EN
In the article I intend to describe the way in which “scientific” categories of race and class are invented and transferred into public culture and subsequently instrumented in creating and maintaining imaginaries and practices of colonial and postcolonial power relations. I interpret colonialism and postcolonialism in a very broad context, as a continuum encompassing creation and recreation of the contemporary rules and phenomena that are related to the functioning of nation-state power, which in turn is shaped, as a set of ideas, by discourses of public culture. My arguments derive from anthropological research on social mobility and are illustrated with examples from Jamaica and the USA.