Whether seen as drudgery and humiliation or as honoured art, the work that humans do is a key site for understanding both material and cultural reproduction: how we survive and what it means to persist. The transformations which humans produce through work are read by anthropologists as distinct cultural markers, e.g. as archaeologists identify a stone adze of a specific period or cultural anthropologists distinguish Mayan from Maori carving. Humans not only transform material culture through work, but we can also believe ourselves to be transformed through the work we do, or work to demonstrate our transformation, as "Max Weber pointed out so well in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Anthropologists of work have endeavoured to understand not only the basic needs humans work to accommodate in any culture, following Malinowski’s functionalism, but also the inequalities that are reproduced through the organization of work, following "Marx, and the relationship between work, identity, and value in various cultural settings.
While most early ethnographies mentioned the kinds of work done by the people studied, work did not receive major theoretical and methodological attention from anthropologists until the latter half of the twentieth century. Attention to work in anthropology has been diverse. "Physical or biological anthropologists interested in human "adaptation have measured the calories humans have expended in working to transform items from their environments for human use. Economic anthropologists have used caloric expenditure to argue that, for example, hunting and gathering provides more leisure time than industrial organization of a society’s work activities (Sahlins 1972), making ultimately, of course, the argument that a shift from egalitarian hunting and gathering work to industrial capitalist work is not necessarily an improvement. Psychological anthropologists have, like sociologists and applied economists, studied perceptions of work and the significance of employment for self-worth, especially in industrial societies. Work has been an area for the convergence of historical materialist and symbolic approaches. Paul Willis (1977), for example, studied how, through training for work while in schools, young men learned to valorize tasks differently and reproduce class identities. Foley (1990), reproducing Willis’s study in a US context, looked at the way young people learned to manage gender, class, and ethnic identity, as well as conflicts, in their work at school and their training for future work. Kondo (1990) looked at the powerful formation of social identity through workplace relations in Japan, and the relationship between work and identity has been one focus for the wide-ranging discussions of identity by cultural anthropologists in the 1990s.
The valorization of work and workplaces has been the topic of several lively debates in anthropology in the late twentieth century, most notably: the comparison of non-industrial with industrial forms of work; the issue of whether theories of economic rationality could explain all work, including ritual work; and the questioning of whether women’s work — from domestic to ceremonial — has been attended to properly in anthropological analyses and how it is organized and attributed value across cultures. Discussion of gender divisions of labour and their relative valorization was related to attention in anthropology from the 1970s through the 1990s to other historical divisions of labour and the relationship between forms of work — e.g. slavery and child labour — and forms of power. Anthropologists of work have been influenced by historians of labour and by human geographers as they study changes in the marking of work time and the spatial aspects of production, and the inequalities embedded in the control of those changes.
Sociology, with its attention to industrial societies and Marxist theorizing of the organization of production, has most greatly influenced the anthropology of work, especially as anthropologists look at how local labour (whether industrial or non-industrial) is related to global production, distribution, and consumption patterns and how they are controlled. Studies of the global factory by anthropologists (cf. Ong 1987; Nash 1989; Ward 1990; Rothstein and Blim 1992) have focused on workplaces to describe the ambiguous relationships between local and global organization of production; workplace discipline and other forms of discipline — e.g. through religious fundamentalism — and classifications of kinds of work such as agricultural and industrial, in an increasingly interconnected and transnational marketplace. Migrant work has drawn anthropologists’ attention to neocolonial labour relations and questions of transnational identities and policies.
Ethnographic attention to the specifics of consumption and distribution, as well as to (more traditionally) production, has yielded such interesting insights as Nestor Garcia Canclini’s (1993: 63) finding that international tourist consumers of Mexican crafts valued individualism in purchasing artisans’ work, while the producers in a crafts collective saw their work as interchangeable, using one another’s unique seals freely. Late capitalism affords many opportunities to study cultural values through the cross-cultural valorization of work and worker identity, and categories of work studied by sociologists and anthropologists have shifted. Service sector work, for example, has been increasing, and so, increasingly studied. The anthropological, sociological and labour studies literatures have merged in discussions of technology and the labour process; unionization; and workplace discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender, and age. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an anthropological preoccupation with neoliber-alism and globalization has been accompanied by concern with increasing market demands for ‘flexible’ labour (e.g. Urciuoli 2008). From this perspective, anthropologists have explored migration (Durrenberger and Marti 2006), the gendering of labour forms (Mills 2003), and spatial analysis of labour markets (Peck 1996).
It is only fitting that anthropologists of work have organized themselves professionally. In Britain, the Association of Social Anthropologists held a conference in 1979 on the anthropology of work, well documented by Wallman (1979). In the USA, the Society for the Anthropology of Work, a unit of the American Anthropological Association, has published the Anthropology of Work Review since 1979. Anthropology as a form of labour has become increasingly subject to demands for flexibility, with insecurity prevailing in academic markets, and scholars have begun to consider how this has altered the academic professions they inhabit (Nelson 1997; Field and Fox 2007).
