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Anthropology: Exchange, Money & Markets > 2. Production (inc Fordism) > Flashcards

2. Production (inc Fordism) Flashcards

1
Q

What is Production?

A
  • Interplay between how we act on the world and engage in the world.
  • This bidirectional relationship ultimately changes ourselves, our bodies, our natures.
  • Human Transformation of the environment.
    • Manipulation of the environment (incl technologies) to make things
    • Human labour is a key element
    • Transformation of matter through labour to create a useful consumable good (immaterial and material)

PRODUCING THINGS = PRODUCING PEOPLE

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2
Q

What is etymology of Economy?

A
  • Ecos = home
  • Nomos = organising
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3
Q

Name 4 typologies of Economic Production.

A

Typologies of Economic Production (historical not teleological i.e. they all exist in the world today are not caused by an evolution):

  1. Hunters & Gatherers
  2. Tribal
  3. Peasant
  4. Industrial: Economic Organisation
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4
Q

What is the definition of Hunting & Gathering society?

A
  • 90% of world’s entire (historical) population
  • Small, mobile, low birth rate
  • Sharing
  • Marginalised
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5
Q

What is the definition of Tribal society?

A
  • 10,000 ya
  • Produce food (domesticating crops/animals)
  • Scattered
  • Light work
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6
Q

What is the definition of Peasant society?

A
  • c5,000 ya (China/Mediterraean)
  • Farming
  • Complex hierarchical relationships with rulers / land owners
  • Connected to markets / part of wider civilisation
  • Social inequality
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7
Q

What is the definition of Industrial Economic Organisation?

A
  • Machinery replaces human labour
  • Market principles = selling/buying
  • Concentration of wealth, rise of wage employment
  • Private property, inheritance (via individual)
  • High social mobility
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8
Q

What does Marx tell us about Production?

A

Karl Marx (1818-1883): The Communist Manifesto

  • How we understand Capitalism is thanks to Marx’s critique.
  • Marx was interested in the social relations of production
  • Emergence of 2 classes: Bourgeoisie (Capital) and Proletariat (Working)
  • Money is exchanged for labour-power
  • Essential defining character of man is his labour power.
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9
Q

What does Weber tell us abut Production?

A

Max Weber (1864-1920)

  • Society shifts enormously in 19th century
  • Growing separations: business from household / public and private domains
  • Need for new:
    • policitical & legal systems
    • attitudes toward nature
    • political organisations
    • infrastructures
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10
Q

What does James Carrier tell us about Production?

A

James Carrier (Economic Anthropologist)

  • Growing seperation of economic and social spheres
  • Needs are satisfied through paying wages to buy things
  • Production is… less control by the workers themsleves, factory workers are deskilled, rote and repetitive, affects social relations
  • Alienation of labour-power - less autonomy and control over our time or creative capacities, further removed from the process to make things
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11
Q

What does Thompson tell us about Production?

A

E.P. Thompson (1967)

  • Industrialisation requires a radical reconfiguration of time (i.e. from cyclical nature time to regulated clock time)
  • BUT clock time is relentless, universalising, traumatic…
  • IS IT SO CLEAR CUT?
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12
Q

What is an assembly line?

A
  • Labour process is broken down into specialised, unskilled tasks.
  • Tasks are performed by workers situated along a moving conveyor belt.
  • Sequential production.
  • Time and motion studies.
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13
Q

What is Fordism?

A
  • An example of an assembly line, rigid factory setup, efficiency, rationalisation
  • BUT workers were paid enough to be able to afford a car (creating a consumer class).
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14
Q

What does Foucault tell us about Production?

A
  • Discipline & technologies of power e.g. Bentham’s panopticon
  • Discipline becomes indirect, subtle (17th/18th century)
  • Docile bodies required for: warfare, industry
  • BUT… workers are not simply ‘docile bodies’ but are critical, thinking actors.
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15
Q

What is Global Production?

A
  • A global assembly line
  • Connected parts of production over vast spaces and industries
  • Global search for ‘cheap labour’ (companies don’t own their own factories)
  • Complex & hidden sub-contracting regimes (who is making what?)
  • Demands of ‘fast fashion’ market asks too much of local producers (brutal global inequalities)

EXAMPLE: Rana Plaza Collapse (24/04/13) cause huge ramifications for the garment industry as 5 garmet companies and 1000s of people were affected and the local economy.

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16
Q

What 3 ethnographies are associated with Production?

A
  1. Yelvington, K. (1995) Producing Power: Ethinicity, Gender and Class in a Caribbean Workplace
  2. Ong, A. (1988) Spritis of Resistenace and Capitalist Discipline (Malaysia)
17
Q

What does Yelvington’s (1995) ethnography say about Production?

A
  • Gender and race are integral elements of the workplace.
  • Class, Race and Gender as categories of production e.g.
  • Stereotypes of women workers:
    • Passive, obedient (won’t unionise)
    • Accustomed to sedentary tasks
    • Skilled from working at home, productive
    • Can pay them less (devalued labour) - “transnational trop of productive feminity” (Salzinger)
    • Less likely to form unions
  • Ethnicities, Class, Gender Identities
    • Women - unskilled part time
    • Men - Skilled full time
    • Younger women preferred over older women as they will work longer hours
    • Coercion into working overtime
    • Divisions within the workplace exploited for the purposes of control
18
Q

What does Ong’s (1988) ethnography say about Production?

A
  • Seized by spirits, requirements collaide with preexisting class and gender expectations.
  • Spirit culture - worldview of Malay culture
  • Patrols the boarders between spheres/boundaries between home, jungle and work
  • Traditional roles women were subject to spirit “attacks” when transitioning through major events in life - possibly when most vulnerable
  • Younger women who are now in workplace are now suffering more attacks since they are moving into the male dominated sphere of work or even out of their traditional worldview where they are monitored by family into an environment where they have more free reign and are now vulnerable to attacks
  • Maintain social order - Management see it as “hysteria” and “treat” with sedatives and penalise those who “fail to get better”
19
Q

How might mass Production lead to the alienation and deskilling of the workforce?

A
  • Focusing on just one aspect
  • Social relations / conflict
20
Q

Does industrialisation transform workers’ experience of time?

A
  • 8 hour day - focused output / guaranteed pay
  • Autonomous “nature time” / Supervised “clock time”
  • Piece rate pay - unethical?
  • Pay on output and overtime.
21
Q

In what ways do workers resist dehumanising treatment?

A
  • Dehumanising: Access to toilets, not being harrassed, long hours, working conditions, depensible, contract of care
  • Implicit (forms of resistance)
    • Shirking
    • Slander
  • Explicit
    • Union
    • Sabotage
    • Strike

Anthropology: Exchange, Money & Markets (6 decks)

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