Anthropology of Work

Anthropology of Work: Beyond a Work-Centered Life
Ayami Nakatani and Taeko Udagawa

210 mm x 148 mm
318 pages
JPY 4,000
ISBN 9784790716754
Pub date: March 2016

Is “work” equal to “earning money” ? What is “work” ? And what is not “work” ? What is the value of work that does not earn money ? By reporting on the realities of people living in various areas of the world, this book reexamines the meanings and possibilities of working.

Points of Appeal
1) Relativizing modern society’s view of work, which tends to overestimate wage labor
2) Capturing how gender norms are changed through flexible negotiation and interpretation in practical situations
3) Critical inheritance of accumulation of labor studies

Table of Contents
Introduction: An anthropological approach to work

I　Confronting the shakeout of the gender division of labor

Chapter 1 “Invisible” work, “unseen” work: Masculinity and re-gendering in the embroidery industry in Uzbekistan
Chapter 2 Shaking “men’s work” and “women’s work: The experience of rural women in post-socialist Bulgaria
Chapter 3 Family and the repositioning of gender roles in globalization: A case study of cross-border marriage between a Japanese woman and a Pakistani man
Chapter 4 What it means for a woman to “earn” money: Migrant labor and life course transformation of rural women in northeast Thailand 

NOTE 1 Wives’ entrepreneurship: Wisdom and strategies of Indonesian women
NOTE 2 Changes in women’s working behavior and gender roles in North Africa

II　Expanding the extent of the concept of “labor”

Chapter 5 Is ritual work?: Working and resting for the Balinese
Chapter 6 Each “way of living”: Working in contemporary Kalahari hunter-gatherer society 
Chapter 7 “Work is work”: The dynamism of the informal economy in East African countries 
Chapter 8 Social relations embedded in labor, labor embedded in social relations: How Italians who “hate work” work

NOTE 3 “Work” and “labor: The word “kerja” in East Malaysia
NOTE 4 The work of “beggars”: Indonesia and Japan
NOTE 5 Challenges of the Scandinavian welfare society that requires work-life balance

III　Tracing the trajectory of labor and gender

Chapter 9 How and where have women worked?: Reconsidering issues and methods of women’s labor studies
Chapter 10 The meaning of “work” and masculinity in postwar Japan