ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an account of this methodological and substantial focus, some flows of people in the world-system have been more visible than others. It explores differential visibility made for the disproportionate representation of those flows of people in mainstream sociological theory, especially the sociology of social inequality and stratification. The chapter argues that the enduring prominence of class and status as primary dimensions for the analysis of social inequality in current sociological production represents an overgeneralization from the Western European experience. The conceptualization of European industrial society as modern and of non-European agrarian societies as premodern allows it to conceive of them as disconnected contexts of social inequality, to be explained and analyzed in terms of class on the one hand and of ethnicity/race on the other. The focus on culture and epistemology with the one on political economy helps uncover coloniality as more encompassing and more enduring than colonialism, but it presents both as prerequisites of Western modernity.
