Developed in the mid-1970s during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and sustained by the democratic governments that followed the authoritarian regime, Chile's neoliberalization founded a political, economic, and cultural project that has had a significant impact in Chilean society. Probably one of the most salient phenomena in this regard was the expansion of the middle classes. Joel Phillip Stillerman focuses precisely on this group, in an attempt to offer a compressive picture of how middle-class families signify their living conditions and construct their identity through discourses and practices around work, housing, cultural consumption, school choice, and taste preferences. To do this, Stillerman carried out a qualitative study in which he conducted almost seventy semi-structured interviews and participant observation in homes and schools. In addition, he took pictures of living rooms to delve into people's lifestyles and decoration preferences. The data was gathered primarily in the late 2000s in two comunas (districts) in Santiago, Ñuñoa, and La Florida, as is clearly explained in the methodological appendix.
In theoretical terms, Stillerman's book is organized around two main concepts: identity investment and precarious privilege. Based on Bourdieu's seminal work on class-based habitus, the former is defined as “the set of motivations and practices that guide economic decisions so that they affirm individuals’ deeply held values” (7). The latter, in turn, is used to “understand the fragility of the middle-class in contemporary Chile as well as middle-class Chileans’ motivations for constructing symbolic boundaries with other groups” (9). The concepts of identity investments and precarious privilege allows the author to build one of the main arguments of the book: the middle classes in Chile draw on partisan, organizational, and ideological legacies of Chile's recent past to carry out their investments in different markets (work, housing, schooling, home decorations, and cultural consumption) through which they differentiate themselves from other middle-class groups. With this argument, Stillerman is engaging critically with scholars who have also examined the middle classes in Chile, but who have focused mainly on lower-middle class families’ pursuit of upward mobility and upper-middle class families’ attempts to preserve their privileges. In contrast, Stillerman reveals that a significant part of the middle classes “use identity investments as a means of symbolic struggles against more economically successful families and to manage fraught relationships with the poor” (204).
To provide the reader with a broad image of Chile's middle classes, Stillerman constructs a typology of middle-class groups (activists, moderate Catholics, pragmatists, and youngsters), each of which is composed of families with different backgrounds and ideological orientations. Each chapter is dedicated to examining how these groups behave in the distinct markets described above, which allows us to understand the varieties of families and lifestyles that are included in the middle classes, as well as how they respond to their precarious privilege. For example, when talking about the labor market, Stillerman shows that, while, activists and moderate Catholics emotionally withdraw from competitive workplaces as a way to deal with labor instability, youngsters experienced an upward labor trajectory. Likewise, when talking about schooling, Stillerman demonstrates that while some groups based their school choice on ideological or political principles (activists and moderate Catholics), others look at schools as a means to promote upward mobility (pragmatists).
Methodologically innovative and theoretically robust, Stillerman's book is a brilliant work which provides the reader with a detailed representation of the middle classes in neoliberal Chile. In addition, the author offers suggestive reflections on Chile's recent political history, which has been framed by intense mobilizations for rights and an unprecedented constitutional process, focusing on the ambivalent ways in which the middle classes have taken part in politics. In sum, this is a fascinating book for anyone interested in understanding how middle-class groups form their identity by participating in different markets and the ethical, symbolic, and political implications of such involvement.
