Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research and informed by workers' personal narratives, this paper considers how a focus on the concept of 'anticipation' could inform anthropological explorations of 'the present' and reframe ongoing debates on precarious work and labour in contemporary capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Recent debates in the anthropology of work and labour have foregrounded the realities of precarious livelihood strategies across the world, frequently emphasising the 'novelty' of labour precarity in so-called 'Western countries'. While this framing has informed nuanced analyses of particular situations, it also risks obscuring the uneven distribution of capitalist forms across regional contexts, and the ways in which particular regional and industrial 'pasts' continuously colour workers' experiences and perspectives in the present.

Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and considering the perspectives of workers employed in the local textile industry, in this paper I discuss the importance of locating contemporary experiences of labour uncertainty within particular histories – regional, industrial, personal. For most islanders I met, economic fragility, the threat of depopulation, and fluctuating employment propects were perceived not as particularly novel circumstances, but understood and experienced as part of long regional histories.

Examining workers' personal narratives through the lens of 'anticipation', in this paper I consider how people drew on their knowledge of those histories to make sense of their present circumstances, and to navigate, in resourceful ways, the 'predictable unpredictability' of everyday 'island life'. I suggest that paying attention to the anticipation involved in navigating various kinds of uncertainty – environmental, economic, social, existential – can illuminate how everyday experiences are shaped both by visions of the past and by shifting expectations of potential futures. Moreover, I argue, these perspectives can inform ethnographic research and anthropological knowledge-production in fruitful ways.