berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Preface
Chris Hann

Introduction: Work and Ethics in Anthropology
Chris Hann

Chapter 1. The Meaning of “Free” Work: Service as a Gift, and Labor as a Commodity for Ni-Vanuatu Labor Migrants
Rachel E. Smith

Chapter 2. On the Meanings of Pleasure: Work, Ethics, and Freedom in the Hunza Valley
Katherine J. L. Miller

Chapter 3. Ethics of Work and Freedom in the Argentinean Andes: Value Creation and Virtuous Self-Crafting through Miniature Production
Olivia Angé

Chapter 4. Pursuing Pleasure at Work: Friendship and Precarity at North Indian Call Centers
Akanksha Awal

Chapter 5. More Than Money: Work as Self-Realization in Accra’s Private Media
Anna-Riikka Kauppinen

Chapter 6. Capitalism, Overwork, and Polanyi’s Dialectics of Freedom: Emerging Visions of Work-Life Balance in Contemporary Urban China
Gonçalo Santos, Yichen Rao, Jack L. Xing, Jun Zhang

Chapter 7. From Freedom to Loaf to Freedom to Work: The Late Socialist Countermovement and Liberalization from Below in Yugoslavia
Ivan Rajković

Chapter 8. Max Weber’s Heirs? Work and Ethics among Small Business Owners in East Germany
Sylvia Terpe

Chapter 9. Click for Work: Rethinking Freedom through Online Work Distribution Platforms
Ilana Gershon and Melissa Cefkin

Chapter 10. Unicorn-Makers Working for Freedom (and Monopolies): The Work of Venture Capital Investors
Johannes Lenhard

Chapter 11. Individuality, Teamwork and Work Processes in a Financial Services Center in Germany
Magdalena Dąbkowska

Chapter 12. Writing Without Fear—or By-Lines: Freedom and Frustration among US American Ghostwriters
Deborah A. Jones

Afterword
Gerd Spittler

Index

Work, Society, and the Ethical Self

Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era

Edited by Chris Hann
Afterword by Gerd Spittler

304 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-225-4 Hb Published (September 2021)

eISBN 978-1-80073-226-1 eBook

Details

“This is an extremely important contribution to the anthropology of work. Unlike most existing approaches which focus on ‘labor’ as exploitation and alienation processes, the chapters in this collection explore the multiple valuations of work and the ambivalence often present in them.” • Susana Narotzky, Universitat de Barcelona

Primarily on the basis of ethnographic case-studies from around the world, this volume links investigations of work to questions of personal and professional identity and social relations. In the era of digitalized neoliberalism, particular attention is paid to notions of freedom, both collective (in social relations) and individual (in subjective experiences). These cannot be investigated separately. Rather than juxtapose economy with ethics (or the profitable with the good), the authors uncover complex entanglements between the drudgery experienced by most people in the course of making a living and ideals of emancipated personhood.

Chris Hann is a Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale) and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Prior to moving to Germany, he was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent (Canterbury). Recent publications include Repatriating Polanyi: Market Society in the Visegrád States (Central European University Press, 2019) and The Great Dispossession. Uyghurs between Civilizations (LIT Verlag, 2020, with Ildikó Bellér-Hann).

Series: Volume 7, Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

Area:

LC: HD4905 .W666 2021

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; BUS038000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Labor; BUS097000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Workplace Culture