The article analyzes a situation in the Patagonian city of Comodoro Rivadavia in which strongly stigmatized workers have higher income levels than those stigmatizing them, resulting in a mismatch between symbolic hierarchies and socioeconomic class. Based on a shared interest in social inequalities and the ways in which these are culturally legitimized, the research pursued by the two authors - one an anthropologist from Buenos Aires and the other an anthropologist from the region in question - shows how an exceptional case like Comodoro can shed new light on the traits of supposedly 'normal' cases where hierarchies of prestige are more or less match income levels. Furthermore the study reveals that cases in which this correlation is not the rule are actually more common than currently registered in the literature. Finaly the work enables us to reach a sociological conclusion with policy implications: economic redistribution is a necessary but insufficient condition for a multidimensional reduction of inequality.
Linguistic Politics; Inequality; Hierarchy; Identity; Classification; Prestige; Oil Workers