The Value of Reproductive Labor

Griffith, David; Preibisch, Kerry; Contreras, Ricardo

doi:10.1111/aman.12973

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…He suggested that alternative work ethics “unleash the inventive play of ethical labor and give rise to unruly subjects” (74). Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras () asked how people value their labor positively in exploitative conditions, focusing on guest worker programs between Guatemala and Canada and between Mexico and the United States. They argued that reproductive and productive labor can add value to one another and thus provide “happiness, dignity, and social legitimacy” (224).…”

Section: Captivity: Wolves Zombies and Oil Palmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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Section: Captivity: Wolves Zombies and Oil Palmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…Increasingly, today, in an era of growing economic precarity, workers spread their labor across multiple livelihoods that not only include a variety of income-generating activities but also depend on various forms of labor-wage, domestic, reproductive, and so on (Collins 1995;Comitas 1964;Quijano, et al 2015). Combining productive with reproductive labor has been particularly common, the former generating income in multiple forms and the latter generating other kinds of benefits (often along with income) such as future security, intimacy, happiness, and fulfillment (Griffith et al 2018). Briefly, I argue here that focusing on labor, in a variety of forms and across multiple livelihoods, rather than markets yields a more holistic understanding of work, livelihoods, and economics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Labor in Livelihood Constellations along Coastal Plains

Griffith

2021

Anthropology of Work Review

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Coastal plain economies are dependent on seasonal, low‐wage labor for tourism, fisheries, construction, and other sectors. Historically, labor in these sectors has come from multiple social and cultural backgrounds: natives, legal and undocumented immigrants, visiting mariners, students, guestworkers, etc. Anti‐immigration sentiments around the world have forced undocumented immigrants further underground while increasing demand for legal guestworkers, encouraging the growth of subcontracting and nonmarket labor relations, making work more precarious and laying the groundwork for human participation in livelihood constellations—or several activities that individuals and households combine for income, health, and well‐being. Focusing on Eastern North Carolina, this paper examines how these processes influence local economies and the lives of working people, using this analysis as an occasion to critique market‐emphasis economic analysis.

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“…As Boris and Parreñas (2010) note, intimate labor creates interdependent relations, fulfills a multiplicity of core human needs, is central to household maintenance and personal survival, and entails intimate interactions between those who perform it and those who receive it. Therefore, intimate labor often includes reproductive labor that reproduces life (Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras, 2018), care work that maintains life (Martín Palomo, 2016), and affective work that generates positive affective energies (Gutiérrez‐Rodríguez, 2013). It also often includes paid affective labor (Hardt, 1999) and unpaid emotional labor (Hochschild, 2003), distinguished thus by Lukacs (2015), both of which entail manipulating and producing affects and hence intangible, immaterial goods through proximity and human contact.…”

Section: Pseudo‐kinship Reciprocal Obligation and Affection As Ambiva...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reciprocity and intimate capital in household work: Exchanging love and care for labor rights in contemporary Buenos Aires

Baiocchi

2023

American Anthropologist

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In 2013, Argentina promulgated Law 26844, transforming household workers’ juridical status from “servants,” with almost nonexistent labor rights, to “workers,” with rights virtually equal to all other workers under the law. This article examines how household workers in Buenos Aires who share amicable or kin‐like relationships with their employers and the people they care for experience the transition from a discriminatory normative order of patronage and servanthood into an egalitarian normative order of full labor rights. The article shows, first, that rather than adopting a purely contractual rationality of labor rights and obligations, workers instead often make claims to labor rights in the registers of reciprocal obligation extant in their relationships with their employers and the people they care for. Second, the article shows that, as a type of social capital, the intimate capital that workers accrue in their relationships with their employers and the people they care for, in the form of relational ties with them, sometimes enables workers to access labor rights. Thus, the article demonstrates how household workers claim and access their legal equality against the backdrop of enduring intersectional inequalities between them and their employers in a context of widespread violation of household workers’ labor rights.

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The Value of Reproductive Labor

Cited by 8 publications

References 30 publications

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Labor in Livelihood Constellations along Coastal Plains

Reciprocity and intimate capital in household work: Exchanging love and care for labor rights in contemporary Buenos Aires

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