Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

The emergence of hailing and platform labor applications across industries has generated productive theorizing on new forms of worker control, exploitation, and data commodification. Yet, despite their significant use of labor brokerage platforms, care workers are overlooked in political and scholarly analyses of the current platform-based economy. In this article, I describe two facets of the United States home health-care industry to identify how the problems of platform labor—namely, loss of employee status coupled with decentralized oversight and routinization—germinated in the highly exploitative realm of home health care for decades prior to uberized and gig-economy capitalism. In so doing, I consider how technological oversight of remote care workers codifies care in accordance with managerial priorities and reimbursement protocols and I argue that for-profit home-care jobs in the United States presaged processes of precarity, decentralization, surveillance, codification, and data generation that now appear nearly ubiquitous across industries.

The phrase “we too have blackened our hands” was often repeated to me in conversations with shop owners in what I call “Leela Market,” one of India’s largest metal scrap and parts markets, located in Delhi. I consider the refrain of “having blackened one’s hands” in order to highlight the place-making power of repeated embodied practice and expressive forms and to explore how those who pursue their livelihood in the market invoked a particular quality and world of work to claim rightful presence and legitimacy in the city. This essay ethnographically renders two activities—“breaking a car” and “cleaning gently”—as forms of work that compose the refrain and resound through the landscape of Leela Market. These forms of work hold together various material practices and transactions, heterogeneous communities and experiences, and contested events and histories that are entangled with the transformation of metal discards into scrap and parts. As regulatory interventions challenge the relevance of the market and threaten its place in the city, these forms of work also constitute a basis for engagements with various forms and discourses of harm, pollution, and toxicity.

In Lahore, a public-private partnership has been formed to replace the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Department. Along with technological and managerial interventions into the labor process, this partnership has also brought in a class of professionals whose expertise is viewed as being essential to improving solid waste management for the city. Nevertheless, a labor force of sanitation workers and supervisors from the municipal SWM Department remain the primary means by which discarded materials are actually taken away across the urban landscape. This article examines how technical and productivist frameworks were brought to bear—especially as professionals enacted their expertise—upon the labor process by which waste materials are disposed of in the city. In doing so, this article argues that in moments of institutional and technological transition, the instability of work as a category of action opens it up to potential revaluation. Not only does this approach make clear the frameworks, whether technical or productivist, through which forms of work or labor get revalued, it also allows us to trace a politics of work beyond such frameworks.

From the outside, India’s urban construction sites appear to be places of toil, yet for workers, the material qualities of particular actions, from carrying bricks to cutting marble, are experienced as either self-affirming work or abject labor. This article explores how construction workers understand and intervene in the meaning of their work. Skilled and semi-skilled workers are particularly attentive to the bodily shifts brought on by work, as well as the varied recognition of such shifts by others. The formulation of a superior’s command, along with callouses, capacities, and the aches induced by work are all understood as elements of an unstable process of transformation. Workers are constantly on guard to ensure that their work, envisioned as a specific bodily capacity, does not devolve into labor or undifferentiated toil. By refusing to perform tasks that they consider labor, these workers simultaneously assert control over the conditions of their productive activity and recreate an embodied form of class distinction. I argue that such refusals and contestations constitute a politics of work that poses particular limitations but also possibilities for envisioning the nature of capitalist work more generally.

Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in Pakistan’s Punjab, the country’s agricultural heartland and home to the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network, this essay posits a structure of feeling of devaluation among officials of an irrigation department. It examines everyday practices of supplementing salaries, anti-corruption measures, World Bank intervention, and officials’ efforts for an enhancement of the bureaucratic scale and refusals of work. It argues that alienation from official roles, erosion of authority, knowledge practices amid patchy information, and ill will vis-à-vis donor organizations cohere as a structure of feeling of devaluation. The devaluation is inflected by individual career trajectories, challenged, and deepened even as quotidian corruption yields gains. Examining corruption as part of the labor process, the essay expands the scholarly lexicon of corruption and bureaucratic work.