The challenge to social reproduction in times of crisis: Tensions between generations in southern Europe

Social reproduction can be defined as a form of continuity linking generations around household projects of making a living and enhancing future opportunity. It can also be defined as the continuity of social organization that distributes power and assets unequally. This chapter is about these two aspects of social reproduction and their articulation. In the process, inter-generational forms of care overlap with conflict and resentment at different scales. While obligations of solidarity weave everyday actions of support around parents and children, at a larger societal scale discourses of privilege regarding access to resources such as stable jobs, assets (home ownership)...info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The everyday states of austerity: Politics and livelihoods in Europe

This special issue addresses how working people in Southern Europe engage with austerity state formations. We argue that in order to look at people’s responses to austerity, one cannot avoid delving into the ways people engage with state formations and the co-production of state functions, material relations and ideological configurations. Whether imposed by supranation-al institutions or voluntarily endorsed by a national elite, austerity politics were concretely implemented and legitimated by state institutions, making the austerity–state nexus a “critical junction” of social reproduction (Kalb and Tak 2006).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Be our guest/worker: reciprocal dependency and expressions of hospitality in Ni-Vanuatu overseas labour migration

Whilst there has been renewed interest in the development potential of temporary migration programmes, such schemes have long been criticized for creating conditions for exploitation and fostering dependence. In this article, which is based on a case study of Ni-Vanuatu seasonal workers employed in New Zealand’s horticultural industry, I show how workers and employers alike actively cultivate and maintain relations of reciprocal dependence and often describe their relation in familial terms of kinship and hospitality. Nevertheless, workers often feel estranged both in the Marxian sense of being subordinated to a regime of time-discipline, and in the intersubjective sense of feeling disrespected or treated unkindly. I show how attention to the ‘non-contractual element’ in the work contract, including expressions of hospitality, can contribute to anthropological debates surrounding work, migration, and dependence, and to interdisciplinary understandings of the justice of labour migration.ESRC scholarship (project reference ES/H034943/1

[Introduction] Toward an anthropology of the just price: history, ethnography, critique

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Social cooperation and resource management dynamics among late hunter-fisher-gatherer societies in Tierra del Fuego (South America)

This paper presents the theoretical basis and first results of an agent-based model (ABM) computer simulation that is being developed to explore cooperation in hunter–gatherer societies. Specifically, we focus here on Yamana, a hunter-fisher-gatherer society that inhabited the islands of the southernmost part of Tierra del Fuego (Argentina–Chile). Ethnographical and archaeological evidence suggests the existence of sporadic aggregation events, triggered by a public call through smoke signals of an extraordinary confluence of resources under unforeseeable circumstances in time and space (a beached whale or an exceptional accumulation of fish after a low tide, for example). During these aggregation events, the different social units involved used to develop and improve production, distribution and consumption processes in a collective way. This paper attempts to analyse the social dynamics that explain cooperative behaviour and resource-sharing during aggregation events using an agent-based model of indirect reciprocity. In brief, agents make their decisions based on the success of the public strategies of other agents. Fitness depends on the resource captured and the social capital exchanged in aggregation events, modified by the agent’s reputation. Our computational results identify the relative importance of resources with respect to social benefits and the ease in detecting—and hence punishing—a defector as key factors to promote and sustain cooperative behaviour among populationSpanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (projects CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 SimulPast-CSD2010-00034 and HAR2009-06996) as well as from the Argentine Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (project PIP-0706) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (project GR7846)

Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy. An introduction to supplement 9

Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people, the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This rethinking seeks to bring to center stage the complex ways in which people attempt to make life worth living for themselves and for future generations, involving not only waged labor but also structures of provisioning, investments in social relations, relations of trust and care, and a multitude of other forms of social action that mainstream economic models generally consider trivial, marginal, and often counterproductive. A holistic understanding of how people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between different scales of value. It is attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the future has become synonymous with geographical mobility. It is attentive to the fact that making a living is about making people in their physical, social, spiritual, affective, and intellectual dimensions