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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