Thinking with Bevereley Skeggs - Stockholms universitet

material. Nevertheless, I still have to investigate the extent towhich an analysis based on a specific European context canbe applied to ethnographic material on Brazil. By that I meanthat I see the necessity of rooting classification struggles withina particular history and within the complex and controversialrealities of Brazilian society. Such a perspective might make themultidimensionality of classification struggles more prominent,in terms of both life trajectories and outcomes.Looking for those who produce – an insight intostruggles concerning authorizationThe way Skeggs charts the mechanisms by which value ‘isretained, accumulated, lost or appropriated’ (Skeggs 2004: 13,2005) and most of all her firm emphasis on the pervasiveness,ubiquity and dynamic character of class – class as a process –enabled me to reflect about some of my research questions andmethodological approaches.Looking back at the ethnographical material I had gathered sofar, I noticed that I could tell a great deal about ‘produced bodies’,i.e. bodies that went through treatments that supposedly lead toimproved modification. What I came to realize through Skeggs’texts and seminars was that I also should pay more attention toa network of agents (hidden and apparent labourers) involved inthese processes of bodily modification.Looking back at my dream (an unintended parody of participantobservation where I am an observer and a patient, a researcherand an object of research), I can also see that it includes a womanwho is producing a body (my body), that it depicts some of herwork conditions, and that it even shows a glimpse of a struggleconcerning authorization between her and myself. But what wasin my dream was not yet processed in my awaken thoughts.Besides making me aware of my own positioning in the fieldboth in class and gender terms (questions that would, per se, bethe topic of an entire paper), Skeggs’ texts and seminars have46