For an anthropology of the demoralized: state pay, mock‐labour, and unfreedom in a Serbian firm

Abstract

Recently, the leitmotif of much anthropological writing became that of the virtue of precarity: the belief that people continue to exercise their ethical imagination in the most trying circumstances. While refreshingly non‐deterministic, the Foucauldian approach to freedom that guides this vision neglects those situations in which people see their ability to be moral as irreparable, and structurally compromised. Such is the case of a Serbian firm selling spare car parts, where policies of financing unprofitable employment gradually involved workers in everyday, ritualized performances of productivity for the state – what I call mock‐labour. Unable either to meaningfully fulfil or to renounce the ethos of work, workers remain in an affective blend of nonchalance and failure, experiencing mock‐labour as both a source of material security and an abandonment of their creative capacities – a mocking of moral self. I call for a reconciliation of the anthropologies of ethics and precarity through the notion of demoralization, as a state in which the deficits of structural agency and the limits of reflective freedom overlap.

Theory from the Peripheries

“…Many 'ordinary' people felt stuck (Jansen 2015; Simić 2014) while others -politicians, the new rich -were seen moving at their expense (Kojanić 2017;Patico 2005). As economic precarity spread, patterns of relating and expectations from the state were being transformed (Dunn 2004;Morris 2016;Potkonjak and Škokić 2013;Rajković 2018).…”

European social anthropology in 2018: an increasingly recursive public

“…The most notable dynamic of the increasing anthropological focus on labour is the tendency to use labour as an analytic concept precisely because of the dissonance it creates with what is being described. This emerges most clearly, perhaps, in Rajković's () concept of ‘mock‐labour’, which he uses to develop ‘an anthropology of the demoralised’ focusing on low‐level state employees who seem, in a sense, to be doing anything but working. Kravel‐Tovi () also uses this same sort of dissonance between the vernacular sense of labour and his ethnographic object in his fascinating study of the exacting disciplines that apprentices seeking Israeli state‐recognised conversion to Judaism undergo.…”

‘If you look at the sky you step in sh*t’: horizons of possibility and migration from Serbia

“…In centring vernacular expressions of perspektiva , negative selection and meritocracy, I join both classic ethnography of the region and more recent works (e.g. Rajković ) in foregrounding the moral frameworks through which post‐socialist subjects make sense of the global transformations that have scrambled their lives and expectations of the future.…”