Class, Self, Culture (Transformations)

by Beverley Skeggs

"Class, Self, Culture puts class back on the map in a novel way by taking a new look at how class is made and given value through culture. It shows how different classes become attributed with value, enabling culture to be deployed as a resource and as a form of property, which has both use-value to the person and exchange-value in systems of symbolic and economic exchange." "The book shows how class has not disappeared, but is known and spoken in a myriad of different ways, always working through other categorizations of nation, race, gender and sexuality and across different sites: through popular culture, political rhetoric, economic theory and academic theory. In particular, attention is given to how new forms of personhood are being generated through class, and how what we have come to know and assume to be a 'self' is always a classed formation." "Analysing four processes - of inscription, institutionalization, perspective-taking and exchange relationships - it challenges recent