The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor offers a cross-cultural examination of labor around the world and presents the breadth of a growing and vital subfield of anthropology.
As we enter a new crisis-ridden age, some laboring people are protected, while others face impoverishment and death, as they work in unsafe conditions, migrate to gain livelihoods, languish in the unwaged sector, and become targets of law enforcement. The contributions to this volume address questions surrounding the categorization and visibility of work, the relationship of labor to the state, and how divisions of labor map onto racial, gendered, sexual, and national inequalities. In addition to the emotional dimensions and subjectivities of labor, the book also examines how laborers can articulate common experiences and identities, build organizational forms, and claim power together.
Bringing together the work of an impressive group of international scholars, this Handbook is essential for anthropologists with an interest in labor and political economy, as well as useful for scholars and students in related fields such as sociology and geography.
PART I Divisions of labor 1 1 To have a life: labor reproduction, value, and negative value Susana Narotzky 2 The many workers of capitalism Aviva Chomsky 3 Labour, property and persons: refl ections from Papua New Guinea Keir Martin 4 Labor and merchant capitalism in Myanmar and Thailand Stephen Campbell 5 Between the labor theory of value and the value theory of labor: a program note Don Kalb 6 Social reproduction and the heterogeneity of the population as labour Gavin Smith 7 Labor in the time of COVID- 19 (with apologies toGabriel García Márquez) Andrew Herod PART II Organizing, mobilizing, and resisting 8 Labour organisation: ‘traditional’ trade unions and beyond Sian Lazar 9 Class analysis across the “Capitalist/ Communist” divide: practicing the anthropology of labor in Kerala and Cuba Luisa Steur 10 New forms of labor and resistance in the era of fi nancialization Ida Susser 11 International unions as a sphere of working- class (re)organization: anthropological insights into Latin American steel workers Julia Soul 12 Working- class, political organization, and popular economy in Argentina María Inés Fernández Álvarez 13 Factory takeovers for production under self- management: three examples from Europe Dario Azzellini 14 Laboring for whiteness: the rise of Trumpism and what that tells us about racial and gendered capitalism in the United States Jeff Maskovsky and Julian Aron Ross 15 Food, labor, and political struggle Steve Striffl er PART III Workplaces, non- places, and labor regimes 16 Working the supply chain: towards an anthropology of maritime logistics Elisabeth Schober 17 Space– time compression: the workplace regime of transnational capitalist agriculture in northern Mexico Christian Zlolniski 18 Tea in troubled times: labour in Indian postcolonial plantations Jayaseelan Raj 19 Two workplaces and a revolution: labor in brick kilns and food factories in western lowland Nepal Michael Hoff mann 20 Freedom at work inside and outside the gig economy Deepa Das Acevedo 21 In the Romanian bubble of outsourced creativity Oana Mateescu PART IV Migrant labor 22 Border walls and passages: eff ects on labor exploitation Josiah Heyman 23 The unmaking of Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers in the 1970s Ismael García Colón 24 Contract migrant farmworkers in North America: “free” to be “unfree” Leigh Binford 25 Migration, “aff ective” labour and capitalist reproduction Winnie Lem 26 Going global: Philippine migrant encounters with mobile capital Pauline Gardiner Barber 27 Social justice writing and photography: the reality check and beyond David Bacon and John W. McKerley PART V Aff ect, values, and subjectivity of labor 28 A strike to remember: ethnographic refl ections on the conditions of possibility for labor resistance in the US heartland Chandana Mathur 29 ‘We are supposed to be the middle class’: intra- personal responsibilities, hierarchical development projects and union mobilisation on Zambia’s Copperbelt Thomas McNamara and James Musonda 30 Technologies of transformation Andrew Sanchez 31 Beyond birthing: the labor(s) of doulas and Black birth workers D á na- Ain Davis 32 Class and labor organization in building ships and dreams Manos Spyridakis 33 Unruly workers and laborless landscapes: the role of marginal places and redundant people in energy transitions Jaume Franquesa
Sharryn Kasmir is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University, USA. Lesley Gill is Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, USA.
