Women’s Cityward Migration, Domestic Service and Schooling in Southern Mexico

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Jayne Howell
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Household Labor ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Formal Sector ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
City Population ◽  
Household Workers ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Very High ◽  
Shed Light

That 40,000 women work as household workers in Oaxaca City (population 450,000) is deemed “very high for a country as developed as Mexico” (Selby, Murphy and Lorenzon 1991:48; INEGI 2001).  Ethnographic data collected among women currently and at one time working as either full-time or daily/hourly domestic workers shed light on the realities faced by unskilled women cityward migrants who find employment in the lowest paid, least prestigious jobs in the urban economy.  Two case studies are presented to illustrate ways that women's paid household labor can finance their own or their children's acquisition of the schooling requisite for more gainful, higher paid forms of urban formal sector employment. 

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-132
Author(s):  
Erynn Masi de Casanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
State Funding ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
The People

This epilogue looks at several new factors affecting domestic employment in Ecuador today which may change the landscape for workers, employers, and activists. First is the new government. If before, there was worker-friendly rhetoric and praise for humble domestic workers, but little concrete improvement in policies and conditions, today even the rhetoric is gone. The best way to reach and make claims on the new government is still unclear, and it will be difficult to obtain state funding for domestic worker initiatives. Second, there has been a “rupture” in the domestic worker organization Asociación de Trabajadoras Remuneradas del Hogar (ATRH). This situation makes organizing and advocating for domestic workers more difficult and may lead to confusion among policy makers and funders. Third, there has been an uptick in migration to Ecuador from Colombia and Venezuela, as people flee violence, political instability, and economic disaster. Finally, some of the people interviewed in 2018 claim to be witnessing growth in the proportion of live-in, full-time domestic workers. Despite changes in the context of domestic employment, however, workers' status has not changed much since this study began. Social reproduction is still devalued, informal arrangements still prevail, and the class gulf between employers and domestic workers remains.

“Their Side of the Case”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Household Labor ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
The World ◽  
Contractual Agreements ◽  
Working Class Women

Chapter 2 maps the labor activism of St. Louis’s largest segment of black working-class women as they mounted a labor reform program that anticipated and challenged New Deal labor legislation. With progressive black women staffers who led the St. Louis Urban League’s Women’s Division and progressive Jewish clubwomen who developed important ties to black communities, domestic workers designed and enforced standardization and rationalization policies to make dignity tangible in their contractual agreements. A predominant female constituency marked the Urban League as a women’s organization during a “radical” phase that extended into the late 1940s. As domestic workers made moves to “industrialize” household labor, they laid the groundwork for black women’s economic battles during the World War II period.

The Homemaker as Worker

2020 ◽  
pp. 121-147
Author(s):  
Kirsten Swinth
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Household Labor ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
Second Wave

Swinth’s essay explores 1970s American feminists’ efforts to revalue household labor as work with economic and social value. It begins by tracing domestic workers’ campaign to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act and secure a minimum wage for household employees. The chapter then turns to liberal and radical feminists’ struggles to recognize housework as labor worthy of wages and fringe-benefits, including most importantly, social security. By altering the valuation of household labor and making social reproduction visible as work, feminists of the era drew on a gender justice framework to put forward successful working alternatives to conventional economics. Swinth bolsters contemporary campaigns to value women’s emotional labor and caregiving by connecting them to the vision pioneered by second wave feminists more than fifty years ago.

Renegotiating the Domestic Division of Labour? A Study of Dual Career Households in North East and South East England

1993 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicky Gregson ◽  
Michelle Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Dual Career ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
South East England ◽  
Shed Light

This paper is concerned with extending debate on the renegotiation of the domestic division of labour within the context of contemporary economic restructuring. Our focus is on a form of household which is becoming increasingly common in Britain in the 1990s. This is the dual career household, in which both partners are in full time professional/managerial employment. A sample of 71 households drawn from the North east and South east, forms the basis for the study. The paper is divided into three main sections. In the first we establish a typology of forms of the domestic division of labour, as well as a means of allocating individual households to particular forms of the domestic division of labour. Then we move on to discuss the degree of variation in particular forms of the domestic division of labour found within our sample households and illustrate these with reference to five case studies. In our final section we consider the implications of our findings for the respective arguments of Lydia Morris and Jane Wheelock; point to the significance of gender identities to an understanding of between household variation in form of the domestic division of labour; and suggest how our findings shed light on the debate over women and social class.

scholarly journals The socialization of hallucinations: Cultural priors, social interactions, and contextual factors in the use of psychedelics

2021 ◽  
pp. 136346152110363
Author(s):  
David Dupuis
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Auditory Imagery ◽  
Peruvian Amazon ◽  
Cognitive Penetrability ◽  
Global North ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Do So

The effects of so-called “psychedelic” or “hallucinogenic” substances are known for their strong conditionality on context. While the so-called culturalist approach to the study of hallucinations has won the favor of anthropologists, the vectors by which the features of visual and auditory imagery are structured by social context have been so far little explored. Using ethnographic data collected in a shamanic center of the Peruvian Amazon and an anthropological approach dialoguing with phenomenology and recent models of social cognition of Bayesian inspiration, I aim to shed light on the nature of these dynamics through an approach I call the “socialization of hallucinations.” Distinguishing two levels of socialization of hallucinations, I argue that cultural background and social interactions organize the relationship not only to the hallucinogenic experience, but also to its very phenomenological content. I account for the underpinnings of the socialization of hallucinations proposing such candidate factors as the education of attention, the categorization of perceptions, and the shaping of emotions and expectations. Considering psychedelic experiences in the light of their noetic properties and cognitive penetrability debates, I show that they are powerful vectors of cultural transmission. I question the ethical stakes of this claim, at a time when the use of psychedelics is becoming increasingly popular in the global North. I finally emphasize the importance of better understanding the extrapharmacological factors of the psychedelic experience and its subjective implications, and sketch out the basis for an interdisciplinary methodology in order to do so.

scholarly journals A Tale of Two Shitties

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-41
Author(s):  
William Robertson
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Cancer Prevention ◽  
Anal Cancer ◽  
Clinical Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Prevention Clinic

Based on 12 months of ethnographic data collection in an anal cancer prevention clinic, this article uses the extreme examples of patients involuntarily defecating through the anoscope during the procedure to highlight the relationship between the extreme and the everyday. Despite the rarity of this occurrence, I argue that these extreme examples shed light on the ways the daily clinical routines are embodied as an expert habitus. High Resolution Anoscopy procedures are specialized, highly routinized practices that are performed hundreds of times per month at the clinic. These routines result in the development of a clinical habitus that guides physicians in deploying techniques to efficiently conduct the invasive examination. Exemplary examples of ordinary procedures certainly help explain how this expert habitus is enacted through routine clinical practices; however, this expertise becomes especially observable in moments when habituated practices are disrupted, forcing clinicians to react and respond in unscripted ways. I discuss the only two instances of patients defecating through the anoscope that occurred while conducting my research, each with a different clinician. These extreme examples provide rich opportunities to analyze how clinicians with similar procedural habits navigate extraordinary situations in expert and professional but idiosyncratic ways. Whereas exemplary examples of everyday routinized procedures can show the process of developing an expert clinical habitus, these extreme examples more clearly demonstrate how this habitus enacts expertise and professionalism by highlighting the clinicians’ abilities to deftly navigate the technical and sociocultural aspects of such extraordinary disruptions.

Informality and Working Conditions in China's Sanitation Sector

2018 ◽  
Vol 238 ◽  
pp. 375-395
Author(s):  
Hao Zhang ◽  
Eli Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Family Income ◽  
Work Organization ◽  
Formal Sector ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Informal Work ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Team Model

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the sanitation industry in Wenzhou and Guangzhou, we investigate different patterns of work organization in each city. We find that supplementary informal work can serve to subsidize low family income and therefore stabilize formal but exploitative work. In Wenzhou, the family team model creates time and space for one spouse to engage in informal work while still receiving a wage from the employer. This additional informal work significantly increases net family income, which neutralizes worker demands for better wages and working conditions in the formal sector. In contrast, Guangzhou workers are subject to relatively rigid spatio-temporal controls, impeding them from participating in informal work to supplement their formal wages. Despite receiving higher wages and more benefits, these workers are highly wage dependent and express much greater discontent than their equivalents in Wenzhou. Theoretically, we contribute to the literature on informality through a discussion of “ancillary informal work,” highlighting how access to certain kinds of informal work both subsidizes and is facilitated by formal sector employment.

Brownie kuzyutka: the internal form and symbolic meaning of a word in the light of sociological and ethnographic data

2021 ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Irina V. Yakushevich ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
High Concentration ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Very High

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the internal form of the Tula dialect word kuzyutka, meaning brownie. Analysis of the internal form allows detecting a hidden, symbolic meaning of the word (A. N. Afanasyev, A. A. Potebnya, V. N. Toporov). More broadly, the paper addresses the problem of the etymological significance of the semantically syncretic (M. V. Pimenova) root of kuz-, which is the basis of a number of root words and the source of several symbolic meanings of the brownie. The analysis has revealed three variants of the etymology of the word Kuzyutka: 1) from the Russian Kuzma, identified by folk etymology with the blacksmith and ascending to the name of St. Cosmas; 2) from the dialect word kuzyukat (and its variants) with the meaning “to tickle, making ‘horns’ with fingers,” which goes back to the Turkic koza ; 3) from Turkic kuzov. All three meanings are united by common symbolic meanings ‘fertility’, ‘prosperity’, ‘children’, ‘marriage’, ‘needlework’ related to the lexical background and have cultural and mythological value. The choice of the most probable version - kuzutka as a diminutive version of Kozma - is justified by sociological statistics and ethnographic data processed using the cartographic method. From ancient times, Dubensky area, where the word was fixed, and its surroundings were famous for blacksmithing. That is why there is a very high concentration of the temple consecrated in honor of St. Cosmas and Damian - the patrons of the blacksmiths

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