Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism

Chris Hann is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Previously he was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent (Canterbury). He has authored and edited numerous books in economic anthropology, especially with reference to socialist and post-socialist societies.

“This collection of articles by industrial anthropologists does a magnificent job of describing the nature of work in the neoliberal era. What particularly stands out is the ethnographic descriptions of work often ignored by anthropology, such as Ching Kwan Lee’s vivid descriptions of the hellish mines in which Zambian workers toil.” • Journal of Anthropological Research“This well-written, carefully integrated volume, edited by two of the more outstanding British social anthropologists of their generation, offers a valuable contribution to the field.” • John Harriss, London School of Economics

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceChris HannIntroduction: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal SubjectJonathan ParryChapter 1. Varieties of Capital, Fracture of Labor: A Comparative Ethnography of Subcontracting and Labor Precarity on the Zambian CopperbeltChing Kwan LeeChapter 2. Miners and Their Children: The Remaking of the Soviet Working Class in KazakhstanEeva KeskülaChapter 3. Work, Precarity and Resistance: Company and Contract Labor in Kazakhstan’s Former Soviet Steel TownTommaso TrevisaniChapter 4. Regular Work in Decline, Precarious Households and Changing Solidarities in BulgariaDimitra KoftiChapter 5. Precarious Labor and Precarious Livelihoods in an Indian Company TownChristian StrümpellChapter 6. Regimes of Precarity: Buruh, Karyawan, and the Politics of Labor Identity in IndonesiaDaromir RudnyckyjChapter 7. Between God and the State: Class, Precarity, and Cosmology on the Margins of an Egyptian Steel TownDina Makram-EbeidChapter 8. The (Un-)Making of Labor: Capitalist Accelerations and Their Human Toll at a South Korean Shipyard in the PhilippinesElisabeth SchoberChapter 9. Relative Precarity: Decline, Hope and the Politics of WorkAndrew SanchezChapter 10. From Avtoritet and Autonomy to Self-exploitation in the Russian Automotive IndustryJeremy Morris and Sarah HinzChapter 11. Precarity, Guanxi, and the Informal Economy of Peasant Workers in Contemporary ChinaI-Chieh FangChapter 12. From Dispossessed Factory Workers to “Micro-entrepreneurs”: The Precariousness of Employment in Trinidad’s Garment SectorRebecca PrenticeChapter 13. Towards a Political Economy of Skill and Garment Work: The Case of the Tiruppur Industrial Cluster in South IndiaGrace Carswell and Geert De NeveChapter 14. From Casual to Permanent Work: Maoist Unionists and the Regularization of Contract Labor in the Industries of Western NepalMichael Peter HoffmannAfterword: Third Wave MarketizationMichael BurawoyIndex