Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

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.

This paper examines the project of US corporate diversity and inclusion as it is experienced by LGBTQ-identified employees on Wall Street. It draws on ethnographic research among junior bankers who participate in Wall Street’s LGBTQ recruitment events and employee networks. Attending to their claims that queer difference affords them valuable workplace skills, this paper situates these claims within the gendered ideals of Wall Street, models of entrepreneurial selfhood, and ethical projects of self-fashioning. It argues that diversity and inclusion is not simply a novel means for corporations to extract value from workers. On Wall Street, LGBTQ bankers use diversity and inclusion to, as they say, “bring their full selves to work” and fashion themselves as queer and financial subjects. Starting from their first experiences at the banks’ recruitment events, they are incited to pursue this project of self-fashioning by exemplary senior LGBTQ leaders. They learn that by managing queer difference as human capital today, they can achieve professional success in the future. In pursuit of this payoff, they engage with queer difference as an object of speculation.

In India, many women from former untouchable caste groups (Dalits) are domestic workers. Despite attempts at seeking formal, legal recognition, they continue to be seen by the state as part of a broad, ambiguous category of “informal workers” whose work is stigmatized and not legislated for. In this essay, I suggest that the discourses and practices of a neighborhood-level Dalit domestic workers’ union in Mumbai reconceptualize domestic work as “formal” work. The workers assert themselves as formal workers (kamgaar) owing to their long histories of work in specific neighborhoods, relationships of trust with employers, and their ability to negotiate long-standing employment with them. Though domestic work does not align with the state’s definition of formal work (for example, through the presence of written contracts), for the workers, it was their own qualities, origins, social positions, and relationships that defined the formality of work rather than the other way around. Centering respect and dignity in their own work, their union also facilitated the articulation of the caste and gender-based prejudices that have not only kept domestic workers outside the ambit of formal recognition but also have brought about routine encounters with violence and harassment for Dalit women in the local neighborhood.