Precarity, Care and Popular Economy in Latin America.

MARÍA INÉS FERNÁNDEZ ALVAREZ ; FLORENCIA PACIFICO

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Oxford University Press

Lugar: New York; Año: 2022; p. 1 - 27

The notions of precarity and care have become increasingly central in academic debate. Although both notions have a history dating back to the 1970s, the debates have undoubtedly been renewed since the economic world crisis following 2008. Both concepts have been subject to various reviews according to different disciplinary views and contexts of knowledge production. However, it is possible to identify some points in common across the different lines of analysis that come into play for both cases. From a social and historically situated perspective, the understanding of precarity as an experience that goes beyond what is strictly labor related, has made it possible to bring visibility to the living conditions of a large sector of the population worldwide. By putting on hold the views of work as a formal / informal dichotomy, the attention to non-European realities opened the way to questions and reflections that led to rethinking the ways in which work and the economy are understood, to consider the ways in which individual and collective strategies are generated for the reproduction of life, under unwaged and even non-commodified forms. The concept of care, particularly the way it was developed by feminist economics, also aimed to problematize the view of economic systems that were centered on a self-sufficient ideal subject that solves their vital needs only through the market, evidencing hierarchies of gender and class that come into play in the valorization and distribution of work.In Latin America, the recent development of a series of union construction and mobilization processes led by workers from the popular economy have given way to revisiting the debates about the various forms of reproduction of life in populations structurally excluded from wage labor. In recent years, in Argentina in particular, a series of collective organization processes led by unwaged workers have taken place with the aim at claiming for the rights and improved living conditions of sectors of the population defined as part of the popular economy. The ethnographic analysis of these experiences sheds lights on the intersection between precarity and care, contributing to a broader question about ways of making a living and producing wellbeing in contexts of structural inequality and exclusion from the formal labor market. The dynamics of organization produced by the popular economy entail the implementation of collective forms of care and reproduction of life that stretch the limits of the Fordist model of welfare provision anchored in the labor market and in the nuclear family, renewing the debates around the ways in which processes of class struggle are configured.