Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic study on social relations of production and experiences of work in Syrian agricultural sector is going to take us into a theoretical discussion about the emotions and the economy bringing together feminist and postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and political economy.

Paper long abstract:

Based on an ethnographic study on capital-labor relations and experiences of work on the agricultural sector in Tartous (a region located at the Syrian coast), this paper explores the relationship between the regime of accumulation and the affective and moral experiences which endorse and undermine it. We are going to analyze: on the one hand, how the structure of accumulation depends on the moral and affective economies of patronage and family, and how such economies are not the simple product of ideological hegemony, but the result of lived relations at an everyday level (through experiences of love, dependence, respect, fear, esteem, etc.) and very concrete anxieties (around the difficulties to survive in a context of precariousness). On the other hand, we are going to consider how everyday experiences put in motion the ambivalence and conflict that are inherent in the structure of affections and in the general social structure. We are going to evaluate how the concrete experiences of the subjects destabilize the hegemonic structure of emotions.

These ethnographic experiences are going to take us into a theoretical discussion bringing together: 1) feminist critiques of the separation between private-emotional domain and economic-rational one; 2) social applications of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory to explore the vécu of relations of domination and the conscious-unconscious continuum; 3) the political economy framework in anthropology which interrogates economic structure as a historical arena of everyday struggle and everyday struggle as a concretion of structural and large scale processes.