Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

The settler colonial state of Hawaii has fostered tourism as its primary economic activity, despite its being only one-fifth to a quarter share of the economy. As a result, the push to reopen tourism in the face of COVID-19 pandemic conditions, which ground the industry to a near halt in 2020, has been acute. Based on our long-term involvement with UNITE HERE! Local 5 and our participation-observation of union members’ activities since May 2020, we examine worker-led safety protocols and practices to promote public health in the face of state and industry actors’ conscious exclusion of their expert knowledge in order to revive tourism. This exclusion put barriers in the way of hotel workers returning safely to their jobs and ultimately cost lives. We call this self-destructive urge “autoimmune capitalism,” an autophagic assemblage that consumes the mostly immigrant and Indigenous workers integral to the operation of tourism in the state. As tourism returns, hotel workers continue to organize for life-affirming practices even as their radical care to ensure community well-being gets absorbed as an invisible and uncompensated component of the pandemic service economy.

In June 2021, laboratory analysis of my blood indicated dangerously low levels of iron. This article chronicles my subsequent diagnosis of uterine fibroids, the hysterectomy that followed, and the scarring that came afterward. In doing so, the article tells the story of how blood circulates—or not—through biosocial systems. It shows how the properties of blood are frequently connected to conditions of exploitation to advance the argument that paying attention to how blood works, or “bloodwork,” can illuminate systemic inequality and alternative systems. In conversation with social reproduction theory, I consider capitalism’s powerful extractivist orderings of immunity in which my iron comes at another’s expense, alongside logics of immunity based on different circulatory visions. I hold on to the possibility of growing stronger without weakening others—so long as we can attend to history and its scars.

Who gets to be an author in contemporary anthropology and who does not? How do both questions about authorship expose problems surrounding academic labor and scholarly knowledge production, which have become normative features of the discipline? This essay examines how inherited logics and practices of anthropological authorship allow for the accumulation of intellectual capital for select academic laborers while excluding others, most notably field research assistants and students. Among university faculty, intellectual capital tends to concentrate in the hands of an elite few who are immunized from the demands imposed on most other academics, including unstable employment conditions and heavy course loads. This essay considers how anthropological scholars of labor can challenge the reigning logics of anthropological authorship through the adoption of new methods while also working to confront the neoliberal audit culture in higher education, which has created unsustainable demands for the majority of academic laborers.

This article explores the social category of work as it intersects with pleasure (mazaa). Through an ethnography of beauty workers in urban New Delhi, in interwoven digital and non-digital spaces, I interrogate how certain forms of work are valued at the expense of others. Beauty work refers to the broad category of work that enhances the physical appearance of oneself or others. It is a part of the new categories of entrepreneurial work that have emerged in post-liberalization India, where demands for consumer goods and services have escalated. I focus on makeup artists and beauticians: two categories of relationally produced beauty workers. While the former are popularly constructed as creative workers, the latter are viewed as providing mundane and dull forms of labor pertaining to bodily cleanliness, like body-hair removal. Pleasure, through creativity, sutures practices of work in relation to categories of class, capital, labor, caste, gender, and aesthetics. Creativity and pleasure, then, emerge as sites of articulating caste-based immunocapital (Olivarius 2019). I argue that mazaa becomes a negotiated and historically situated site for negotiating caste-based immaterial (immuno)capital.

Kuppi in Sinhala and Tamil refers to a small oil lamp, a vial. On university campuses in Sri Lanka, kuppi is the figurative term for a student-led informal study group led by a “smarter” or senior student. Informed by the complexities of university life, kuppi signifies a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall. It parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies. Drawing upon this conceit, a group of academics and activists, found the Kuppi Collective in 2020, as an inquiry of the location of the university, academia, the intellectual and of their imbrication in the state and the global, in all its complexity.

In “Conversations in a Time of Crisis,” five of the collective’s members enter into a conversation reflecting on its actions, expectations, and the political, remarking on what the future may hold. The conversation takes on an ever more insistent urgency as Sri Lanka catapults into an economic and political debacle, slowly shutting down, even as we speak. Participants in the conversation are Hasini Lecamwasam (HL), Sivamohan Sumathy (SS), Shamala Kumar (SK), Ahilan Kadirgamar (AK), and Nicola Perera (NP).

The past fifteen years have seen a rapid growth in the number of coworking spaces worldwide. In the research literature, these spaces, in which start-up entrepreneurs and other self-employed people form professional and social networks, are often understood either as a manifestation of increasingly precarious forms of work within neoliberal capitalism or as a solidary alternative to this form of individualizing and competitive economy. Drawing on ethnographic research from a coworking space in Barcelona, we identify three forms of sharing—demand sharing, passion sharing, and public sharing—which simultaneously carry the potential for communal and passionate work and for instrumental and exploitative forms of collaboration in coworking. We show how coworkers balance acts of sharing, exchanging, and buying/selling their skills and knowledge in different ways, depending on their personal situations, experiences, and professional skills. Accordingly, we argue, in this setting coworking also involves forms of “differential commoning” through which coworkers can obtain—even if it is only momentary—a sense of being part of an intentional community that operates according to values of solidarity, care and passion, which intersects with yet differs from what they perceive as individualist capitalist work life.

Labor mobility to and from tea plantations in India has been treated as an exception. Plantations continue to be imagined as unaltered enclaves with an immobile, bonded, or fixed labor force as their key feature. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in India, this article investigates forms of labor mobility to and from Assam tea plantations. While tea labor is not spatially immobile, I argue that spatial mobility does not necessarily lead to upward social mobility. Based on this observation, I reconsider the plantation in the twenty-first century in two ways: first, plantations are permeable and transforming spaces, due to ongoing labor mobility and evolving changes in the political economy of Assam tea production; second, certain forms of inequality and injustice attributed to plantation economies need to be located beyond the Plantationocene.

This article focuses on the autonomy of construction workers informally employed in Belize City, Belize, as emerging from the labor processes and material conditions that characterize construction work in this ethnographic setting. I argue that the notion of ambivalence can be fruitfully applied in order to understand how autonomy acts in contradictory ways in reproducing the relationships amongst workers, and between them and their contractors. In a context characterized by personal relationships, minimized managerial control, and flexible employment, the article employs an ethnography of the workplace which focuses on the role of trust, status and tactics used by builders to their own advantage, in order to show the relevance of their autonomy for how they meaningfully engage with their work, with each other and their employers. The article asks how workers differentially positioned within the skills-based hierarchy of the workplace act ambivalently, simultaneously reinforcing and negating their unequal place within it while striving to make their conditions less precarious.

This paper explores the interlinkages between the abundance of stuff moving through community-based reuse organizations and the labor needed to manage this material. The glut of donations is due to the sheer volume of materials moving through a wasteful linear economic system, as well as the practice of donation dumping, where unusable used goods move through reuse economies, washing their previous owners free of guilt while entangling laborers in messy relationships with objects. I draw on theories of gendered, social reproductive labor to explore how the work of localized reuse, disproportionately borne by unpaid women, reproduces communities. Following calls for work that explores the social dimensions of circular economies, this research uses a qualitative approach that draws on two main methods: participant observation in reuse establishments and in-depth interviews with reuse participants. This qualitative data provides a picture of reuse activities at a local scale and helps us understand the complex relationships formed and perpetuated through reuse. I find that the labor of volunteers is often unseen and undervalued and suggest that policies designed to address material surplus do so with these laborers in mind.