Auto/Biography 0967-5507 12 3 200409 Sage Publications Sage UK: London, England Book Review: Class Back On the Map Class, self, culture. Beverley Skeggs, 2004. London: Routledge; ISBN 0 415 30085 1, 215 pp. £19.99 RayFielderUniversity of Kent/Mid Kent College 262 264

262 Book ReviewClass Back On the MapClass, self, culture. Beverley Skeggs, 2004. London: Routledge; ISBN 0 415 30085 1, 215 pp. £19.99 SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120030402 RayFielder University of Kent/Mid Kent College Not much has been written recently about class. It appears to be a topic that has been missing from the research agenda over the past few years. This book successfully redresses the gap and, it claims, `puts class back on the map'. Skeggs theorizes and explores the poss- ible conditions associated with the concept of class. She sets out to show how class is constructed and given value through different cultures and categories and the many ways that culture is distributed and deployed as a resource and form of property. 263 The style of the book is surprisingly readable for a work that attempts to tease out meanings, clarify and analyse notions of class, self and culture at an academic and philosophical level. It is clearly structured and the reader is provided with signposts that direct and guide the text. Language is not overly jargonized and carefully and selectively referenced. The structure of the book is based upon four central themes or pro- cesses, namely inscription, exchange, evaluation and perspective, that constitute class in our present society. Class is considered as a dynamic, subject to change, rather than a given. The account examines the following: how certain bodies become inscribed; how categorizations of class are made in the contemporary; how it is spoken and known in a variety of ways. It suggests class is always made by, and in the interests of, those with power and it pos- sesses circuits of symbolic distribution. This symbolic struggle then impacts upon value, national belonging, interpretation of experiences and the propertizing of culture. Culture is seen as a resource that is not equally available to all. Culture can be used by the middle classes as a vehicle to increase their exchange value, establishing a relation- ship with entitlement, but that same culture cannot be converted for the working classes. Skeggs claims that value is attributed, accrued, institutionalized and lost and that there is an underlying assumption about who can have a self. Self is seen not as a subject position but as part of an exchange system in which class personhood is produced through dif- ferent technologies such as narratives and discourses. Specific per- spectives, theories and methods are promoted as morally good, generating a self only for the privileged; thus value can be produced through different perspectives. It can be seen from the account how symbolic exchange enables culture to be used as a form of property, which cannot be accumu- lated by modern, possessive individuals, therefore increasing their value and ability to move across social space. These processes show how cultures are differently valued depending on who can deploy them as a resource and how the processes are reliant upon fixing some people in place whilst others can move. It challenges debates on reflexivity, risk, rational action, individualization and mobility. Skeggs make use of an analysis of Bourdieu's perspective on the sym- bolic economy (Bourdieu, 1986), offering a specific example as an application of these processes usefully concluding into an analysis of self-formulation and how this is integral to class making. Overall, the book offers a selection of carefully written but compre- hensive analyses and interpretations that demystify the notions of 264 class, self and culture and contextualize their meanings in the contem- porary moment. REFERENCE Bourdieu, P. 1986: Distinction. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1986: Distinction. London: Routledge.