Abstract Like many key terms in history and the social sciences, ‘middle class’ is at once a category ‘of social and political analysis’ and a category ‘of social and political practice’, in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper's terms – two aspects that were, and continue to be, entangled in complex ways. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’, or the ‘middling sorts’, has been a catchword in political discourse, and it became one long before scholars defined it in any systematic fashion. Once it became a more or less well-established conceptual tool of research, however, it began to take on an academic life of its own, with scholars also using it to describe people who did not invoke this category for their own self-description. But scholarly terms could – and indeed did – also feed back into folk understandings of social stratification. In particular, the recent global popularity of the term ‘middle class’ seems to be at least in part a result of the appropriation of academic categories by policymakers. This article contributes to the discussion on African middle classes by tracing the genealogy of theoretical perspectives on class and by outlining some findings from studies of the history of European and American middle classes as well as recent research on middle classes in the global South. I discuss both the history of scholarly debates on the middle classes and what empirical studies tell us about people's contested self-categorizations, and how their understandings and practices of being middle-class have changed over time. The article argues that future research on the dynamics of African social stratification has much to gain from a regional and historical comparative perspective.

中文翻译：

---

在全球南方做中产阶级：比较视角和概念挑战

摘要 与历史和社会科学中的许多关键术语一样，“中产阶级”既是“社会和政治分析”的范畴，也是“社会和政治实践”的范畴，用 Rogers Brubaker 和 Frederick Cooper 的话说——两个方面曾经并将继续以复杂的方式纠缠在一起。自 18 世纪末以来，“中产阶级”或“中产阶级”这个词一直是政治话语中的流行语，早在学者们以任何系统的方式定义它之前，它就成为了一个流行词。然而，一旦它成为或多或少成熟的研究概念工具，它就开始拥有自己的学术生活，学者们也用它来描述那些没有援引这一类别来进行自我描述的人。但学术术语可以——而且确实如此——也可以反馈到民间对社会分层的理解中。特别是，最近“中产阶级”一词在全球的流行似乎至少部分是政策制定者挪用学术类别的结果。本文通过追溯阶级理论观点的谱系，并概述欧洲和美国中产阶级历史研究的一些发现以及全球南方中产阶级的最新研究，为非洲中产阶级的讨论做出贡献。我讨论了关于中产阶级的学术辩论的历史，以及实证研究告诉我们关于人们有争议的自我分类的什么，以及他们对中产阶级的理解和实践如何随着时间的推移而发生变化。