Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

As I read “Revaluing Work after COVID-19” (Collins, this issue), I wondered how was it that garment workers making the personal protective equipment (PPE) so desperately needed during the pandemic were never considered “essential workers.” As governments wrestled with the need to sustain their economies while safeguarding the health of citizens, keeping health infrastructures functioning, and ensuring the basic needs of populations could be met, they had to determine whose work was “essential.” As Collins (this issue) shows, these debates exceeded the “narrow technical meanings coming to signify workers who were putting their lives on the line to insure the well-being of the rest of us.” Amidst celebrations of other “essential workers” and craftivists sewing masks from the comfort of their homes, the non-essential essential labor of garment workers stayed on the margins of the historical memory of COVID-19. This essay thinks with Collins to consider how garment workers got lost in between the scales of the national and transnational.

India's textile and clothing worlds are marked by a distinctive model of creative interaction between “designers” and “artisans.” Referencing different skills and social positions, this designer–artisan dyad was relationally configured during India's post-colonial transition in the 1940–50s, imbued with distinctively modernist ambitions of national development. Such imperatives remain prominent in pedagogy at Indian design schools, where novice designers are routinely taught to develop relationships with artisans and position themselves as intermediaries between “village” traditions and world markets. At a moment when fashion industry institutions globally are grappling with colonial legacies, Threads: Sustaining India's Textile Traditions takes up the question of how, and on what terms, Indian fashion designers and textile artisans perceive value in their shared projects.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath instigated a series of debates about economic value. From early discussions about “who counts as an essential worker” to post-pandemic arguments about what constitutes the “infrastructure” needed to rebuild the economy, the pandemic led to reexaminations of the kinds of investments and activities necessary for the continuity of our social system. This article examines these debates through the lens of the labor theory of value as expanded by feminists and ecologists. Drawing on my 2017 book, The Politics of Value, I discuss how the political-economic upheaval that the pandemic unleashed laid bare the essential nature of care and social reproductive work, low-wage labor, public sector provisioning, and ecosystem services. The stark dilemmas of holding body and soul together during the crisis created an opportunity to rethink the artificial lines between the market and the rest of life, highlighting the essential nature of activities formerly unrecognized or considered nonproductive. The article discusses how we might take advantage of this opening to create new vocabularies and measurement practices that take into “account” and fairly reward formerly invisible and unvalued forms of labor.

This article explores the curious case of the ketab shenass (book knower), a figure unique to the Iranian publishing industry. Ketab shenass play a crucial role in the production of translated books, yet their labor is invisible and uncompensated. A comparison of their expertise to that of their closest counterparts reveals that anxieties surrounding the politics of mediation undergird the invisibility of the labor of the ketab shenass.

Alternatives to traditional waged and salaried work have become increasingly relevant in a post-pandemic U.S. labor market in which it seems that everyone hates their job. This article proposes that nonemployer businesses, business firms with no paid employees other than the business owner(s), constitute a distinct economic and cultural category of independent work in the U.S. economy, in addition to being a specific category of small business. Building from anthropological scholarship on entrepreneurship and on alternative forms of work, I argue that nonemployers are a recognizably discrete group from independent contractors because they think of their ventures as businesses. At the same time, nonemployer business owners expend their energy on building more holistic lifestyles rather than on wealth and capital accumulation. These findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in New York and North Carolina from 2017 to 2020. The stories I gathered illustrate that, by doing the work and running the business, nonemployer business owners control the practices and process of their work, and avoid both the precarity of other work arrangements and the stresses of growth-oriented entrepreneurship.

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.