Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

Ethnographic fieldwork in Bihar, India, reveals paradoxes at the core of contemporary agriculture. Rural people view growing their own food as a crucial bulwark against the vicissitudes of the market but prioritize off-farm employment to meet rising household expenses. Landowners who cultivate crops often refer to themselves as unemployed while complaining about a lack of laborers to work the land. They do not always refer to themselves as farmers, while many people who do not call themselves farmers nevertheless perform farm work and rely on agriculture as a livelihood. These paradoxes point to the fuzziness and incoherence surrounding the term “farmer” as both an identity and analytical concept. Ideologies of agricultural labor are shaped by different subject positions and social categories, such as caste, gender, and age. The fractured, fluid, and contingent nature of agriculture, in which people move between different locations and identities, provides the grounds for problematizing scholarly categories of agricultural labor—categories like farmer, landlord, peasant, sharecropper, and laborer. The on-the-ground realities of agriculture necessitate reframing the conceptual language to attend to the specificity and materiality of labor in particular sites and moments while also foregrounding the ambivalence, vulnerability, and incompleteness that inheres in agricultural labor.

As migrant Filipina mothers embark on domestic labor abroad, their children respond in novel and dynamic ways to the work that needs doing within their households. Such work includes caring for siblings and responding to parents’ emotional and marital struggles. This labor emerges from the feminization of the global labor market, which leaves a care slot that young people register and work to fill. Attention to young people’s perspectives on their families and to their enactments of what I call “tender labor” recasts ongoing discussions about care work by highlighting how young people actively participate in the processes of transnational family separation and reunification. A pair of case studies reveals the impact of care extraction in the recesses of domestic life, as children struggle to mitigate the precarity of life for themselves and their loved ones.

By indexing several key variables in the industry to the “ficha,” the taxi fare multiplier, Buenos Aires’ taxi union recreated economic, fiscal, and legal relations emerging from taxi work. In principle a perfect example of a market device, an actant facilitating economic exchange, the ficha consistently transformed the taxi industry’s income uncertainties into certainties for the union, abstracting its income from wages, contracts, and the amount or value of work. Examining this case study from a political economy approach, I propose the trope of inscription to understand how structural inequalities can be written into the market devices that reproduce them. The political economy approach is a powerful complement to market devices as emergent technologies revolutionize the nature, quality, and management of work in ways shown to reproduce and naturalize hierarchies.

This article focuses on the rise of domestic outsourcing in the high-tech industry in the Galilee in northern Israel. Outsourcing has emerged as a self-proclaimed mode of development targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel. This industry has expanded significantly in the past decade, attracting lucrative funds from public and private sources, and it has received widespread acclaim. Firms in this industry tend to have ties to the Israeli security establishment, a key player in the architecture of high-tech in Israel. At the same time, a Palestinian capitalist class has coalesced around this industry, embracing the discourse of technology and globalization as forms of self-empowerment. I argue that separation—in terms of wages and physical spaces—is a core operational characteristic within this industry, yet firms simultaneously invoke development as part of their organizational cultures, particularly the integration of Palestinian labor into the Israeli economy, empowerment of women, and peacemaking. Locating the practice of domestic outsourcing within a history of subcontracting to the Galilee, I illustrate that this “new” and “innovative” industry builds on established patterns that reinscribe Palestinian workers as a cheaper labor force. These practices illustrate the intertwinement of inclusion and exclusion within neoliberal economic development as well as the mutual production of Palestinians of 1948 as subjects of Israeli capitalism and colonialism.