The Anthropology of Industrial Work
Worldwide, most adults and some children spend most of their lives working, usually in conditions not of their own choosing. As one result, studying people’s experiences at work is nearly the same thing as studying “the human condition” – which is the definition of anthropology, according to some first-year textbooks. This course is thus located within an effectively limitless field of study, but is narrowed down to one overarching goal: to develop an historical-ethnographic understanding of how work came to dominate so much of our time, and to analyze the present-day and future implications of this. From the industrial revolution, to the Keynesian welfare state, to neoliberalism and “globalization”, we will trace the history of present-day capitalism from the perspectives of sweatshop workers, labour migrants, trade unionists, agricultural labourers, and others near the lower ends of their societies’ socioeconomic hierarchies. Through ethnographic case studies including rural Bolivia, the Zambian Copperbelt, and the Canadian labour movement, we will explore how gender, ethnicity, location, and other markers of identity intersect to shape peoples’ options and prospects in a globalized capitalist economy.
Learning Goals
Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:
- Analyze micro-level information through a critical macro-level perspective.
- Use anthropological research methods to link socioeconomic context to everyday life.
- Synthesize data from original primary research and secondary scholarly sources into a coherent, relevant case study.
- Knowledgeably reflect upon the origins and nature of some major global challenges confronting humanity today.
