Working Bodies

In economic anthropology, debates about the body and embodiment have developed along several overlapping trajectories. This chapter on ‘Working Bodies’ focuses on three such trajectories: racial capitalism and the racialisation of workers, skill and its devaluation via feminisation, and the embodiment of structural violence in the form of occupational illnesses, injuries, and deaths. I draw upon my ethnographic research with Trinidadian garment workers to show what the anthropological study of working bodies reveals about how workers experience labour conditions, drawing into a single analytical frame the structural forces shaping working lives and how workers embody, navigate, resist, and acquiesce to these forces.<p></p>