JOBNAME: Wydra PAGE: 1 SESS: 3 OUTPUT: Fri Aug 31 11:01:41 2018 24. The fall and rise of class Andrew Sanchez PROLOGUE When I was ten years of age, my primary school class in East London was taken on a short trip to a static sailing barge moored in rural Essex. Our school was located in an area of high deprivation, and although most of my friends were the children of expatriates from the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia, a good number of them had never left the city before. The trip was an opportunity for inner-city children like us to do unfamiliar, fun things in a rural setting. Over the course of several days, we made supervised excursions into the surrounding countryside, tried our hand at archery, got lost in small forests while orienteering, and scrambled over obstacle courses in the mud. In the evenings, we slept below deck in the fantastical environment of an actual boat, and sang songs with our teachers and the youth workers who managed the programme. I remember our youth workers as chirpy young characters who were drawn from comfortable backgrounds quite different to our own, and had novel ideas about how the world worked. They would do things like separate us into teams to compete with one another in a treasure hunt. At the end of the hunt, they would then ask everybody who had won. When one team declared that they had won by virtue of having finished first, they would be admonished with the statement: ‘No. We all won!’ This was repeated until we learned to properly work as factions, whilst publicly proclaiming that we were not. The youth workers and our teachers seemed to enjoy one another’s company, and over the course of the trip began to joke with one another. One of their most common routines involved adopting a mocking cockney accent, and repeatedly saying a word that was common in the children’s English: ‘Innit’. 1 On other occasions, when some especially vulgar aspect of our culture slipped into the country air, a youth worker would sigh and say ‘It’s all relative’, with a look of doe-eyed patience settled on their face. This wit was much appreciated by their colleagues. The children on the barge were generally bright and attentive, and we were aware that a world existed outside of East London. However, this was the first occasion when it was forcibly impressed upon me that society was not only comprised of groups of people who had greater or lesser degrees of privilege, but that these differences translated into cultural distinctions, and that virtual strangers could bond with one another against others according to these differences. For a child travelling on a bus back to the East End after a weekend in the country, this observation was distilled into something even simpler: it was clearly not true that all of us could be ‘winners’ at the same time. My trip to the barge took place in the early 1990s, at the moment when most social anthropologists were either concluding that social class was neither interesting nor 410 Columns Design XML Ltd / Job: Wydra-Handbook_of_political_anthropology / Division: 24-WydraChapter24_forreview_ts /Pg. Position: 1 / Date: 24/8