Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

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.

Written in the swim and wake of the world financial crisis, Jane Collins's book The Politics of Value: Three Movements to Change How We Think about the Economy (2017) tells a history of the US economy and finance that is fundamentally and distinctively anthropological. By this I mean not that it draws on research outside of the so-called West or so-called market-based societies but that it begins its analysis by questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions upon which the economy is organized and work is valued.¹

In The Politics of Value, Collins told the history of the decline of “the embedded liberalism compromise” (Ruggie, 1982, 1991). A major catalyst and symptom of this decline was the rise of the preeminently disembedded concept of shareholder value, which allowed for the dislocation of social utility or a labor theory of value from share prices (Collins, 2016, 2017). Like a number of other scholars (Federici, 2018; Fraser, 2017; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Graeber, 2019; Hart et al., 2010), she focused attention on how valuation happens in capitalist economies and how definitions of value render certain problems and populations outside its frame, literally invisible or, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot would describe it, “unthinkable” (1991). Collins aims to expand the thinkability of forms of valuation that account for things like just distribution, social reproduction, and generational transfer.

The Politics of Value focused on three cases emergent in the mid-2010s, centered on ethical corporate practices, place-based and “slow” capital projects, and contention over labor in the context of public and civil service. Building on the insights of that earlier inquiry, especially the focus on valuation as political, Collins opens her 2023 article by saying, “Calling something valuable is always a discursive move, but it is part of a discourse about materiality. The conversations about economic value described in this paper all contend with the fact that our contemporary accounting practices fail to register activities essential for social life and that this failure has material consequences” (2023, 2). Materiality here has two related and important meanings: it refers to the tangible, apprehensible effects of valuation and revaluation, and also their relevance—how they matter for people. The COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its earlier phases, caused us to focus attention on what matters—thus bringing into view who the “essential workers” are, what is “essential” in the economy, and what infrastructure is required, in the first place, to meet social needs. Collins's emphasis on value as political and therefore contentious allows us to see how people prise open spaces where these questions can be seen, can be discussed, and can become thinkable in the first place.

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.

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.

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.