| This study explores class, as a relation experienced in the everyday world, and practice, as the mode through which class structures action in, and orientations to, the world. The ethnographic core of the study focuses on the families of officers of the Indian Railways, and the servant families who work for them. Railway officers are provided with spacious bungalows in the railway colony, and each bungalow-compound contains separate servants' quarters, or "outhouses," where servants who work in the bungalow live. Residents of outhouses seek to gain permanent jobs in the railways through patronage relations with an officer's family, converting years of unwaged domestic labor into more lucrative and secure forms of waged labor. The study looks at social reproduction and the symbolic construction of class difference, as well as transformations of class distinctions as servants seek social mobility.; The study addresses a number of related themes that link the symbolic and material orders, structure and practice. Much of the work involves a semiotic analysis of class relations, focusing on the signifying practices that mediate the relations between actors in different class positions. I explore class differences in lifestyle, particularly through the uses of the polysemous Tamil word vacati, whose meanings encompass money and wealth as well as all the conveniences that money can buy. An important part of the work explores the relation between class and forms of knowledge, as well as the transfer of knowledge/practice between servants and employers. Servants do not only learn work procedures while performing domestic service, but encounter new lifestyles, leading to servants' improvisations in their own lifestyles. But employers sometimes seek to delimit servants' improvisational ventures into privileged spheres of practice and act to impede servants' mobility through railway structures. Another portion of the study explores alternate constructions of class relations as they are pragmatically grounded in different communicative contexts and how varied positions within a social order generate different schemes of class categories. Finally, the study articulates these insights with the problem of theorizing a relation among culture, consciousness and social experience in the lived-in world. |
