No Smooth Surfaces: The Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination

• Autores: Sharryn Kasmir, Lesley Gill
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 4, 2018, págs. 355-377
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Although concerns about complexity and multiplicity have long been at the core of ethnographic research, this article moves beyond such descriptive terms and develops a theoretically engaged concept of unevenness and combination. We argue that unevenness is not just the outcome of capitalist development; it is politically momentous. Unevenness emerges from the struggle between capital and labor and from the historically specific ways that they configure social space. Because power coalesces in some places and social relationships and networks become dense, whereas they recede in other places, we need to understand how labor contributes to making these lumps and how the differentiated parts of a causally interactive world combine and intertwine to create novel social, cultural, and political configurations. We can then better understand the current moment in which labor is fragmented and differentiated. The analysis draws on case studies of the Saturn automobile factory in Tennessee and the oil export enclave of Barrancabermeja in Colombia.