Paper Short Abstract:

This paper reflects on the unstable ways in which labour is invoked and experienced by farmers in south-east Australia. I argue for the enduring salience of ‘labour’—in dialogue with the turn to ‘work’—as a conceptual lens through which to grasp present and future regimes of power and possession.

Paper Abstract:

What it means to labour — what the stakes of labour are — are increasingly uncertain propositions. Indeed, the reconfigurations of late capitalism compel questions about whether ‘labour’ itself retains any significant conceptual utility as a means of describing and analysing diverse expressions of production and livelihood. In this context, a turn towards ‘work’ offers the possibility of a more inclusive frame, tied particularly to new frontiers of automation and other technologically-mediation transformations. And yet, ‘labour’ invokes aspects of political economy, of collectivity and struggle, and of embodied physicality, that feel important not to lose.

In this paper, I draw on fieldwork conducted with both farmers and farmworkers in the Australian horticultural region of Shepparton to explore the conceptual affordances, and limits, of 'labour' in changing times. While my farmer interlocutors largely resisted understanding their own personal experiences of agricultural production explictly in terms of labour—using this term solely to describe the farmworkers they employed—they nevertheless described their experiences in terms of a gruelling physicality, invoking notions of work ethic, nostalgic recollections, and traditions of claim-making over place that often had labour at their core. Reflecting on the divergent and unstable ways in which labour is invoked, narrated and experienced in this agricultural landscape, I ask: what kinds and degrees of elasticity can we reasonably impose upon the concepts we deploy in anthropological analysis? What might ‘labour’—as distinct from, or in dialogue with the turn to ‘work’—offer to a future-focused anthropology?