Short Abstract

What meanings and values attach to the present and futures of manual labour? This panel explores how such work - in sectors from care to agriculture to digital infrastructures - remains constitutive of global capitalism, and asks how anthropologists should attend to the physicality of labour.

Long Abstract

What meanings and values attach to the futures - and contemporary experiences - of manual labour? And how should anthropologists orient themselves, practically and theoretically, to these? While recent anthropological scholarship has brought attention to contemporary work transformations, much focuses on horizons of technological change - digitalisation, automation, platformisation, AI (e.g. Srnicek & Williams, 2015; Pink, Lyall and Korsmeyer 2024). Here, manual labour often appears as residual, associated with the past while digitally-mediated labour is tied to (imagined) futures. We seek to recentre manual labour not as residual, or indeed as merely persistent, but as constitutive of contemporary capitalism.

Globally, vast swathes of life-sustaining practices remain manual, including notably in food and agriculture, from harvesting to processing to shipment. Much of the so-called care economy rests on an accumulation of deeply physical and intimate gestures of feeding, washing, and treating. Even the supposedly post-manual digital economy relies on manual "ghost work" (Gray and Suri 2019) to produce and sustain expanding technological infrastructures. Booming food delivery platforms mobilise disposable pools of informal labourers whose bodies must meet specific abilities for mobility, speed, and endurance. At the same time, some forms of artisanal production now leverage the embodied physicality of labour to generate new hierarchies of “handcrafted” value and distinction contra mechanisation.

We invite contributions that attend to the present and future of manual labour, pursuing questions including: how should we theorise this labour, and the power relations attendant to it, amid the destabilisation of class categories? How does labour's physicality signify different statuses and affective experiences in different contexts? How do these patterns articulate with Global South/North connections? What orientations to the future (Bryant and Knight 2019) seek to capture or, inversely, obscure manual labour? What does attending to the manual tell us about the anthropology of labour today?

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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