Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

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.

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.