Class, Citizenship and Symbolic Struggles in Classical Athens

This article examines the symbolic construction of citizenship in Classical Athens through a relational theory of class inspired by Bourdieu and an anthropology of consumer goods à la McCracken. Focusing on clothing, especially the himation, it argues that civic identity was materially enacted through practices that encoded leisure, autonomy and moderate prosperity. Democratic discourse enabled broad groups of citizens to appropriate elite symbols while redefining them normatively. At the same time, visible manual labour and servility were symbolically displaced onto slaves and outsiders.