Rules as resources

Rules as resources

Week 6: Care as capital after the Fordist social contract

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Monday, September 02, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/6.1

Main reading: Mazelis (2017), chap. 5; Zaloom (2019), chap. 4

Other reading: Mazelis (2017), introduction, chap. 4, conclusion; Zaloom (2019), introduction and conclusion

The global economy is an informal economy

We have talked about several things in just a few weeks:

• Kinship: It seems like it’s a natural, fixed essence, but we can see it as something people do. People create kinship by performing acts of care.
• “The global economy”: We’ve heard about since Grade 6, but we can now see it as something other than either a bourgeois plot to exploit people or the march of modern progress.
  • Today’s global economy requires people to patch the gaps in a broken capitalist system by blending the domain of kinship with the domain of work, earning, and economic activity.

Scholars first formulated an idea of the informal economy—the space between the realm of care for kin and the realm of economic enterprise—to understand the lives of the world’s poor.

I argue that in a post-Fordist world, middle-class and relatively rich people also operate in an informal economy.

You have 2 messages.

Take out a sheet of paper.

Picture the face of a close, personal friend. Write this person’s name down.

• What would you say if this person asked you for a loan of $300

Picture another person who is a friend. Write their name down.

• What would you do if they both text you at the same time, and they both ask for a loan of $300.
• There’s two texts in your Messages app, both on “read.”

What is this “friendship” anyways? What is the substance of this relationship?

Society as rules

Mauss says the gift comes with obligations for giver and recipient because both are embedded in a total social system.

• Reciprocity feels like a rule you must obey.
• In a Maussian view of society, people are rule-followers.
• Society itself is a system of rules.

Do we agree that society has rules and being a social subject is following rules?

• Are there in fact social rules? Is this an accurate metaphor?
  • Yes, people do often act as if there is an invisble rule book that they follow.
  • But, it’s not like all of people’s collective experiences can be described as prescriptions and prohibitions.
• Are individuals nothing more than obedient, robotic rule-followers?
  • People have conscious awareness of themselves and their actions. They can choose how to act. Should we not also account for the importance of people’s capacity to act and to have an effect on their circumstances (i.e. individual agency)?

Is reciprocity a rule?

Pierre Bourdieu (1977) says that Mauss’s mistake is that we can only see reciprocity as a clockwork-like system after the fact, in hindsight.

• Ongka didn’t know he would receive pigs from followers, or that he would be able to deliver his moka to his rival when he said he would. Something was at risk.

Bourdieu says that when people give and receive, timing is everything. You have to have a feel for the right time. The social quality of reciprocity is a matter of individual practice.

• If you reciprocate right away, then essentially you forsake the relationship.
• If you wait too long to reciprocate, you have effectively stolen the gift.

There is scope for creativity, choice, and indeed strategy in reciprocal exchange. If it’s not just rules, then what is this social system? Bourdieu’s alternative rests on two key ideas:

• Habitus
• Field

The body is a recording device and a tool

We learn by doing, because we learn what it feels like to do something. As Bourdieu says,

• Habitus is “a system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them” (Bourdieu 1990, 53)

A habitus is not a constraint on freedom; it is a source of individual agency.

By embodying a social position, people acquire abilities to act that they would not otherwise have.

Society as a game

Social life takes place among people on a field of play.

Players on a team occupy specific positions on the playing field, and acquire skills associated with their position and their relationships to other players in other positions.

A field need not exist first for people to play a game. By applying the capacities granted by the habitus of a specific position (in a literal and metaphoric sense), they draw others into a shared game on a common field of social space between them.

Scoring points, reaping rewards

If social situations are fields, and the habitus for a field generates actions, then these social situations are also arenas for acquiring recognition, merit, esteem.

• You can be a good student, family member, employee.
• Kabyle men are skilled in exchange who win honor in the eyes of their community by the gifts they reciprocate.

The two messages

Time to text those two friends back. What are you going to do? Who gets the $300 loan?

Whom do you “trust”?

If some people are more trustworthy than others, is it possible that they also had a head start on earning trust, too?

Social capital in The Flats

Being a neighbor involves a habitus of neighborliness, and in some neighborhoods, this is a particular kind of skill you must learn through practice.

• Neighbors in The Flats (a pseudonym for a neighborhood in Chicago) “swap” or “trade” what they need, but this isn’t barter (Stack [1974] 2008).
  • This is not balanced reciprocity, or an even, tit-for-tat exchange between two people.
  • This is generalized reciprocity among multiple people. Neighbors in the Flats give when asked, and ask when they need (see especially Stack [1974] 2008, 41n1, 156; also Reyes-Foster and Carter 2017).

Generalized reciprocity is part of the habitus of neighbor in The Flats. Because people acquire this habitus and play this game on this field, people accumulate social capital.

References and further reading

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. “The Objective Limits of Objectivism.” In Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, 1–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507.

———. 1990. “Structures, Habitus, Practices.” In The Logic of Practice, 52–65. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Mazelis, Joan Maya. 2017. Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among the Poor. New York: New York University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4500689.

Reyes-Foster, Beatriz M., and Shannon K. Carter. 2017. “Mothers, Milk, and Morals: Peer Milk Sharing as Moral Motherwork in Central Florida.” In Breastfeeding: New Anthropological Approaches, edited by Cecília Tomori, Aunchalee E. L. Palmquist, and E. A. Quinn. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315145129-7.

Stack, Carol B. (1974) 2008. All Our Kin: Strategies For Survival In A Black Community. New York: Basic Books.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2019. Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691195421.