Anthropologies of Unemployment

Anthropologies of Unemployment offers accessible, theoretically innovative, and ethnographically rich examinations of unemployment in rural and urban regions across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The diversity of case studies demonstrates that unemployment is a pressing global phenomenon that sheds light on the uneven consequences of free-market ideologies and policies. Economic, social, and cultural marginalization is common in the lives of the unemployed, but their experience and interpretation are shaped by local and national cultural particularities. In exploring those differences, the contributors to this volume employ recent theoretical innovations and engage with some of the more salient topics in contemporary anthropology, such as globalization, migration, youth cultures, bureaucracy, class, gender, and race.

Taken together, the chapters reveal that there is something new about unemployment today. It is not a temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unemployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work and employment; they improvise new forms of sociality, morality, and personhood. Ethnographic studies such as those found in Anthropologies of Unemployment are crucial if we are to understand the broader forms, meanings, and significance of pervasive economic insecurity and discover the emergence of new social and cultural possibilities.

Jong Bum Kwon is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Webster University. Carrie M. Lane is Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment, also from Cornell.

Anthropologies of Unemployment is a major contribution to our understanding of the experiences of unemployment. This collection of fascinating ethnographic studies spanning seven national contexts makes vividly clear how the experience of unemployment is far from universal but is profoundly shaped by specific social, cultural, and economic institutions. More broadly, this volume should be of great interest to anyone wishing to understand the varied ways in which precarious employment conditions intersect with local contexts to shape the experiences of modern work or its absence.

Ilana Gershon, editor of A World of Work:

What do you know about work when you begin by thinking about unemployment? This fascinating collection shows that, around the world, we labor all the time, but only some labor is widely understood to be work. Classifying some tasks as work and not others profoundly structures much of social life. This book is a bouquet of anthropological insights about what counts as work and why—a valuable set of interventions that overturns many taken-for-granted ideas about what it means to have a job or look for one.

Jane Collins, University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market:

Anthropologies of Unemployment is a timely, coherent, and powerful collection; it is both a strong contribution to the anthropology of unemployment and the anthropology of work and globalization.