Troubled Reproduction: Capital, Boundaries, and Malaise in Chile’s Middle Classes

• In Event: 2241 - New Consumption Research: politics, class and networks

Abstract

Recent scholarship on culture and stratification explores established fields of inquiry such as education (Khan 2011; Calarco 2018; Reay et al. 2011), housing (Savage et al. 2004; Savage et al. 2015; Boterman 2012), employment (Rivera 2015; Laurison and Friedman 2016), and cultural consumption (Savage et al. 2015; Lizardo and Skiles 2016); as well as new arenas of symbolic conflict such as food (Cairns et al. 2013; Best 2017; Schrank and Running 2018) and environmentally-conscious consumption (Carfagna et al. 2014; Holt 2014). This work underscores the continuing importance of economic, social and cultural capital as key assets securing privileges for dominant groups and how the affluent use seemingly “alternative” or “oppositional” discourses and practices to seek distinction. However, individual works focus on well-established middle classes operating within a single field. In contrast, this study, based on 77 interviews with middle class couples and photographs of 31 of their living rooms in Santiago, Chile, analyzes patterns of inequality across the fields of employment, housing, education, home decoration, and cultural consumption. I argue that the privatization of education and land markets as well as trade liberalization have led to a restructuring of middle classes leading to changing symbolic conflicts and reproduction strategies. Individuals experience malaise as old stratification patterns evolve. They express this malaise by contrasting their values of political commitment and religious faith with market-based values of wealth and materialism. However, like environmental and local food movements, these “oppositional discourses” belie middle class efforts at distinction and class advantage.

Author

• Joel P. Stillerman, Grand Valley State University