Wage‐labour and a double separation in Papua New Guinea and beyond

Abstract

In this essay, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour is used to perform a double separation within and between persons. The first aspect of this separation is a separation of activities that are characterized as ‘labour’ from the person performing the activity thus characterized. This separation is the precondition for the second separation: namely a partial and often contested separation between the two parties to the contested wage‐labour transaction. Ethnographically, I explore how the idea of wage‐labour has been used to perform this double separation in Papua New Guinea in recent years. The analysis of these separations has a long pedigree in Western critical thought, the first being at the heart of Marx's conception of the worker as person in a capitalist political economy, for example. The second separation creates the possibility of momentary perspectives from which persons can present themselves increasingly as discrete individuals separate from the claims of others. Ethnographic analysis demonstrates how the category of ‘labour’ and related idioms create possibilities for the historically shifting emergence and dissolution of different idioms of the person in contemporary PNG, which is taken as a specific instance of an important global phenomenon.

Labour, property and persons

“…Yet, as Martin (2018) observes, both Locke and Marx can be seen as being based upon a kind of 'partibility' with 'labour' being the part of the person that must be detached for the person to operate in a socially recognised manner. In addition, whereas Locke does seem to argue that labour is 'unquestionably' the property of the individual, it is less clear that this holds for Marx.…”

Imagined individuality

“…To be able to create and switch between perspectives that disconnected the domains of business and friendship in one moment and reconnect them in another was key for getting ahead in the Cuban business world. Yet, such maneuvers are not exclusive to the Cuban setting (Martin 2018;Martin and Yanagisako 2020;Yanagisako 2002). Analyses that focus on individuality as a fi xed cultural schemata, distributed diff erently on a "Western"/ "non-Western" axis, is poorly positioned to understand these struggles over meaning and power, whereby people and social processes highlight or hide human interdependencies.…”

European social anthropology in 2018: an increasingly recursive public

“…Harvey and Krohn-Hansen's 'Dislocating labour' (2018) is the most programmatic of these contributions, drawing on a tradition in feminist thinking that has historically expanded the concept of labour to draw out new solidarities in relation to capital. In that spirit, contributors to the special issue try to offer the most expansive possible sampling of relationships between labour and capital, seeking to avoid limiting the concept to wage labour (Cant 2018;Martin 2018;Narotzky 2018;Yanagisako 2018). Here, they make a deliberate decision to focus both on the now much-discussed precariat (Grill 2018;Harvey 2018;Eriksen and Schober 2018), but also the persistence of the state and far more stable labour relations among certain privileged groups (Campbell 2018;Hoëm 2018;Krohn-Hansen 2018).…”