The commodification of kin

The commodification of kin

Week 6: Global gifts and body shopping

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, September 07, 2022

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2022/6.2

Main reading: Zharkevich (2019)

Other reading: Krause and Bressan (2018); Leinaweaver (2010); Vora (2009)

Home economics

Capitalism has taken many forms over its history in different places. In many respects, its days of greatest success are over, and we live in a new phase of capitalism.

Fordist production and a Fordist social contract

In the first half of the 20th century in industrialized, affluent, capitalist societies of “the West” (and especially after the second World War), the dominant model of production and consumption created a new structure for society.

And then it was over.

After Fordism, a new kind of global capitalism and a new kind of household

Mass production can only be made so efficient (and consumers can only consume so much stuff). As the economy it sustains continues to grow, the large firms at its heart make less and less profit. The system inevitably falls into crisis.

Fordist families in a post-Fordist era

Fordism as a social contract institutes a specific kind of kinship based on an absolute division between the public domain of economic activity and the private home.

Families have responded to the breakdown of the Fordist social contract in different and unequal ways

In conclusion, global capitalism is a broken system on the verge of collapse. Informal economies and transnational reciprocity are the duct tape and chewing gum holding it together.

References and further reading

Adkins, Lisa. 2016. “Contingent Labour and the Rewriting of the Sexual Contract.” In The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract, edited by Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever, 1–28. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137495549_1.

Colen, Shellee. 1995. “‘Like a Mother to Them’: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York.” In Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 78–102. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Florida, Richard L., and Marshall M.A. Feldman. 1988. “Housing in US Fordism*.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12 (2): 187–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1988.tb00449.x.

Fraser, Nancy. (1997) 2013. “After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment.” In Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, 41–66. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315822174.

Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. New York: Penguin Books.

———. 2000. “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.” In On the Edge: Globalization and the New Millennium, edited by Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton, 130–46. London: SAGE Publications.

Krause, Elizabeth L., and Massimo Bressan. 2018. “Circulating Children, Underwriting Capitalism: Chinese Global Households and Fast Fashion in Italy.” Current Anthropology 59 (5): 572–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/699826.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2010. “Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations.” Latin American Perspectives 37 (5): 67–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X10380222.

Pateman, Carole. (1988) 2018. The Sexual Contract. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.

Vora, Kalindi. 2009. “Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Commodification of Vital Energy.” Subjectivity 28 (1): 266–78. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.14.

Zharkevich, Ina. 2019. “Money and Blood: Remittances as a Substance of Relatedness in Transnational Families in Nepal.” American Anthropologist 121 (4): 884–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13316.

 

/

#