Working bodies

Rebecca Prentice

Chapter 4 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, 2025, pp 300-304 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In economic anthropology, debates about the body and embodiment have developed along several overlapping trajectories. This chapter on ‘Working bodies’ focuses on three such trajectories: racial capitalism and the racialization of workers; skill and its devaluation via feminization; and the embodiment of structural violence in the form of occupational illnesses, injuries, and deaths. I draw upon my ethnographic research with Trinidadian garment workers to show what the anthropological study of working bodies reveals how workers experience labor conditions, drawing into a single analytical frame the structural forces shaping working lives and how workers embody, navigate, resist, and acquiesce to these forces.

Keywords: Embodiment; The body; Garment workers; Skill; Feminization; Precarious bodies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035312566
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