Work/Labour

All anthropology deals with work because all people engage in purposeful activity to build and maintain their physical and social worlds. However, the anthropology of work and labour has a specific history and theoretical purchase which has been shaped not only by theoretical shifts within the discipline, but also in response to wider political-economic transformations. The anthropology of work and labour provides a comparative perspective on how people make a living within their natural and social environments, while bringing into focus how people everywhere are interconnected and impacted through global historical processes. This overview approaches the anthropology of work and labour by tracing how anthropological analyses have responded to shifting political and economic contexts and disciplinary concerns. We first discuss how early ethnographic fieldwork helped to overturn Eurocentric assumptions about work, including theories of social evolution, but they often excluded the impacts of colonialism and capitalism. We then discuss the various ways the concept of division of labour has been used to understand and critique how different forms of labour are allocated and valorised differently. From the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists increasingly situated their studies within a critical perspective on capitalism, its alternatives, and its consequences. A major contribution of the anthropology of work and labour is how anthropologists have elucidated perspectives and experiences of people in the peripheries and margins of capitalism. Anthropological research into work in industrial centres has clarified the ways in which industrial processes have played out in different regions and political-economic contexts as well as how power is accrued and maintained by elites and professionals. We conclude by highlighting key anthropological contributions to understandings of work and labour during the contemporary era of late capitalism.