Paper short abstract:

From an ethnography conducted among youth and families of the upper middle and upper class in Buenos Aires, we focus on the moralized connection with work, money and the source of economic dependence, mobilized historically by these actors as a response? to rugby professionalization.

Paper long abstract:

The significance given to work and the economic dependency ("de qué vivís") is a key to understand the history and transformations of capitalist societies. Anthropology has dealt with the analysis of exchange relations, gratuity and trade as well as the senses that workers in different national contexts and geographical mobility give to work, and the relationships between work, social reproduction, and changes in the structures of kinship. This paper reflects on the meaning given to work by men located, for more than half a century, in the middle and upper positions of Argentina society, who have built a position as intellectual workers, and also play amateur rugby. From an ethnography conducted among youth and families of those social sectors, we focus on the analysis of the moralized connection with work, money and the source of economic dependence (professional activity, not sports), mobilized by these actors as a response to rugby professionalization. The paper explores the moralized relationship with money as a way to build an independent "national" class through relationships and exchanges between nations that tournaments made possible. In recent years, with the globalization of economic relations and sports industry, are undergoing a profound transformation of local, regional and global rugby. Each international confrontation is a way to "improve" competing with the best teams, to position the Argentina and its players as an important rugby nation. But those contacts and exchanges also favor the expansion of professional and market criteria, changing the dominance of amateur rugby.