Centering Political Economy as a Framework for Field Research Methodology: Insights from an Ethnography of Migrant Women Household Workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Seattle (modalidad híbrida)

Congreso; 2022 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting: Unsettling Landscapes; 2022

American Anthropological Association

Latin American women who migrate to Buenos Aires often participate in forms of commodified social reproductive work embedded in a distinctive political economy of household labor. Middle-class families there often rely on the paid reproductive labor of migrant women household workers to access the paid labor force, outsourcing to them the work of cooking, cleaning, and caring. Simultaneously, migrant women’s participation in such forms of commodified social reproductive labor goes hand-in-hand with processes of precaritization and class-formation. Drawing from recent ethnographic research with Latin American migrant women household workers in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, this paper considers the ways in which these workers’ experiences as precarious reproductive workers shapes ethnographic research with them in methodological terms. The paper argues that workers’ experiences of precarity must be understood not only as an existential condition for them, but also as a framework determining every methodological choice when conducting ethnographic research with them. Such choices include recruitment of participants, type and length of interviews, selection of research sites, and a consideration of our multiple roles vis-à-vis our interlocutors beyond our role as field researchers. In centering political economy as a methodological framework by taking it as a starting point in the crafting of ethnographic research methodology, the paper aims to problematize the assumptions encoded in normative approaches to the ethnographic method. It also aims to highlight the importance of creativity, flexibility, and engagement in ethnographic praxis when conducting ethnographic research with interlocutors who are subject to significant material and symbolic intersectional constraints.