mollona2005

Gifts of LabourSteel Production and Technological Imaginationin an Area of Urban Deprivation, Sheffield, UK

Mao MollonaGoldsmiths College, London

Abstract The article focuses on how the workers of a small tool factory locatedin Endcliffe an area of urban deprivation in Sheffield, UK conceptualize,experience, and talk about the value of their labour and how changes in thewider politico-economic environment affect their notion of labour value. Thearticle combines a Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process with ananthropological focus on the ideology of gift and commodity exchange, andexplores the cultural specificity of processes of labour commodification. Itargues that the combined effect of state neoliberal policies and extensivesubcontracting by local steel corporations in Sheffield have turned small fac-tories into hybrids between economic and welfare institutions, with mixedcommodified and non-commodified labour on the same shopfloor. In challeng-ing much of the recent anthropological literature on alienation, the articleclaims that alienation is the consequence of the workers (con)fusion of theideology of labour as a free gift and the ideology of labour as a purely utilitarianactivity, rather than of their sharp separation.Keywords de-industrialization Europe exploitation fetishism imagination political economy politics of production

This article is a Marxist exploration of the imaginary forms taken bylabour under capitalism. I describe the labour process as a process offabrication of social relations through the exchange of objects and infor-mation. Through the production and circulation of artefacts, the workersbuild sensuous and material connections, make cuts and separationsbetween themselves, their objects of production and the environment.Under capitalism, technology is the imaginary fetish1 through which theworkers conceptualize the connections between people and things. It isthe symbolical operator that mediates between the world of the objects andthe world of subjects, and the arena where social relations are negotiatedand reproduced. My ethnography focuses on the technological fetishism ofthe workers of Morris, a small tool factory located in Endcliffe,2 an ex-industrial neighborhood of Sheffield. In Morris, the younger workers talkof the machines as alienable labour, whereas the older workers talk oftheir machines in terms of inalienable capital. In the article I treat tech-nology as an ideological construct and an enchanting artefact3 and I

Article

Vol 25(2) 177198 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X05052022]Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CAand New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

at PURDUE UNIV LIBRARY TSS on May 24, 2015coa.sagepub.comDownloaded from

suggest that the workers conflicting versions of technological fetishismobscure their common subsumption to capital.

In the article I combine the tradition of industrial sociology that devel-oped from Marxs seminal study of the capitalist labour process (1976[1867]) and his focus on the commodified nature of wage labour withrecent anthropological studies on labour commodification (Carrier, 1992;Goddard, 2000; Hart, 1983) and the politico-economy of gift andcommodity exchange (Parry, 1986; Parry and Bloch, 1989; Strathern, 1988;Thomas, 1991). These anthropological studies have variously incorporatedMarxs symbolical analysis of labour commodification and combined it witha Maussian understanding of exchange as total fact. For instance, MauriceBloch in his Marxian study of the symbolical construction of the represen-tation of the mode of production by Merina peasants (1989b: 175) pairsthe worship of money and commodities under capitalism with the Merinaworship of tombs and ancestors. According to Bloch, Western commerceand Merina tombs are ideological constructs through which the dominantclasses obscure human productiveness and reproduce the political order.Similarly, the anthropologists Lisette Josephides (1985) and MauriceGodelier (1996) show that the ideology of generosity of Melanesian GreatMen is a misrepresentation of their exploitation of womens labour. Theseanthropological studies provided a structural link between ideologies ofexchange and ideologies of production, and a theoretical framework forcomparative studies on alienation in capitalist and non-capitalist societies.For instance, Jonathan Parry (Parry and Bloch, 1989) suggests that theideology of the pure gift as opposed to the ideology of commodityexchange emerged in societies with an advanced division of labour, astrong state and world religions. On the same line, James Carrier (1992)suggests that labour commodification and the experience of alienationdeveloped in Europe and North America as a consequence of the modernsystem of factory production.

Carrier (1992) in his historical sketch of the emerging alienation inrelations of production draws on Thompson, Braverman and Polanyi toargue that modern capitalist production entails a split in the workerspersonalities between two opposite moralities. The morality of economicinstitutions is seen to be impersonal and regulated by abstract forces asthe market , while the morality of the family is seen to be personal andregulated by personal forces like affection, creativity or bonds betweenpeople (1992: 553). Carriers formalist reading of the notions of tech-nology, working class and alienation under capitalism leads him to drawa historical divide between the non-alienated pre-capitalist world and alien-ation under capitalism. In my analysis, I focus on the subjective, experien-tial and symbolical ways through which manual workers imagine themselvesand the relations of production in which they are embedded. I suggest thatideologies are not as sharp and static as Carrier makes them, and I focuson the opacity of the categories of capital and labour; on their historical

178

Critique of Anthropology 25(2)


continuity (Hart, 1983); and their strategic permutability and convertibil-ity (Thomas, 1991) in the contexts of the factory, the family and the neigh-bourhood.

In fact, the workers of the same shopfloor have ambiguous and conflict-ing views of the value of their labour. Some workers consider labour asinalienable social capital that can circulate only in the form of gift amongrelated individuals. Other workers consider labour as a commodity thatthey exchange anonymously in the production process. The workerscomplementary narratives one of pure generosity and one of pureinterest reflect and reproduce the capitalist ideology or cosmologycentred on the free and alienable nature of labour in modern factoryproduction. On the one hand these oppositional moralities obscure thefact that the workers pertain to the same space of poverty outside thefactory, while on the other, they allow the workers to articulate long-termstrategies of reciprocity.

My article follows up on Stratherns project of an anti-humanist anthro-pology. Strathern, in her Gender of the Gift (1988), challenges Josephidesclaim of womens alienation in Mount Hagen and suggests that Melanesianpeople cannot possibly be alienated because they dont subscribe to theWestern myth of possessive individualism. Strathern conceived of herattack on the myth of possessive individualism as a challenge to theThatcherite myths of individuals and society that informed neoliberaland Marxist social science in the 1980s (Ingold, 1996: Part II). Neverthe-less, she overlooked the long tradition of Marxist critique of possessive indi-vidualism from Marxs 1844 Manuscripts (1963) to Louis AlthussersHumanist Controversy (2003) that preceded and possibly informed herwork. In so doing, she depoliticized anthropology by drawing a dividebetween alienated Westerners and non-alienated Melanesians. In my articleI go back to this tradition, and I suggest that a truly anti-humanist projectmust provide a serious critique to the myths of capitalism.

My focus will be mainly on the shopfloor. In the first section I describethe organization of labour and the physical layout of the shopfloor. In thesecond section I describe the technological system of Morris, both in termsof the social history of the machines and of the social distribution of theknowledge that is necessary to operate them. In the third section I recon-struct the workers narratives of labour and show how their poetics shapestheir politics of production. In section four, I reframe the workers narra-tives and practices of labour in the wider politico-economy of the neigh-bourhood. At the end, I draw some tentative conclusions on the nature ofalienation in modern factory production.

179

Mollona: Gifts of Labour


Part 1: The shopfloor

Preface: The magic of capitalist productionIn his seminal article on technology, Gell claims that the Trobriand peopletend to assess the value of labour according to magical criteria. Forinstance, they evaluate the standard of actual Kula canoes against thestandard set by the mythical flying canoes and through the notion of effort-less labour. The magic of production in Morris consists in the fact thatMr Greed, the owner of the firm, evades taxes through CISCO, a smallghost firm that was built during my fieldwork inside the Morris shopfloor,under the worried glances of the workers.

By fragmenting the workforce into two legally distinct firms, the ownerbenefits from legal concessions accorded to small firms. In fact, firms withfewer than 20 employees are not compelled to compile balance sheets, andare granted tax relief and reduced duties in terms of employees welfare.By shifting income and workforce between the two shopfloors, the owneris able to under-declare the profits of CISCO and to keep Morris at thebreak-even point, that is, on the verge of bankruptcy. In fact, in Morris thecosts are inflated by the costs of production of tools for CISCO. Morrisinsolvency also allows the owner to benefit from the exemption from theminimum wage legislation granted to firms facing financial hardship. ThusCISCO is an empty box producing profits and Morris is a collection ofsecond-hand machines and obsolete workers producing losses. The profitof the former thus originates from the losses of the latter, and from thelack of legal status of its workers.

Mostly Mr Greed profits from the externalization of the welfare andorganizational costs of production onto the workers themselves. In fact inMorris the workers provide both for their own social protection and fortheir capitalist supervision. What is magic about Morris is the workersdenial of their social productiveness and their technological imagination,which sees the shopfloor as split between totally human and entirely alien-able labour. As for the Trobrianders, in Morris technologies of productionreveal the invisible power of external agents and the effortless nature ofhuman labour, split between priestly rituals and workers toil.

The shopfloorMorris is located along the River Don, in Endcliffe, Sheffield. The presenceof an ancient grinding wheel right near its back door, together with anancient weir, reveals one of the many industrial stages that have beenwitnessed and powered by the water of this river, that is, the long period ofindustrial production of steel initiated by the Earl of Fitzwilliam in the 17thcentury. His family kept the control of the cutlery trade until the end ofthe 19th century and actively fought together with the cutlers tradeunions against the introduction of machinery into the developingcapitalists mills. The many derelict mills reflected on the surface of the

180



River Don described by Marx as the outcome of the new despotic capi-talism in 1865 have had a long history of expansions, nationalizations,rationalizations and closures before reaching the calm state of desolationin which they may be found today. These ancient and unsafe mills are stillin use, in spite of the fact that the people in Sheffield believe that they arenot and that nowadays steel is produced almost entirely in big, modern andfully mechanized shopfloors. One day, following the rhythmical noise ofTommys hammer, I walked into Morris asking for a job. Under my eyes Ifound a big open space, approximately 80 meters long, filled with around100 machines, the majority of which dated from 1914 while a few of themhad been made in 1860, when the firm was founded. After a briefconsultation with the others, one of the forgers decided that I could stayand start my apprenticeship on his machine.

There are two main entrances to the shopfloor, located in a small streetbetween the Elysium brothel and a derelict red-brick building. Oneentrance leads into the office and is used by the manager and by the owneronly, whereas the other leads into the break-room and is used by the 23workers when they come to work at 6 oclock in the morning. Later on, ahuge blue door kept closed during the early morning opens slowly asthe day unfolds, letting the air from outside free to circulate inside. Thisdoor is used mainly by the workers located on the hot part of theshopfloor, who freely walk in and out through it. The workers of the hotdepartment have lost the sense of their bodily temperature by working nearthe fire, but they constantly complain about the hot air surrounding theirmachines. For this reason, they open the big blue door every morning, nomatter what the temperature is outside. During the summer, they have theprivilege of having big white fans near their machines that they keepconstantly running. The workers of the cold department are always coldduring the winter and hot during the summer, constantly complainingabout the drafts coming from the big blue door during the winter andabout the lack of ventilation during the summer. Thus a subtle net of draftsand currents divides the shopfloor into two distinctive microclimates.

Hot and cold workers not only perceive distinct temperatures on theshopfloor, but also different kinds of noises. In fact, the noises of thehammers used in the hot department are regular, low and rhythmic,whereas milling machines and grinding machines produce irregular,electric and acute sequences of noise, which are refracted and multipliedin the small space where the cold workers are crowded. From the point ofview of the workers health, the former sorts of noises produce deafness,whereas the latter produce stress and high blood pressure.

Light is distributed on the shopfloor very unevenly. The cold depart-ment uniformly reflects the light of the sun coming from the big windowoverlooking the river and of the powerful neon lamps located high up onthe ceiling. Conversely, the hot department has no window; it is dark, witha scattering of feeble neon lights hanging from the distant roof above each

181



machine, which oscillate rhythmically, following the movements of themachines. Obscurity punctuated with sharp rays of natural or artificiallight and red waves of heat coming from the ovens surrounds the hotworkers, while artificial uniformity surrounds the cold ones. The darknessof the hot department is constantly lit up by the red waves coming out ofthe ovens by each machine, whereas the light of the cold department isrefracted between the white wall at the back, the blue coolant liquid of itsmachines and the silver reflections of the polished bits of steel. As a result,the same dark green machines appear to be violet in the hot departmentand pale blue in the cold one.

Because of the lack of light, dirt, grease and oil appear to be a naturalextension of the machines located in the hot department, whereas in thecold department particles of dust are clearly distinguishable in their silverreflections in the light of the sun. Dust can be seen all around themachines, colored by the artificial coolants, the bright yellow chemicals andthe silver blue of the polished steel. The hot workers are more preoccupiedwith dirt and fumes, the cold ones with dust, and their opposing attitudestowards air circulation also reflect the different degrees of volatility of theirenvironment and different perceptions of its cleanliness. In fact, in orderto breathe properly, the hot workers need to create circulation, whereasthe cold workers need to prevent it. In order to have a clean machine, theformer have to dissolve the dirt, the latter to concentrate it in one place.As a matter of fact, the hot workers control the air fluxes either throughtheir control over the big blue door, or through the control of their fans.To prevent both the dust from dirtying their clothes and the cold fromstiffening their bones, the cold workers wear blue overalls on top of theirnormal clothes. Hot workers dont wear overalls and each of them has hisown peculiar style of working clothes: coloured shirts open on their chests,T-shirts tight on their muscles, track-suit bottoms or denim trousers.Getting changed is part of the hot workers daily routine, during which theytake pride in publicly displaying their semi-naked bodies. They arrive at5.30 a.m., clock in, open their lockers, warm up their clothes near theirovens and get dressed near their machines. The cold workers arrive at 5.50a.m.; they clock in and quickly add their overall on top of their clothes.

Thus, sensuously perceived, the technical system expands and dissolvesits boundaries into waves of colours and smells, warm spaces veiled withsmoke, and dark corridors crossed by dust and cold air. The workersperceive and absorb differently the colours, smells, drafts and dust comingfrom the machines according to their different location in the productionprocess, but they also reshape their technical and social boundaries bymanipulating the microclimate of the shopfloor.

The marketMorris was founded in 1860 to produce cutlery, augers and wood-boringtools for railway construction. According to Tommy, one of the workers in

182



Morris, the job of hand-boring the wood for the railway was so repetitiveand exhausting that in the past it was used to rehabilitate prisoners. Fromthe 1920s, the tools of Mr Morris were exported to China, Africa and India,where they are still used today for railway construction. In these countries,according to Tommy, workers are like slaves in that they still hand-borethe holes for the railway sleepers. Bill cannot give me any rational expla-nation for the fact that both London Transport and London Under-ground use Morris bits for the same purpose.

Today, Morris produces about 20 different kinds of wood-boring toolsand sells them to big DIY chains, such as B&Q, and to local tool shops. Thesale of tools to local shops and in small orders allows the firm to survive intimes of economic stagnation. Apart from this primary market, the hotworkers sell or exchange their skills and products in a variety of hiddenmarkets: Bob fits the machines in several firms of the area and subcontracts,with Tony and Brian, semi-finished products to local small firms, Teddytrades alcohol, and they sell broken machines to local scrap dealers. As Ishow later, Mr Greed (the owner) tolerates these informal transactions bypart of the workforce, as long as the production of chisel bits runs smoothly.

The factory organizationThe production process is the following. The workers of the hot depart-ment (the forge) heat bars of steel inside small ovens and forge them intorough drill bits by using ancient hammer machines. The rough bits are leftto cool down for a few hours in the cooling area before the workers of thecold department (the machine-shop) finish, grind, polish and pack theminto boxes that go into the warehouse.4

In the hot department the production process is organized andcontrolled by the workers and follows the slow pace that they impose ontheir machines. Forging involves very skilled knowledge that is communi-cated silently, by doing, and through apprenticeship.

In the cold department the work is fast, repetitive and regulated by thepressure to produce more and to maximize the bonuses. The cold depart-ment is organized to maximize the flexibility of the workforce in respond-ing to the markets demand. In fact the workers rotate on differentmachines and adapt their production to the new orders every morning.

WagesThere are three levels of wage at Morris. At the first level are the staff,with a basic weekly wage of 220. At the second level the skilled and semi-skilled workers earn 180. Big Dave the only unskilled worker earns160. The staff includes Graham, the old man who carries small boxes offinished bits from the rack to the warehouse, John (the manager), Philip(the supervisor and quality controller) and Linda (the secretary). On topof the basic pay, a bonus adds to the weekly wage. Bonuses vary from 5 to50 per week, according to the different kind of bits produced. The cold

183



department is responsible for the weekly bonuses for the whole workforceand the bonus level is calculated on the amount of products that enter intothe warehouse. Bob (the fitter) fixes the piecework rates by deducing themfrom the standard qualities of the machines. Cold workers constantlycomplain to John about the fact that Bobs piecework rates are too tightand that he never shows up in the cold department when the machinesbreak down. Bob claims that he fixes tight piecework rates because other-wise the cold workers would break the machines by setting them up withhammers, rather than with spanners, and by burning the milling machinesarms in their attempt to intensify production.

Burawoys (1985) hypothesis that the workers participate in their ownexploitation by playing the same game of production revolving around thefirms wage system doesnt apply to Morris, where different individualsagree on different rules of the game and have conflicting notions of profit-ability and accountability. For instance, the wages of the hot workers aretotally independent of their daily production. In fact, because the bonus ismeasured on the weekly amount of products worked in the cold depart-ment, the hot workers could easily stop working until the cooling area isempty and still receive their weekly wage. Their disconnection from thepressure of the bonus system allows them to take part in a variety ofinformal economic transactions which parallel the main productionprocess, and to conceive of their weekly wages simply as part of their profitderiving from the informal economy of the neighbourhood.

Differently, the cold workers produce for the bonuses and not for theirwages. In fact if their weekly bonus is calculated on the totality of the bitsproduced, their basic wages dont include the chisel bits that are sold byCISCO. They look at the firms sales and not at the owners profits. Thus,the game of production in Morris follows conflicting and inconsistent rules.The hot workers are preoccupied with increasing their profits and protect-ing the value of their capital (the machines), the cold workers with increas-ing the firms sales.

Burawoys conclusion that capital reproduces itself on the shopfloorthrough labours consent does not apply in Morris, where the workersperceive capital in different ways and consent to produce for differentreasons. The cold workers think about capital in terms of money to bemaximized through the intensification of production; the hot workersthink of capital in terms of machines that are necessary for them to culti-vate their transactions in the neighbourhood. If the cold workers repro-duce the factory regime, the hot workers adapt it to their moonlightingactivities. If the cold workers are really subsumed to capital, the hot workersare only partially so, as I will show in the next section.

Informal organizationThe hot workers are on average above 50 years of age and old Endclifferesidents. They are the only official breadwinners of households with an

184



average of five members of whom at least two are unemployed or long-termdisabled. Thus, in order to sustain their families they have to add to the50006000 pa that they receive in Morris (they are on short-time or offwork for around three months each year) through a variety of hetero-geneous sources of income: state benefits, casual labour, illegal activities,informal revenues and free services exchanged in the neighbourhood.During the working day Tommy and Bob make some extra profits throughinformal production and exchanges in the neighbourhood. For instance,Bob fixes the carcass-processing machines at the chicken slaughterhouseon the other side of the street and the oven of Teds bakery, and Tommyrepairs the furnaces and rolling mills of the local steel factories. The olderworkers of the hot department also work as subcontractors for bigger toolfactories5 located near-by, and they subcontract the production of the bitsthat are less advantageous in terms of bonuses to smaller tool factories, forinstance to the factory run by teenagers in Fowley Road. Hot workers co-opt into their informal production the younger apprentices and coldworkers, whom they remunerate with cash given in the form of gift at theend of each week. Tommy and Bob also control the local trade of scrap andsecond-hand machines through their precious connection with Ned, thelocal scrap merchant, whom they meet every Friday night at Khaleds, thelocal pub. In the committee room at Khaleds, the hot workers deal scrapand steel with petty capitalists and steel merchants, allocate jobs and welfareresources locally and negotiate the pay of their children as prostitutes,pub stewardesses, steel apprentices, pimps, dealers or drug carriers withlocal entrepreneurs and Yemeni bosses.

Thus, the older workers of the hot department complement the wagesthat they receive in Morris with social capital that they cultivate throughinformal production and exchange in the neighbourhood. Social capital in the form of ties of kinship and friendship with local customers, produc-ers, scrap merchants and second-hand machine dealers insulates themfrom the volatile economy of the factory, and at the same time increasestheir power on the shopfloor. In fact, their stable network of subcontrac-tors, customers and suppliers sustains the profits of the owner, who there-fore accepts the delegation of his authority and control over the productionprocess to the hot workers. As a consequence of their control over thepiecework rates, the layout of the machines and the recruitment andapprenticeship of new forgers, hot workers substitute Philip and John inthe managerial function of the firm.

The workers of the cold department are generally younger, sons ofunskilled steel labourers who migrated from the Endcliffe slums during the1960s. They own houses recently built on ex-mining estates located at theperiphery of Sheffield and pool their income with the income of theirwives, employed in the local call centres that have replaced the mining andsteel industries. They enjoy an annual income of 13,000 and a lifestyle new homes, cars, education for their children that makes them look

185



better off than the inhabitants of Endcliffe. Nevertheless, younger workershave no control over the labour process, the system of apprenticeship orthe internal labour market. In fact, unlike the hot workers, their recruit-ment follows formal channels (newspaper adverts, job centres) andrequirements (GCEs; diplomas; previous work experience), and it isdirectly supervised by Mr Greed, whose only concern is that the workers arenot members of any union.

The cold workers lack of control over the apprenticeship and recruit-ment system, the firms internal labour market and the informal economyof Endcliffe makes them totally vulnerable to the volatile cycles of the wage-economy. When some engineering firms of the area close down, theworkers made redundant and expelled from the primary labour marketenter into the so-called marginal labour market now occupied by Morrismachine-shop workers. In times of recession this allows Mr Greed to recruitbetter-qualified machine-shop workers at the same cost as the Morris ones.When made redundant, the cold workers who have not been lucky enoughto be taken as apprentices at the forge sink into long-term unemployment.They are unable to find temporary or casual employment due to their lackof social connections in their newly developed estates, and their wivesunder-remunerated and short-term jobs dont cover the living costs of thenuclear family. Cold workers made redundant often migrate to Endcliffe,as their distant relatives did in the past, looking for casual labour, cheapaccommodation and social connections.

Thus, in Morris, the hot workers are only formally subsumed to capi-talist production, as they control the recruitment and apprenticeshipsystems of the forge, and complement their wages with profits linked to theinformal economy of the neighbourhood. Unlike them, the cold workersare proletarians, fully dependent on the wage economy of the factory fortheir survival, and on the older workers for stable jobs at the forge andinformal incomes. Thus the authority of the older workers over the youngerworkers of the machine-shop overlaps with the authority of Mr Greed sothat the conflict between capital and labour is experienced as a genera-tional conflict within the workforce.

Part 2: The machines

A short social history of the life of the machinesAs Marcel Mauss pointed out, when a generation transmits to the next thescience of its gestures and of its manual acts, there is as much authority andsocial tradition as there is in linguistic transmission (1979: 104). Machinesaccumulate life histories that span several generations of the workers lives.Through their fascinating and enchanting stories, some machines acquirepower and visibility on the shopfloor and increase the status of theirholders. The histories of the machines are incorporated in the workers

186



practices and exchanged on the shopfloor as metaphors of past socialrelations to be reproduced through the invisible force of tradition.

The workers describe the hot and cold department as respectivelyforge and machine shop. Forging involves the transformation of moltensteel into a shaped object through the use of a hammer. In Greek mythol-ogy, Prometheus a clever semi-human god stole fire from the gods andgave it to the humans, teaching them how to forge metal. By teaching themhow to manipulate the fire and to craft tools to be used for agriculture andwar, Prometheus gave to humans the power to challenge the gods. In the17th century, with the spread of the use of cutlery in court etiquette, thesmall hammers of the blacksmiths transformed themselves into giant water-powered hammers operated by several workers employed by the Duke ofNorfolk for the mass production of knives and forks for the tables of theinternational aristocracy.

Until 1890 the duke who owned the rights over the Endcliffe meat,fish and tool markets and the industrial land along the River Don regu-lated the prices, quality and brands of the tools produced and ensured thatthe trade between the local small capitalists and the journeymen followedfair rules of conduct. The capitalists didnt employ the artisans on a stablebasis but hired them for small production tasks. In fact, because of the smallamount of capital required, and the technical interdependence of thedifferent phases of tool production, the forgers, blacksmiths and grinderscontrolled and organized their labour in dense productive networks sharedamong the families that lived in the cottages along the River Don or in thesame yard of the back-to-back houses in Endcliffe.

At the end of the 18th century, merchant-capitalists organized theproduction of tools and cutlery in small workshops and, when Marx cameto Sheffield, he described the newly patented Ryder Hammer as ananthropomorphic mechanical creature whose four hammers could be usedin strict sequence by individual operators. With the increase in the scale ofproduction of tools, milling machines developed as mechanical versions ofthe grinders hands and a transformation of their horizontal movementof friction into a sequence of circular cutting operations. Circular mechan-ical cutting allowed tools to be worked with more precision and on a biggerscale than with grinding and, during the 19th century, as reported by E.P.Thompson (1967: 279), a new category of working class the mechanics replaced artisans and grinders in the production of modern tools andweapons.

During the capitalist expansion in the two world wars, the mechanicswere incorporated into the integrated plants for the mass production ofsteel (developed at the eastern periphery of Endcliffe), their millingmachines expanded to accommodate the customer specifications of theAdmiralty, their tasks mechanized through cranes, cars and ladles and theirwages standardized following the negotiations between the government,the emerging trade unions and the capitalists. As a consequence of the

187



nationalization of the steel industry, in 1967 bulk steel and engineeringbecame two separate branches of the steel industry so that the 60,000 steelworkers of Sheffield were split between the public workers of the big andheavy factories mass-producing bulk steel and the private workers of thesmall and light engineering workshops facing each other along the RiverDon. In the 1980s, with privatization and de-industrialization, skilledartisans blacksmiths, rollers, forgers, cutters migrated from the big andheavy factories into the small workshops of Endcliffe again. The fragmen-tation of the social body of the steel workers was followed by the decompo-sition of the big and heavy machines of mass production and the barter oftheir mechanical parts in local or global second-hand markets. Followingthe flow of labour, the machines of early capitalism the Ryder Hammers,Cutters and Spring Hammer described by Marx with fear and fascination returned onto the Endcliffe shopfloors, such as Morris, where they are usedby the workers today, together with other ancient hammer machines.

The history of steel in Sheffield shows the circular trajectories of indus-trial capitalism. During industrialization, capitalism foresaw modernity as atransformation of small-scale, individualistic and hierarchical artisanlabour into mass-producing machines and magnified proletarian work-forces. Today, modernity is re-imagined in terms of fragmented workforces,miniaturized machines and individualistic and artisan forms of production.This circular and inconsistent history also shows that the factory and theworkshop, proletarians and artisans, machines and tools are nothistorically distinct social and material formations but different versions ofthe same capitalist imagination.

Reproducing technical monsters: the social distribution of knowledge inMorrisIn this section, I follow up on Tim Ingolds (2000) critique of Harry Braver-mans hypothesis in his Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974) of the inher-ently de-skilling and alienating nature of the capitalist labour process.Ingold claims that alienation is not a matter of social relations of produc-tion but the consequence of specifically Western cognitive/cultural under-standing of technology and of the labour process. Unlike Ingold, I suggestthat cognitive understandings of the production process are inscribed inwider capitalist ideologies or cosmologies of labour that both encompassand transcend specific forms of labour organization. This capitalist cosmol-ogy consists in the belief in the free nature of wage-labour. From this pointof view, alienation is more about people believing that they are free, ratherthan about people believing that they are not.

In Morris, the hot department is conceptually perceived and organizedby its workers as a blacksmiths workshop, where work is individuallyperformed, according to Keller and Keller (1996), following non-linguisticand non-codified constellations of practical tasks associated withspecific tools. The authors highlight four features of the kind of knowledge

188



associated with the manual forging of steel and iron. First, it relies on indi-vidual notions of relations between means and ends and is structured intoisolated and self-enclosed tasks. Second, it is memorized and retrievedthrough sets of physical movements and doesnt require thinking in thewords of Bloch (1998), it is implicit. Third, when it is communicatedlinguistically it is not communicated through technical language, butthrough a language that describes the morphological traits of the materialprocessed in terms of colour, shapes and metaphors. For instance, in Morris,hot workers communicate about their job in terms of the redness, round-ness and patchiness of the bits they are working, or of the inner move-ments or noises of their machines. Fourth, this kind of knowledge isephemeral because it is pulled together and held in mind as long as is appro-priate for a given task. Because of these four factors, the knowledge of workin the hot department is embedded in human bodies and socially organizedin subjective, fragmented, ephemeral and centripetal spaces of action.

The forgers talk about their labour as an immaterial and invisibleessence that becomes visible during the process of apprenticeship. Appren-tices are young, male, unemployed, willing to work free for a period of trial(lasting sometimes up to one year). During the apprenticeship, the olderartisan reveals the language and metaphors of the job; moulds the appren-tices body to his posture and personality; discloses the aristocratic historyof his machine; maps its invisible idiosyncrasies and the capricious micro-climate surrounding it. The apprentices reciprocate the masters gift oftheir knowledge of labour with free labour. Their mutual denial of theeconomic aspect of the relationship and emphasis on its personal, intimateand familial aspect legitimizes the masters gift of cash to the apprentice atthe end of the week. The intimacy of this relationship is also increased bythe fact that apprentices are often relatives or younger friends who live inthe area. Labour is not only indissolubly linked to the masters body butalso to his machine. Machines in the hot department are not seen asexternal functional apparatuses of production but as symbolical extensionsof the workers bodies, metaphorical appendages of their sexuality,powerful technologies of enchantment and markers of social status. In theforge men humanize machines with photos, calendars and small personalobjects; and machines progressively de-humanize workers by drawing theminto their self-enclosed mechanical spaces.

Thus, in the hot department labour is perceived as inalienable for tworeasons. First because it is not quantifiable and is entirely embedded in thepersonalities and bodies of the workers or in their machines and only circu-lates in the form of gift between master and apprentices. Labour is indis-solubly embedded in social relations. Second, because the labour in thefactory is rooted in the wider social texture of the neighborhood thefamily or the pub where it is considered an inalienable social capital ofthe community and circulates in the form of moral obligation rather thanof economic transaction.

189



The seven millers of the cold department organize their knowledge ina totally different way. A milling machine contains two mechanical armsthat cut the tools with precision. Workers use two round gears to controlthe mechanical arms inside the machine. Each gear is framed with smallnumbers that translate the position of the mechanical arms in terms ofspace and speed. This mapping of the workers labour through standard-ized temporal and spatial dimensions allows them to rotate on differentmachines and to collectively adjust their labour to the standardized natureof the customer specifications that becomes relevant only in the final phaseof production performed in the cold department. On each machine, chalkinscriptions translate the speed of the arms into piecework rates so thateach operator working on the machine knows with certainty the level ofspeed below or above which he is not allowed to go to meet the standardbonus level agreed by the workforce.

The cold workers spend most of their mental energy in translatingmeasures of speed into measures of bonus; making small chalk inscriptionson their machines to remember the complex arithmetic of their produc-tion; collectively exchanging their individual productive ratios; andcomparing them with old Grahams fragile recollections of formerworkers outputs. As a consequence labour in the cold department is de-personalized, de-composed into bits of human effort, objectified instandards of production, externalized in mnemonic supports, publiclyexchanged in competitive tournaments of value and ultimately dissolved inthe continuous flow of production. As bits flow from the forge into thewarehouse, they slowly transform themselves from raw pieces of steel intopolished geometrical objects. The metamorphosis of raw steel into finishedproducts is paralleled by the metamorphosis of labour on the shopfloor:from the individual and inalienable property of the workers into alienablecommodities in the cold department increasingly adapted to the morphol-ogy of the market as they approach Grahams warehouse.

In conclusion, in Morris the labour process is conceived in terms ofprogressive personalization and individualization of human labour in theforge and progressive de-personalization, de-composition and de-material-ization of human labour in the machine-shop. Embodied in strong person-alities in the hot department and dissolved in magnificent objects in thecold department, labour is seen as inalienable in the former and alienablein the latter. This workers imaginary understanding of their labourrevolves around their belief in machines as technological fetishes. In theforge, machines are seen as mechanical reflections of the workers person-alities; in the machine-shop, machines are seen as technological monstersengaged in deadly competitions with the workers labour.

In both cases, machines are powerful fetishes that hide the workerscontribution to the production process and make labour entirely free andpersonal in the forge and totally coercive and impersonal in the machine-shop. The workers common belief in technological monsters, and in the

190



inherent conflict between human labour and mechanical capital, hideswider structural inequalities and polarizes the workforce into capitalistforgers, who work for pure self-gratification, and proletarian machineworkers, who work only for money.

Part 3: Narratives of labour

Discussion about value in the break-roomAt 10.30 a.m. the workers have a half-hour break. During the break, the hotworkers regroup according to the hierarchical criteria of skill, whereas thecold workers gather together in the break-room, a small empty room withten tables where the workers sit in pairs. Only a big clock adorns the other-wise empty walls. The less-skilled hot workers join the cold workers insidethe room, eating their sandwiches and exchanging copies of The Sun,fishing tools and superficial conversations. The anonymity of the whiteroom, together with the peculiar small square coffee tables scattered in it,emphasizes the public nature of the workers informal interactions andalmost transfixes them into staged dialogues. Measured statements, calcu-lated irony and desultory conversations seem to mirror the workers strangeencounter on the shopfloor, whose old machines are framed in the longwindow of the break-room.

One day Alan made a bitter remark to me about Bobs habit of keepinghis tools locked up. According to Alan, Bob is very selfish and self-centredwhen he works, and he is extremely possessive both of his tools and hismachines. This remark was echoed by Steve who, interrupting his readingof The Sun behind us, claimed that they [the hot workers] are selfish,because in their job they care only for their machines, whereas we [the coldworkers] need each other to do our job.

According to Alan, the cold workers are a modern kind of workerbecause they work only for money and for the bonus, and without gettingpersonally involved in their job like the hot workers, whom he inciden-tally dismissed as prima donnas. He added that the cold workersmodern attitude to work is due to the modern nature of their machinesand of their labour organization that he proudly claimed give realvalue to Morris production. In fact, according to Alan, the value ofproduction depends on the collective efforts of the workers rather thanin individual acts of production. Unlike them, hot workers are egotisticaland selfish because they are shut in the ivory towers of their machines andnever dirty their hands working with other people. In the machine-shop,Alan added:

. . . we are the same kind of people. Our labour is worth all the same and ourhands are dirty all the same. We turn out money and bonuses for the wholefirm. Forgers are like Mr Greed. They dont care for the firm. They only carefor their machines and for their own profit.

191



Tommy reacted to Alans accusations with mannered pride andobjected that cold workers are greedy and reverted snobs due to theirobsolete class mentality that makes them value labour in terms of collectivebonuses and wages rather than as mechanical knowledge, human capitaland personal commitment to the job. In a sudden burst of rhetorical inspi-ration, he claimed that the gap between the skills of the hot workers andthe skills of the cold workers could be described in terms of the differencebetween a butcher extracting a liver from a dead chicken and a surgeonoperating on a human patient in a private clinic. Forging, according toTommy, is more a form of art than a mechanical operation and goes backto the times of the medieval blacksmiths whose tools and cutlery wereproduced in very much the same way in which the hot workers forge theirtools today. As the conversation unfolded around the small tables, Alaninsisted that the final value of production depends on the cold workersmaximization of bonuses and variable capital, and Alan replied that itdepends on the forgers preservation of the firms machines and mechan-ical capital.

During the conversation, Alan and Steve translated matters ofeconomic value into a discussion about modernity and equality, whereasTommy explained economic value in terms of individual knowledge, oftimeless tradition and personal motivation. Thus, the workers illusion ofmarket relations and their technological imagination provide the workerswith two opposite narratives according to which they experience and talkabout the value of their labour. The forgers of the hot department frametheir labour in a specific pre-capitalist ethos of work, symbolized by thestatus of its older workers; transmitted through implicit, subjective andbodily6 forms of knowledge; incorporated in powerful machines andembedded in the informal economy of the family and the neighbourhood.In the cold department the workers think of their interdependent, frag-mented and flexible labour as being in deadly competition with the firmsmechanical capital, and in constant transmutation into codified, public,numerical and monetary forms shared by the same homogeneous class ofworkers.

Staged inside the break-room, this opposition recreated the usual equi-librium in Morris, between the long-term worries of the hot workers for thefirms machines (what economists call fixed capital) and the short-terminvolvement of the cold workers in the monetary bonuses (in the words ofthe economists, variable capital). Enclosed inside the white and artificialatmosphere of the break-room, the more fundamental contrast betweenlabour and capital was turned into a routinely staged antipathy betweendifferent generations of workers, whose labour crystallized into capital withdifferent degrees of mobility. On the shopfloor, these narratives createsolid boundaries between the hot and the cold workers, between themarket and money that motivate the former, and the passion andtradition that inspire the latter. Between the pure generosity that makes

192



labour inalienable in the forge and the pure interest that makes it entirelyalienable in the machine-shop.

In spite of their conflicting market moralities and technological imag-inations the hot and the cold department, the informal and the wageeconomy, gifts and commodities artisans and proletarians are two sidesof the same capitalist coin. Younger workers maximize Mr Greeds variablecapital and absolute surplus, whereas the older workers maximize the valueof his fixed capital and relative surplus. The workers are aware of thefictional character of their mutual opposition and that they pertain to thesame space of poverty. Nevertheless, they also believe that the very exist-ence of imaginary boundaries makes the coexistence between their twoforms of labour possible.

Part 4: Spaces of poverty

In this section I will show that, in spite of their micro-conflicts and separ-ation on the shopfloor, from a macro-economic perspective, the workers ofMorris pertain to the same space of poverty.

State fiscal policies in the UK have formally deregulated the use of theperipheral workforce and fostered small-scale capitalism that thrives on taxevasion, exemption from legislation on the minimum wage, trade unionrepresentation and welfare provisions to the workers. Welfare policies haveshifted emphasis from tackling unemployment as a collective problem toenhancing individualistic economic strategies in the low-paid sector of theeconomy. Housing policies have increased the benefits to lone parents andfostered the formation of extended households. Local regeneration fundshave been diverted from the industrial to the voluntary sectors. The overalleffects of these policies has been to redistribute income from the wage-worker in the steel industry to the older artisans of Endcliffe.

Artisans like the hot workers of Morris diversify their sources of incomerather than maximizing their wages. They mix the process of productioninside the firm with a variety of economic transactions in the neighbour-hood and combine productive and reproductive strategies of survival. As Ihave shown in Morris, they are not only wage-workers, but also steel sub-contractors, middlemen, scrap merchants and petty capitalists, extractingsurplus labour from young apprentices. As a consequence of state housingand welfare policies of local regeneration, their households are mutatinginto extended working groups made up of relatives and loosely related indi-viduals who pool their incomes and exchange welfare services betweeneach other. This fact increases the portfolio of activities on which the olderworkers of the forge can rely for the subsistence of their families. As headsof the enlarged family, they negotiate with local bosses and petty capitaliststhe pay and working conditions for their children or wives in the drugs, sexor scrap trade, or in informal factory work. As a consequence of the

193



blurring of the social and economic spaces of the family, the pub and thefactory, wage work mixes with informal and illegal work. The labour thatis exchanged as commodity among unrelated individuals blurs with thelabour that circulates as a gift among friends and kin.

Proletarians like the cold workers live in nuclear families that surviveentirely on the volatile wages of the spouses. State neoliberalism and exten-sive subcontracting push them into long-term unemployment. Due to theirlack of social connections outside the shopfloor they are not able to shiftbetween the economy of the shopfloor and the economy of the neighbour-hood.

Both categories of Morris workers rely on precarious strategies ofsurvival. In fact, the social capital of Endcliffe is embedded in its ageingsocial network, in derelict estates and in shrinking informal labour markets,whereas the wealth of the cold workers is linked to invisible and volatileindustrial capital and to unstable and unprotected female employment inthe service economy. Besides, these two kinds of strategies seem to beclosely related to each other, each of them being functional for the repro-duction of the other. In fact, in Endcliffe, the younger primary labour forcefinds new jobs in the marginal labour market, and the older marginallabour force is contracted in the primary labour market of the progressivelyprivatized steel industry.

My reconstruction of the history of the machines shows that since thedistant past the working class of Endcliffe has been fragmented betweenartisans and proletarians who turn their social fragmentation into aframework for mutual cooperation In fact, the flow of scrap machines andunemployed proletarians into the informal tool workshops of Endcliffe iscounterbalanced by the flow of skilled artisans and recycled capital into theproletarian and middle-class spaces of the steel industry. Since the distantpast, Endcliffe has been a space of poverty, where the unemployed re-usetheir skills, derelict machines start up their ancient movements once again,boarded-up buildings perform again their old social functions and forgot-ten economic spaces re-emerge as profitable businesses.

Today artisans and proletarians face and feed each other in theclaustrophobic spaces of Morris. In times of economic expansion, theyounger workers redistribute wealth and economic capital to the olderworkers in the shape of bonuses or free labour. In times of economicslump, the older workers give them back their precious mechanical knowl-edge and their social connections in the neighbourhood. The workersnarratives of separation, technological disjunctures and their illusion ofclass antagonism on the shopfloor obscure not only this invisible mechan-ism of social redistribution and mutual cooperation at the level of theneighbourhood, but also the structural condition underpinning their ideo-logical and material fragmentation.

194



Conclusion: emerging alienation in modern factoryproduction?

Today, as a consequence of the combined effects of extensive subcontract-ing from transnational steel corporations and of state welfare andeconomic policies of local regeneration, the formal economy of the factoryhas blurred with the informal and illegal economy of the neighbourhoodand the family. In these blurred spaces of poverty two economies and twokinds of workforces coexist. The global economy of steel consists of globalmarkets, a standardized technology of production and a proletarian work-force living in the post-industrial spaces at the periphery of Sheffield. Theother economy is the economy of tools, consisting of local markets, crafttechniques of production and a variegated army of peripheral workers whocohabit in the same Victorian back-to-back houses of the Endcliffe slums.In Morris, the workers reproduce and reconcile the global economy of steeland the local economy of tools on the same shopfloor along the fragile linethat they trace between the hot and cold departments, through drafts,dust, noises, technological narratives and working moralities.

Thus the cold and the hot departments using the words of Bourdieu are two structural variants of the same class-disposition. Bourdieu, in hisseminal book Outline of a Theory of a Practice (1977), claims that in societieswithout a self-regulating market, people build economic relationshipsthrough the idiom of generosity and by maximizing social prestige andstatus. On the other hand, in capitalist societies, people build socialrelations in the idiom of self-interest and by maximizing money andeconomic capital. This is true not only in the realm of circulation but alsoin the realm of production. According to Bourdieu, in peasant societies therelationship between labour and its product is socially repressed, whereasin capitalist societies the productive qualities of labour are socially empha-sized. The evidence of my fieldwork challenges Bourdieus oppositionbetween peasant and capitalist economics and rhetorical strategies andsuggests that, in Morris, two moralities of labour coexist in the sameshopfloor. Like the Kabyle tribesmen described by Bourdieu, the workersof the hot department claim a morality of pure disinterest and of freelabour that re-evokes the myth of the archaic world of the medieval black-smiths and grinders. This morality legitimizes personalistic strategies aimedat maximizing their social networks and at exploiting the labour of youngapprentices, and sex and drugs workers. On the other hand, the coldworkers, like modern economic men, embody the illusion of pure produc-tivity and maximize their wages through the discourse of labour com-modification and of working-class solidarity rooted in the disappearedworld of the nationalized steel industry.

The short-term and utilitarian morality of the cold workers and thepassionate commitment of the hot workers are not in conflict with eachother, but are in fact functional to the reproduction of the condition of

195



structural deprivation in which they have germinated. In fact, the illusionof market transaction in the cold department and the illusion of socialintimacy in the hot one the maximization of economic capital in theformer and of social capital in the latter hide the fact that both classes ofworkers pertain to the same space of poverty.

Carriers claim of the increasingly alienating nature of modern factoryproduction portrays factory production as more modern than it actuallyis. In fact, in Morris early and modern capitalist technologies and socialrelations are blended together on the same shopfloor. The world of theforgers is a world of intimate connections between objects and persons, ofpermeable boundaries between human and machines; of inalienablelabour that circulates between the factory and the family, and amongindividuals bonded by a mixture of social, economic and familial obli-gation. The world of the machine workers is made of cuts, disconnection,separations between objects and people and of alienable and decompos-able labour that is transacted among anonymous individuals between thefactory and the global steel market.

In conflict with teleological histories that depict industrial capitalismas a radical break with the feudal past, the history of steel labour inSheffield does not read as a linear progression from the customary, hierar-chic and simple system of production of the cutlers to the alienated systemof modern factory production, but rather as an awkward embrace betweenthese two worlds. This strong embrace between the past and the present,and between inconsistent forms of production and imagination, providescapitalism with its power of self-regeneration.7

The evidence of my fieldwork suggests four conclusions. First, that theblurring of the times and spaces of production and the times and spaces ofreproduction and the re-embeddedness of economy into society pacePolanyi and Thompson translates itself into a transfer of the organizationaland welfare costs of production from the capitalists onto the workers them-selves, rather than in an improvement in their living conditions. Second,that Carriers sketch of modern factory production does not apply toEndcliffe, where the coexistence of the morality of pure interest and themorality of pure generosity within the same space, more than their sharpseparation, reveals the emerging alienation of late capitalism, that, likeearly capitalism, imagines labour both as entirely free and as totally alien-able. Third, that the workers exploitation is not only to be related to theappropriation of surplus labour from the capitalist taking place at the levelof the shopfloor, but also to their mutual dependence and coexistence inthe space of poverty outside the shopfloor. Finally, my case shows that whatdistinguishes capitalism from other forms of alienation is its ability toreconcile opposite and inconsistent moralities and ideologies of humanlabour, rather than, as for Strathern, its stubborn belief in immutable formsof individual labour.

196



Notes

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the anthropology depart-ments of Brunel, Cambridge and the LSE. I am particularly indebted to the staffand students of these departments for their useful feedback and comments.

1 On the notion of technological fetishism, see Pfaffemberger (1988) and Harvey(1997).

2 All the names of places and people are pseudonyms. Mr Greed is the workersnickname for the owner. The author worked in the factory as forger appren-tice and lived close by for 18 months.

3 Alfred Gell defines technology as a form of enchantment for the reproductionof the status quo (1992: 163).

4 The hot and cold departments can also be read as respectively capital- andlabour-intensive. The technical and social interactions that take place betweenthe hot and the cold workers also recur in companies or industries thatcombine capital- and labour-intensive production processes.

5 In an example of this kind of activity, Fevre (1987) shows the widespread useof local cowboy subcontractors by BSC (British Steel Corporation) in PortTalbot, South Wales.

6 Maurice Bloch (1989a: 38) claims that messages carried by the language of thebody become ossified, predictable and repeated . . . the acceptance of this codeimplies compulsion. According to Bloch, bodily communication structuresauthority more solidly than linguistic communications.

7 For a similar view, see Meiksins Wood (2002).

References

Althusser, Louis (2003) The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso.Bloch, Maurice (1989a) Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation, in

Ritual, History and Power, pp. 1945. London: LSE Monographs on SocialAnthropology.

Bloch, Maurice (1989b) The Symbolism of Money in Imerina, in Maurice Bloch(ed.) Money and the Morality of Exchange, pp. 16590. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Bloch, Maurice (1998) What Goes without Saying: The Conceptualization of Zafi-maniry Society, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds) How We Think TheyThink, pp. 2238. Oxford: Westview Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Braverman, Harry (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly ReviewPress.

Burawoy, Michael (1985) The Politics of Production. London: Verso.Carrier, James (1992) Emerging Alienation in Production: A Maussian History,

Man 27: 53958.Fevre, R. (1987) Subcontracting in Steel, Work, Employment and Society 1(4): 50927.Gell, Alfred (1992) The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of

Technology, in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds) Anthropology, Art andAesthetics, pp. 4063. Oxford: Clarendon.

197



Goddard, Michael (2000) Of Cabbages and Kin: The Value of the Analytic Distinc-tion between Gift and Commodities, Critique of Anthropology 20(2): 13751.

Godelier, Maurice (1996) The Enigma of the Gift. Cambridge: Polity Press.Hart, Keith (1983) On Commoditization, in Esther Goody (ed.) From Craft to

Industry: The Ethnography of Proto-industrial Cloth Production. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Harvey, Penelope (1997) Technology as Skilled Practice, Social Analysis 41(1):313.

Ingold, Tim (1996) Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge.Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge.Josephides, Lisette (1985) The Production of Inequality: Gender and Exchange

among the Kewa. London: Tavistock Publications.Keller, Charles and Janet Keller (1996) Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Marx, K. (1963) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. T.B. Bottomore.

New York: International Publishers.Marx, Karl (1976 [1867]) Capital, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Mauss, Marcel (1979) Sociology and Psychology: Essays by Marcel Mauss. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul.Meiksins Wood, Ellen (2002) The Origin of Capitalism. London: Verso.Parry, Jonathan (1986) The Gift, the Indian Gift and the Indian Gift , Man 21:

45373.Parry, Jonathan and Maurice Bloch (1989) Money and the Morality of Exchange.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Pfaffemberger, Brian (1988) Fetishised Objects and Humanized Nature: Towards

an Anthropology of Technology, Man 23: 23652.Strathern, Marilyn (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California

Press.Thomas, Nicholas (1991) Entangled Objects. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.Thompson, Edward P. (1967) The Making of the English Working Class. Harmonds-

worth: Penguin Books.

Massimiliano Mollona is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths Collegeand is one of the editors of Critique of Anthropology. In September 2002 he publishedCeux du chaud, ceux du froid. Fabriquer des outils a Sheffield (Terrain 39, Paris).He has two more articles forthcoming, one in the Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute. His current research interests are economic anthropology and globaliz-ation; the anthropology of Europe and visual culture. Address: Department ofAnthropology, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK. [email:[email protected]]

198



mollona2005

Documents

Transcript of mollona2005