Paper Short Abstract:

How does communal life reconfigure the common distinctions between home and workplace, self and company? Tracking how Indonesian Catholic nuns learn to ‘cover each other up’, I argue that the organisation of work is intricately intertwined with the collective development of character.

Paper Abstract:

How does communal life reconfigure the common distinctions between home and workplace? What might an ethnography of communal life teach us about the imbrication of self and company? This paper begins to answer these questions through the lives of an Indonesian order of Catholic nuns as they live and work together in intimate moral communities. Tracking how nuns learn to ‘cover each other up’, I argue that the development of work is intricately intertwined with the collective development of character and personality. Facing demands to both ‘become oneself’ and to ‘become one’ with others in the convent, nuns learn to take a complementary approach to both labour and personalities, responding collaboratively to each other’s actions and expressions. Through two years of participating in convent life, I offer an experience-near account of the complex ways that nuns play with different possibilities to discover their unique talents before assuming the mantle of one career, granted through their superiors’ assessment of character, abilities, and institutional need. This paper explores how interlocking careers ideally manifest as a holistic community—spread across convents and across continents—that works well together to achieve success beyond the possibility of any individual. By demonstrating how the organisation considers ‘character’ together with their assessment of ‘work’, I propose that an analysis of either must account for the ways each is defined and positioned within organisational thought. By attending to the ways that character and work emerge collectively, we may deepen our understanding of the blur between ‘private’ selves and ‘public’ work.