ANTH 303 Anthropological Theory Fall 2019
I acknowledge that St FX is in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People.
Nov.
25 Applying Marx READ: O’Hare, Patrick. 2019. “‘The landfill has always
borne fruit’: precarity, formalisation and dispossession among
Uruguay’s waste pickers.” Dialectical Anthropology 43(1): 31-44.
Look for concepts such as class, labour, precarity and dispossession.
O’Hare challenges the assumption that established workplaces with
stereotypical owner-worker relationships offer more stability than
informal self-employed work, using Marxist concepts to arrive at this
conclusion.
- remember what “class” refers to
- how does O’Hare use this concept, focussing on social relations
of production and control over the work process, to analyse the waste
pickers?
- what is the precariat?
- how is it related to Fordism (or not)?
- is it a “class in the making”?
- why does it matter?
- are garbage pickers precarious?
- what is their “class” position?
- as independent pickers
- in the coop
- in the plant
- dispossession (Harvey, Kasmir and Carbonella)
- structural violence
- gender: viewed with respect to livelihood
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