Recapturing the household: reflections on labour, productive relations, and economic value

Abstract

Labour regimes organize the economy; they also organize lives. With the continued deregulation of the labour market and the simultaneous drive to cut labour costs, there lies a challenge to grasp not only the workings of capital but also the way such processes impact on the organization of everyday labouring lives. This implies a focus that is attentive to value, combining political economy with moral economy. I suggest that household analysis represents one way to address such issues. Household analysis provides a means of ethnographic access to a particular temporal dynamic that is revealing of a layered texture of precariousness, capturing at one and the same time the material realities and the intimate relations of living. Regimes of labour and regimes of value can thus be brought into the same frame, indicating relational dependencies as well as structures of social inequality. Drawing on earlier ethnography amongst landless tobacco growers in Corrientes, Argentina, I draw attention to the potentials of a particular perspective, all the while paying attention to the specific historical and political context. Anthropology is well placed to grasp contemporary configurations of labour and how these both are framed by and contribute towards reproducing social and economic inequalities, not only locally but also at a more global scale.