Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

Harsha Walia is the winner of the 2022 Conrad M. Arensberg Award given by the Society for the Anthropology of Work for outstanding contributions to the anthropology of work from inside the discipline and beyond. Walia is a scholar, activist, and organizer committed to migrant justice and border abolition. She is also author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Fernwood Press 2021), Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press 2013), as well as numerous journal articles. Walia's analysis and her organizing with No One Is Illegal and other activist communities lay bare why border imperialism continues to feed into worker exploitation and why border abolition is imperative for migrant worker justice. This roundtable discussion is the culmination of collective thinking by anthropologists about how Walia's work has influenced their own, including their research, writing, and advocacy with their interlocutors who live and work across borders.

The United States resettles refugees as humanitarian-aid recipients and authorizes them to work so that they may achieve immediate self-sufficiency. Current and former refugees, who utilize public assistance, must engage in a work activity or risk losing their benefits eligibility. Is employment the right activity for them? Workfare poses challenges for families with young children. When primary caregivers (typically mothers) transition into the formal labor force, they face constraints on their capacity to determine their child's care and on the timing of their physical separations from that child. The employment focus of both workfare and resettlement policies reflects a neoliberal ideal of citizens as workers, unencumbered by partners or dependents. I utilize the concept of affective equality from Kathleen Lynch's Care and Capitalism to consider the institutional disregard of people's relational and moral needs in refugee resettlement programs. Based on research in western New York among Karen and Karenni refugees from Myanmar, this article examines how families contend with resettlement and workfare constraints on their capacity to care. I describe how interlocutors' families manage affective inequalities by constructing and utilizing family networks who nurture a care ethic focused on familial needs like the provision of kin-based care.

In Hungary, street art has emerged as a unique form of political activism since 2010, when the authoritarian populist Fidesz-KDNP government rose to power. This essay examines the street art projects of a political party, the MKKP, that transformed this genre into a practice of commoning and a mode of critique to call out the government for not maintaining the commons for the benefit of all. The MKKP's street art projects harness affective labor, which strategically links projects of repairing decaying public property with the political program of fostering active citizenship. Yet the affective labor of commoning is not recognized as a valorized form of political labor and the MKKP has not been able to gain representation in parliament. Against this backdrop, the MKKP uses satire as a strategy to emasculate an authoritarian government and a sexist political culture that does not acknowledge the political value of affective labor. The MKKP's street art projects, I conclude, shed light on the paradox that the affective labor of building democracy does not always benefit the ones who perform this labor. Nevertheless, the MKKP's activists generate other benefits following different temporalities as they expand political participation and make it more inclusive.

What are the changes in social life that paid care generates, in a context where kin have been expected to provide elder care? This question opens up key questions about the exploitation of women, who often provide domestic labor and care to their kin without pay; and about the spread of capitalism, in which goods and services required for human survival are exchanged through markets. This paper explores how paid elder care in Ghana is made possible practically and ideologically by the social blurring of the difference between nonkin paid care and kin unpaid care: one, by mistrust between kin that make the exchange of services and labor shorter term and more balanced; and two, by treating paid care between neighbors as a gift. Ultimately, I argue, the commodification of elder care is not a straightforward marker of the expansion of global capitalism, but it has led to increased class differences and tensions between women of different economic means.

The paper broadly illuminates how livelihood pursuits and acts of democratic citizenship mutually constitute each other for the urban working poor in South Asia and argues this through the “democratic action” done by the auto-rickshaw drivers in Delhi. The paper shows how the drivers work their livelihoods and maintain stable work conditions while also trying to protect its very possibilities in the future. The paper does this by tracing first how government regulation envelopes the everyday livelihoods of these drivers, forcing them to master regulation. The drivers go on to perform two kinds of work—challenging regulation on its own terrain and performing electoral activities in lieu of changing regulation and policy. The paper argues that we can understand these two kinds of activities as pertaining to substantive and procedural democracy. The paper draws upon 24 months of dissertation fieldwork in Delhi with auto-drivers, other small transport operators, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, and others associated with the small transport economy.

This article examines Latinx residential gardening in Orange County, California during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic laid bare how the suburban home is a realm of racial suffocation, where the US white propertied subject is secured through unfettered access to the life, not just labor, of racialized and gendered workers of the domestic economy. Despite disposability, residential gardeners' frontline botanical work foments a practice of making breath that, beyond expanding life in the Southern California suburban ecology of lawns, gardens, and property, also crafts more than human mutuality from the grounds of the suburban home. Thinking beyond the paradigm of gardeners' “mow, blow, and go” labor, I track how their more than human mutuality, despite appearing to be pruned back, tarries on other's property with plants, soil, and trees in ways that reemerges beyond liberal humanist categorizations of labor and the human. In doing so, I demonstrate that, despite racial suffocation, residential gardeners' practices of breathing befuddle the aims of racial capitalist COVID-19 inequity.

Reflecting on the life of the work contract during the pandemic, Ilana Gershon writes, “People began to think about the constraints and compromises they had accepted by working and began to wonder if they wanted to continue accepting these compromises. They began to dabble in imagining life otherwise and also often evaluated anew the reasons they were working in the first place, and what obligations should accompany their commitment to work” (2021, p. 62). Now more than ever, as United Auto Workers (UAW)'s workers strike in Michigan and the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) calls an end to their 148-day strike in Los Angeles and New York, we are heartened by the timely focus of the articles in this issue that center workers' experiences and more deeply examine the contracts of obligation they negotiate and commit to.

On a more personal note, this issue closes out 2023 at a critical juncture for us as co-editors of AWR. Quite significantly, we are publishing in a period of ongoing concern and uncertainty with respect to the distribution of publishing and editorial labor in the American Anthropological Association (AAA). As evidenced in the call for solidarity and transparency from our colleagues (Downey, 2023), our editorial working conditions have encouraged difficult discussions across the AAA journal portfolio around the roles we should play and the obligations we can and should honor in the complicated landscape of revenue-driven, academic publishing. Through these discussions, we have learned how singularly dedicated our fellow editors are to increasing and opening access to scientific knowledge, to supporting and developing the publishing careers of junior and early-career scholars, and to expanding and diversifying the capacities for scholarly authorship in the discipline.

As co-editors of AWR, we hold quite passionately to these ideas and are proud that this issue is an exemplar of these collective commitments. All five authors in this issue are early-career scholars. Each article has developed through iterations of careful and generous peer review and purposeful exchanges of developmental editing between authors and editors. Through this dialogic revision process, we had the opportunity to meet and talk directly to many of our authors. We work in an environment where editors are increasingly hidden and disembodied behind large digital portals, and early-career authors are alienated from infrastructural forms of mentoring and collectivity in their writing. Face-to-face author–editor relationships that at once center the author's research experience and challenge their thinking work best in the social, mutual, and intellectual infrastructures of support they provide. This is what we have encouraged here and in all other issues of AWR, and we would like all our prospective authors to know this as they consider submitting to our journal.

Collectively, these articles interrogate worker devaluation a

Ethnographic research on Connecticut farms reveals that workers in the agricultural sector experience a wide range of working and living conditions. While legal precarity, poverty, and oppressive social dynamics confine all farmworkers to positions of structural vulnerability, some acquire a kind of “structural agency” that enables them to exert influence over their conditions of work in ways that are meaningful to their everyday experiences. Several key variables are at play in producing structural vulnerability and structural agency, including agricultural subsector, farm size, type of work, immigration status of workers, workplace interpersonal dynamics, racial and ethnic hierarchies, individual farm cultures, and local and state approaches to im/migration and labor policy enforcement. Ethnography of agricultural labor must take seriously the diversity of farm work experiences and incorporate the perspectives of individuals at multiple levels of farm hierarchies. A new concept linked to structural vulnerability, “structural agency,” can facilitate analyses of how people in broader contexts of marginalization work toward positive outcomes for themselves and others.