on an individualistic and meritocratic logic,
which leads us to believe that our social standing, our economic security and
our wellbeing depend only on us, on our personal efforts; the effect of a
delusionary discourse affirming that social mobility is simply a consequence
of our choices and our investments, instead of being determined by
unequally distributed opportunities. The dominant discourse represents the
middle class as a clearly defined social standing that we can access thanks to
our personal qualities and merits. In this way, it conceals the systemic nexus
of constraints and opportunities, legitimizing the social and economic
hierarchy.
   To illustrate the illusory essence of this discourse, Weiss closely examines
some of the pillars of middle-class standing – such as private property,
“human capital”, civic spirit – revealing their incongruence and
inconsistencies. At the core of middle-class ideology lies the idea that
individual effort, by way of hard work and savvy investments, is a guarantee
of social mobility and economic security. This meritocratic discourse
depicting sacrifice as the primary bourgeois virtue, however, nowadays falls
short with regards to both residential property and higher education. In the
era of financial capitalism, property no longer guarantees concrete economic
stability: buying a house, for example, can easily become a bad investment,
leading to various forms of debt. But above all – putting aside the individual
case – the entire debt machine is directed towards the appropriation of
surplus by the financial system, in a way that exacerbates the general

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ON THE MIDDLE CLASS                                                                   165


economic turbulence. Something similar can be seen in the realm of
education and in that of sociability, both reduced by the dominant ideology
to “human capital”: a clear instance of reification of people’s lives and
relations. Weiss shows that, notwithstanding our efforts, any personal
investments in these such distinctive realms in middle-class identity,
actually produce more and more anxiety and debt, instead of success and
security.
   The awareness that the investments which define the middle-class
lifestyle are less and less profitable puts into question the rhetoric of
mobility, and in this way helps us to acknowledge that, far from being well-
off entrepreneurs of themselves, most members of the so-called middle class
are in fact exploited and indebted workers, to whom the system concedes
mere scraps of wealth and the illusion of self-determination. The function of
middle-class ideology is now clear: presenting social inequalities as the
effects of our personal choices and actions, it tries to legitimize generalized
competition, concealing the structures and contradictions of contemporary
capitalism.
   Weiss’s auto-anthropology is above all a piece of critical theory, using
ethnography mostly as a point of departure for her argumentation; in many
ways, Caitlin Zaloom’s book is the perfect complement thereto, offering us
an original in-depth ethnographic description of the middle class and its
contradictions. Zaloom investigates the middle class by focussing on the
huge problem of the rising costs of higher education in the United States and
the resulting student and familial debts1. The ethnography vividly exposes
the absurdity of a university system that, having fallen prey to finance and
neo-liberal ideology, turned into a source not of social mobility but of
insecurity and anxiety for so many families. Indebted could then be seen as a
development of the author’s previous work: as if, after having studied the
world of finance by means of the ethnographic description of the stock
exchange system (Zaloom 2006), the anthropologist had felt the need to look
at its tangible impact on the lives of American people.
   Zaloom has, then, noteworthy experience in the realm of auto-
anthropology: of the study of her own society. In her new book, however, the
auto-ethnographic dimension is more evident: being a professor at New
York University, one of the most prestigious and expensive American
universities, and a member of the (upper) middle class, the contradictions


1. An important issue even for the American political debate: one of the main points of
Bernie Sanders’s program is the cancellation of students’ debts, as well as free access to
state universities and colleges.

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166                                                                CARLO CAPELLO


she investigates concern her directly. Indeed, as she explains in the
Introduction and in the Methodological Appendix, the research project was
born out of a personal interest for the predicament of her students, from
whose situations the inquiry started before extending to other colleges and
universities.
   Since the inquiry aimed at understanding the opinions of middle-class
families about university and its growing costs, Zaloom’s first problem was
to find an effective criterion to establish middle-classness. She finally
decided to define middle-class every family whose income was above the
threshold for receiving grants, but who then required loans and mortgages in
order to pay the university fees and taxes. Besides its methodological
usefulness, the chosen criterion is indeed interesting because debt – rather
than college attendance, for example – is presented as the true sign of
contemporary American middle class.
   The families Zaloom met are faced with a dilemma. Reporting the words
and opinions of many interlocutors, the anthropologist shows how higher
education is important for them, for many different reasons. First of all, we
find a number of pragmatic motives: university is, above all, a means for
social status, since higher education is deemed mandatory for young people
to find a good job and a successful career. Furthermore, sending children to
college is, in itself, a distinctive badge of middle-class identity. Alongside
these kinds of reasons, however, we can also find some more “idealistic”
ones: from the point of view of these families, university is indeed an
investment, but first and foremost it is an investment in the human and
intellectual “potential” of their children. Giving their children the
opportunity to cultivate their potential becomes, then, a primary value
superseding any economic calculation.
   Still, economic and pragmatic calculations are necessary in any case
because university and college costs are so exorbitant that middle-class
families end up in a real predicament – made up of student loans and family
debts – that directly affects their projects and their future. Due to political
decisions influenced by a merely economic vision, over the past decades
university costs have reached levels considered unbelievable by us
Europeans: even in a public state university – without even considering elite
private colleges – fees and enrolment costs amount to more or less $35,000 a
year. Zaloom carefully reconstructs the history of the political and
ideological changes that led to such a situation: if, following the Second
World War and for many decades afterwards the public politics aimed to
make higher education – seen as a public benefit because of its positive


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ON THE MIDDLE CLASS                                                              167


effects on society as a whole – accessible to as many people as possible,
since the 1980s neoliberalism has completely overtaken the university
system, emphasizing its elitist nature. Higher education is now portrayed in
the dominant discourse as a private resource, or even as a mere commodity
finalised to job and career, and then as an exclusively personal investment.
This neoliberal representation of the educational system has led costs to
skyrocket, due to the cut in public spending for the university system and
the drastic reduction in public funding for students.
   All this is the source of a dramatic aporia for middle-class families, who
are in a way obliged to balance their ambitions with economic strategies, and
to think of their children’s potential in terms of human capital to be invested
in, with less and less assurance of actual economic gain. Above all, debt –
personal and familial – goes against what they deem the main purpose of
higher education: personal autonomy. Because of the level of debt incurred,
far from becoming autonomous young graduates have more limited options
with respect to their career plans and, above all, remain dependent on their
families for many years.
   Due to neoliberal hegemony higher education, which should be a
collective resource for the growth of civic spirit as well as a solid opportunity
for the young, has turned into a trap for too many people. This means, for
Zaloom, that the influence of finance over university has led to a betrayal of
the true democratic values with regards to education and personal freedom.
   Even in this regard, then, we can detect some analogies and differences
between her inquiry and Weiss’s book. Both scholars are engaged in a critical
denunciation of the effects of financial capitalism on common people, whose
lives are more and more insecure and indebted. However, while Zaloom
seems to share the values of her middle-class interlocutors – bemoaning
their betrayal by a political system subjected to the neoliberal credo – for
Hadas Weiss these same values are in large part ideologically-loaded and
contradictory in themselves.
   This difference is strictly linked to the political stances of the two authors,
leaning towards the anti-capitalist left, in the case of Weiss, and towards the
liberal left in the case of Zaloom. I stress this point, because I deem that any
auto-anthropology – whatsoever we may mean by the term – should
necessarily take a clear political position. Exactly as it should take into
account – as we have seen – the class nature of our social system.




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168                                                                     CARLO CAPELLO



REFERENCES
Capello, Carlo, 2020, Ai margini del lavoro. Un’antropologia della disoccupazione a
      Torino, Verona, Ombre Corte.
Carrier, James, Don Kalb, eds, 2015, Anthropologies of class: Power, practice, and
      inequality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kalb, Don, 2015, Introduction: Class and the new anthropological holism, in
      Anthropologies of class: Power, practice, and inequality, James G. Carrier, Don
      Kalb, eds, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Malighetti Roberto, 2012, La centralità dei margini, in Comprendere il dissenso. Et-
      nografia e antropologia dei movimenti sociali, Alex Koensler, Amalia Rossi, a
      cura di, Perugia, Morlacchi: 7-11.
Zaloom, Caitlin 2006, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to Lon-
      don, Chicago, Chicago University Press.




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ON THE MIDDLE CLASS                                                                  169




Carlo CAPELLO is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of
Turin. He is doing research on neoliberalism and unemployment from an
anthropological and ethnographic point of view. Among his recent publications:
Clinica del non-soggetto. Disoccupazione, sofferenza sociale e neo-liberismo morale a
Torino (Illuminazioni, n. 48, 2019); L’etnografo e il narratore (Filosofia, n. 65, 2020);
Ai margini del lavoro. Un’antropologia della disoccupazione a Torino (Ombre Corte,
2020).
carlo.capello@unito.it




                                      2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2020: 161-169
