Organizer: Ronald J. Herring, Cornell University

Discussants: Rina Agarwala, Princeton University; Leela Fernandes, Rutgers University; Patrick Heller, Brown University; Emmanuel Teitelbaum, George Washington University; John Harriss, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK; Vivek Chibber, New York University

Class analytics have been obscured, even marginalized, by overlapping developments inside academia and out. Market triumphalism followed the demise of Soviet-style dictatorships; Marx was somehow rendered quaint thereby. In discursive turns, nouns came to carry explanatory power; modernity does things, reacts, imposes. In the positivist and formal theoretic turn of social sciences, place and context became less important to explanatory strategies -- India becomes yet another case -- and social relations central to class analytics gave way to easier-to-measure substitutes, such as income or education, when social stratification is examined as a variable. Property -- the linchpin of class analytics -- ceases to be an empirical puzzle in favor of a discursive postulate; in institutional analysis, formal structures prove more amenable to modeling than does property. Indian intellectuals have been a major force in the eclipsing of class in favor of more micro [the body as site of contestation] and more macro [globalization] gazes of social analysts. Epistemological relativism challenges science, which even becomes an enemy of the people in some dominant accounts. As a result of these trends, valuable tools with which to analyze current dynamics in South Asia have also been lost. The recent liberalization era has increased class distinctions, distinguished state-citizen relations by class, and altered class politics on the ground. Yet little is understood about the drivers and the impact of these changes. We seek to investigate and refine the place and limits of class in understanding politics and allocative patterns in a globalizing South Asia.