Managing Precarious Work: Economic Anthropological Approaches
This co-hosted workshop engages with the intellectual heritage of Karl Polanyi as an economic anthropologist on the basis of recent ethnographic works on the livelihood of marginalized groupings. The presentations depart from the idea that the current epoch is marked by the global expansion – as well as new configurations – of informalized and precarious labour. The livelihood practices and coping strategies of marginalized populations, including the poor or the sub-proletariat, have been among the classical themes of inquiry in economic anthropology. Especially since the outbreak of the financial crisis at the end of the 2000s, academic scholars and policy-experts seem to share a renewing preoccupation with the rise of social insecurities induced by the retrenchment of the welfare state and the expansion of the precariat. The case studies presented at this workshop – about practices of informal money lending in Hungary, scrap metal trading in Romania and waste-collection and recycling in Serbia – aim to provide ethnographic evidence for the changes in the configurations of formal and informal labor in post-transitional/post-socialist societies.
Program
17:00–17:30: Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute):
Introductory Talk: Karl Polányi’s intellectual heritage on economic anthropology and its relevance today
17:30–18:00: Judit Durst (UCL and HAS):
Informal (money) lending and informalized low-wage factory labour in times of insecurity in North Hungary
18:00–18:30: Gergő Pulay (CEU and HAS):
The management of precarity: Livelihood and value among scrap metal traders in Bucharest
18:30–18:50: Coffee break
18:50–19:20: Eva Schwab (CEU):
Who is going to earn what? Informal waste pickers and calculations of the value of recycling work in the course of Public Waste Management reforms in Serbia
19:20–19:50: Martha Lampland (University of California, San Diego and CEU):
Economic Anthropology: Appreciating Value
19:50–20:15: Q&A Session
Moderator of the Workshop: György Lengyel (Corvinus University)
See Facebook event.
