1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor
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
Biography
Sharryn Kasmir is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University, USA. Lesley Gill is Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, USA.
