Contesting unemployment. The case of the Cirujas in Buenos Aires

MARIANO D. PERELMAN

Anthropologies of Unemployment New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence

Cornell

Lugar: Ithaca; Año: 2016; p. 97 - 117

In Buenos Aires, Argentina the activity of informal waste collection (cirujeo) is a stigmatized activity that historically has not been seen as work. After the 2001 crisis -product of a long itinerary of implementations of neoliberal policies initiated in the last civil military dictatorship- that led to Argentina to unusual rates of unemployment and poverty, thousands of peoples used to earn the living on the labor market resort to the cirujeo as a mean of earning a living. From ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2009 with people dedicated to cirujeo in the City of Buenos Aires,  in this chapter I show the complexities involved in being unemployed in Argentina and the implications that has for people of flesh and blood. The chapter deals with unemployment in Argentina and with how imaginaries of work are transformed. In doing so I also address the ways in which labor processes, ideologies, and justifications about access to legitimate ways of earning a living are produced and reproduced. Delving into the historical experience of a group of people that made a living from outside the labor market, leads to an  understanding of how people of flesh and blood experience labor processes and shows how discourses of work (as a legitimate form of belonging) intersect to produce ideologies of both employment and unemployment.  Centering on the experience of people of flesh and blood enables me to approach not only what unemployment means and how it is felt, but also why some people remain involved in that world.