Rethinking the concept of labour (original) (raw)

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Is labour a useful concept for anthropology today? This essay attempts to respond theoretically to the challenge that the contributions to this special issue empirically pose. The essay rethinks the concept of labour by addressing three questions that deal with the relation of human work effort and capital accumulation: the first refers to alienation; the second to the difference between abstract and concrete labour; and the third to ambiguity. Over the years, these issues have addressed particular aspects of social reproduction, helping define labour as a concept, albeit a heterogeneous one,that is relationally linked to capital. Dislocation, together with the parallel concepts of dispossession, disorganization, disconnection, and differentiation, emerges prominently in the analyses of contemporary labour transformations and spacificities. Finally, the essay engages with seemingly disappearing labour futures and what this means for the concept of labour. What is the value of work for capital and, conversely, the value of labouring for people today? lntroduction: a problem of method This special issue on labour raises important questions that we will probably not be able to resolve but which should not be hastily dismissed. First, there is the epistemological question of the value of concepts cross-culturally and cross-historically, in this case the value of the concept of 'labour'. Anthropologists (but also historians) have been struggling with this thorny issue from the outset. How useful is an extraneous concept to understand the processes, conflicts, settlements, tensions, and harmonies that take place in a historically and culturally different environment where our present-day Western categorizations may not exist, or may be embedded in a very different reality? As many have argued, the nature/culture divide or the self-contained individual may not be significat, whereas other unknown forms of categorization may be present that we cannot fathom or imagine. In sum, this epistemological question determines our method and the internal tension that makes its value. If we abandon the quest for universally applicable concepts, we are at pains to justify the worth of our discipline for we cannot compare, and the terrifying 'so what?' dilemma emerges as we become cornered into being mere consumers of native theory. If we do not acknowledge the concreteness of living experience and its eventual incommensurability, on the