Labor in Cross-Cultural Perspective

E. Paul Durrenberger is professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971. He has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, and as president of Culture and Agriculture, the Society for Economic Anthropology, and the Council of Thai Studies. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in highland and lowland Southeast Asia, Iceland, Mississippi, Alabama, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois. His most recent publications include Pigs, Profits and Rural Communities (1998) and with Tom King, State and Community in Fisheries Management: Power Policy and Practice (2000). Judith Mart' is professor of anthropology at California State University, Northridge. She serves as Secretary-Treasurer and Editorial Board member of the Society for Economic Anthropology.

One of the key strengths of the book is the strong empirical thread that runs through it. Another is that the contributors present strong and well-reasoned arguments for their respective positions. Finally, the book is strengthened by the fact that the contributors, while raising important questions about mainstream economies, so not sing from the same page in the hymn book. This makes for the presentation of an engaging set of views on labor in cross-cultural perspective that is sure to promote considerable discussion in the field and will push the state of knowledge in economic anthropology a good distance from where it has been in the past decade.

• Part 1 PrefacePart 2 Introduction3 1 Sewer Socialism and Labor: The Pragmatics of Running a Good City3 2 Political-Economic Change, Cultural Traditions, and Household Organization in Rural Mali4 PART I: HOUSEHOLDS6 3 Labor Discipline, Debt and Effort in a Philippine Fishing Community7 5 Baragining Wages and Controlling Performance: Harvest Labor in Coffee and Citrus7 4 ¿Ayuda or Work? Labor History of Female Heads of Household from Oaxaca, Mexico8 6 We're to Stand Side by Side: Household Production and Women's Work in Rural Mining Communities8 PART II: FIRMS AND CORPORATE ENTITIES9 7 The Emergence of Worker Cooperatives in Japan among Middle-Aged Middle-Class Housewives in the Late Twentieth Century12 8 Proletarianization of Professional Work and Changed Workplace Relationships12 9 Of Corvee and Slavery: Historical Intricacies of the Division of Labor and State Power in Northern Thailand13 PART III: STATES: PREMODERN TO TRANSNATIONAL13 10 Hilltowns and Valley Fields: Great Transformations, Labor, and Long-Term History in Ancient Oaxaca14 11 A Political Economy from Increasing Marginal Returns to Labor: An Example from Viking Age Iceland16 13 Crossing the Border From Jalisco, Mexico: Network-Mediated Entry into Micro-Labor Enclaves17 12 Immigrant Labor in the New United States Economy: Anthropological Notes19 14 Volunteer Labor: "Adding Value" to Local Culture