The Wider Story of Self-employment

I will never again be able look at my six crammed kitchen shelves of coffee mugs collected over the last 30 years without thinking about Carrie Lane’s More than Pretty Boxes. Carrie’s lifelong work is an exemplar of careful anthropological and ethnographic work on labor and work in the US.  What shines through in every chapter of this book is a characteristically trenchant ethnographic eye and ear (and heart). This book, written in an accessible and enjoyable style shows Carrie as the true and curious anthropologist, with an openness to what is counterintuitive to all assumptions, including her own. I could see myself using this approach and this accessible text in both the graduate and the undergraduate classroom.

When I first approached More than Pretty Boxes, I saw it telling both a poignant and a trenchant story about lives lived within American capitalism. It is also a story about American class and American labor. But then, as I made my way through the rich ethnography, I appreciated this as a much wider story of work and labor, particularly of self-employment. As someone who works with self-employed labor in other parts of the world, I found that what Carrie shows us about the self-employed labor of American organizers is also a story that travels and resonates beyond the US. I work with taxi drivers in India, a self-employed group of working-class men who occupy very different class and gender positions from the organizers depicted in Carrie’s book. Yet, the question of how the professionalization of self-employed labor develops through narrative, material, discursive, institutional, and relational labor travels fruitfully to many other contexts of self-employment. For me this book suggests that self-employment is certainly a structure of labor that works for the self, but the social life of self-employment is never really just about the self. In fact, Carrie’s interlocutors show us that self-employment has incredibly complex systems of social organization that structure the work, without losing the sense that it is “self”-employment. The work of self-employed organizers here also illustrates how this self-employment, despite its varied strategies, does have a form, a process of professionalization and a structural relationship to other spheres of the labor market. What it tells us about relational self-employed work, particularly the capacity for professionalizing collectively was particularly illuminating for me.

Second, an aspect of the book that was really striking to me, and maybe this is just because I’m so interested in the sensory aspects of work, is the relationality of touch and sensory attachments in the organizers’ working relationships. The intimacy of hugging at meetings, the attention to the role of the hands in making decisions to throw things away, or the organizers’ attention to “where does it hurt” centers the senses in different ways. It raises many questions for me about how sensory practices create attachments to both people and things. What was so fascinating as I read several of the chapters is how central the organs of touch are to organizing work. In so many of the stories in the book we see that people’s attachments are ultimately broken only when they remove the organ of touch—reflected in the guidance that organizers give to their clients that if they refrain from touching an object, they are more likely to throw it away. This illustrated so well to me that in the end one can never remove the organs of sensation from one’s work no matter how organized or how professionalized that work might be. The presence of connective labor in the book is the labor of touch; and it seems to me that a large part of organizing work is about mediating sensory relations that people have with each other and with the things around them.  I particularly appreciate the attention to how much the work of organizing is carried out through organizers’ understanding of the different relations of sensory intimacy. The book shows us the workings of both emotional intimacy, and material intimacy with stuff. The work of connective labor which is so central to the analytical contributions of the book is very much about how people use their bodies to engage bother with each other and with things.

Thirdly, what is particularly provocative for me all through the book is the presence everywhere of the ideas and materiality of homes. I wonder if this book could make us think differently about the category of the home both as an analytical sphere and as a site for ethnographic research. So much of the ethnography takes place in home spaces or in spaces where homes have been moved into storage spaces where kinship and loss need to be (re)negotiated.  This makes me think about how we as anthropologists might try to rethink the category of home through the lens of what these organizers are doing as Carrie does here; the apartment, the condo, the house, the deceased parent’s storage unit are clearly different homes spatially in the book and do provoke us to think about how these spaces have different relations to things. Beyond the spatial, the organizers themselves feel at home with each other; they bring along assistants who also work with them into homes. Carrie provokes us to think about what it means to really feel at home or to create a home out of mess or to help someone move a home from one spatial sphere to another.

Lastly, I would like to note Carrie’s methodological approach. The first was the use of the work-along where Carrie as the ethnographer gains a close understanding of what organizers actually do by doing it herself with them.  Most people starting out on ethnographic work think that interviews are the supreme method of data collection. But the real value and beauty of ethnographic work is in fact the capacity to find those divergences between what people say and what they actually do. Carrie takes this doing very seriously in the process of the work along that will be useful in methods pedagogy.  Further, many in anthropology are concerned only about the position of the ethnographer with the field; and there is often a presumption in discussions of positionality that there’s us (the anthropologist) and then there’s the field (everyone else). But in terms of the positionality question, what I find so fascinating is that Carrie is present, but we see all kinds of other relations that structure the processes of work and ethnography here. There is Carrie’s own relationship with the organizers, there are the relationships the organizers have with their clients and client’s families, there are the relationships amongst organizers themselves, there are the relationships organizers have with their own families. All these different positions remind us that in fact positionalities within the field are important but in different ways that we cannot immediately or easily presume.

I will end by saying that More than Pretty Boxes cements Carrie Lane as one of the preeminent anthropologists writing about the American condition of work under late capitalism. But at the same time this book touches on so many questions in the anthropology of work that travel globally and that make very important methodological interventions in the field.

Author Bio

 Tarini Bedi is an economic, political, and urban anthropologist who conducts research in South Asia and more recently in Southeast Asia. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of urban and political anthropology, anthropology of infrastructure, roads, and mobilities, cultural geography, and gender studies. Her first book, The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena: Political Matronage in Urbanizing India (2016, SUNY Press) develops a feminist theory of brokerage politics and her second Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India was published with the University of Washington’s Global South Asia Series.