Asia Europe Journal

Abstract This article examines citizenship practices among migrant workers and their supporters in Prato, Italy, through the lens of the presidio—a physical site constructed and maintained by migrant workers and native activists to sustain daily life at a permanent picket line. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2023), I analyze how the presidio demanded recognition of strikers’ right to a forty-hour workweek while rejecting the terms of the Italian state. More than a site of resistance, the presidio became a space to experiment with building a cross-national political community outside the dominant frameworks of migrant labour governance. Picketers understood that leaving the presidio due to perceived irreconcilable differences, such as conflicting gender norms, could jeopardize their collective pursuit of a better life. The presidio thus exemplifies what Craig A. Clancy calls a ‘temporal autonomous space’, a space where people could experience temporalities beyond those imposed by capitalism and confront their finitude. By refusing racialized work schedules and inadequate state institutions, the presidio offered a material space from which to reimagine the futures of both migrants and natives, encapsulated by picketers’ slogan per una vita più bella (‘for a better life’). In sum, this paper demonstrates how the presidio could achieve material gains for migrant workers, cultivate alternative ways of thinking about otherness, and enable participants to confront existential questions. In doing so, the presidio challenged the assumption that resistance and prefiguration are mutually exclusive, showing instead how they can coexist and reinforce one another.

This paper discusses the transformation of nature into market commodities by focusing on the extraction of beach pebbles from Mexico for export to the USA. In Baja California, the extraction of beach pebbles serves as the primary source of income for many Indigenous workers who constitute an invisible workforce employed in the informal economy. The importation of natural resources from Mexico to address water scarcity and arid landscapes in the USA, I argue, has fostered new forms of Mexican labor precarity associated with extractive “green industries.” Geographical isolation, unregulated workspaces, and natural environments, I contend, intersect to exacerbate labor precarity in this extractive industry. As the rocks move along the transnational commodity chain, there is a gradual reification of nature that turns them into market commodities, wherein the labor and environmental impacts of capitalist extractive activities are incrementally obscured. The result is a transfiguration process that erases the labor and ecological footprint of their extraction, which I refer to as a transnational geography of violence.

Over the recent decade, animal metaphors have emerged collectively in China’s public discourses to characterize and categorize particular social groups—corrupt officials, urban professionals, sophisticated consumers, or the unmarried youth coming of age under the national One-Child-Per-Couple Policy. Specifically, wildlife of tigers and snakes now refer to corrupt officials that the current state leadership deems as national enemies that need caging. Domesticated animals, such as dogs, pigs, and fish, respectively, index undesirable bachelors, consumerist youths, and victims of financial or sexual offenses. Meanwhile, the fictive use of kin terms has also increased to register national role models or the current state leaders. By exploring these metaphors’ pragmatic usages in urban lives, media discourses, and state actions, this article maps out a fictive kinship of contemporary China’s body politic. It further reveals how socioeconomic marketization and globalization exert influences on middle-class desires, urban sociality, and national belonging in China in the global stage of post-socialism. In doing so, the article demonstrates how anthropological studies of metaphors, animals, and kinship might inform broader human relations of similarities and differences, inclusion and exclusion, and the self and the other. This further opens up anthropological imagination for socio-political becoming and national future-making.

This paper discusses the link between (middle) class positionality and political beliefs toward social welfare regimes through the tension between economic security and freedom and with a case study of Venezuelan migrants in Argentina’s platform economy. Since 2014, over 6.5 million Venezuelans have migrated across South America. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, when this study took place, Venezuelans arriving in Argentina are predominantly university-educated professionals. Invited by a right-wing government that promised gainful employment, they were initially presented as ‘deserving’, ‘educated’, and ‘qualified’ migrants. Landing in recession-struck Argentina, however, the majority entered jobs in the platform and gig economy as taxi, delivery, and care workers: risk-intensive precarious jobs that gained visibility as ‘essential’ during the pandemic. Against this background, the paper explores how Venezuelan ‘high-skill’ migrants’ negotiate the opposition between freedom and economic security in the shift from ‘high- ‘ to ‘low-skilled’ labour. We ask, what do their experiences tell us about the nexus between geographic and social mobility, and how do structure their political views and choices? To discuss these questions, the paper presents the findings from our fieldwork conducted among Venezuelan migrants in Buenos Aires (2020–2021). It traces if and how middle-class migrants’ self-perceptions have been challenged or reinforced by work in the platform economy undertaken as a last resort under the conditions of economic hardship, rather than out of free choice between multiple alternatives. We discuss how this situation affects the rationalisation of their situation via certain political attitudes toward socialist or free market regimes. Individual freedom of choice and market freedom are conflated, and social welfare is seen not as a universal right, but as a middle class entitlement obtained through class and/or geographic mobility.

Abstract Compartmentalized historiography of cities and labor hinders us from seeing the common grounds and contour lines connecting disparate places, periods, processes, institutions, and groups of actors in the making and remaking of cities. Through exploring the historical geography of a street in Linz (Austria), I call for shifting our lens to expanded extractivism to bring economies of (im)mobile labor and confinement and the governance of the displaced inscribed to distinct periods and regimes within a common analytical lens. The longue durée perspective I adapt enables us to situate the commodification of the containment and care of refugee and asylum seekers within the broader dynamics of extractivism. 

AbstractThrough a micro-case study of labor relation within a small Hungarian horticulture enterprise, our study reveals what precarity means and what experiences it entails for a small-farmer employer and his workers. Drawing on theoretical works that emphasize relationality and the multifaceted character of precarity, we can delineate the different constellations of vulnerabilities, dependency, and autonomy in different social positions. Precarity covers a wide range of social situations and experiences. In contrast to previous research, which emphasize the challenges that the heterogeneity of precarious situations pose for class formation, we highlight the ways the experience of precarity may become the basis of solidarity. Instead of scrutinizing only the employee’s precarity, which is common in research, we focus on its relationality. Our micro-case study examines the ways precarity interlinks the employer and the employee despite their different social positions and the potential conflict of interest between them. Our analysis shows that the intertwined (shared but differently experienced) precarity can create a labor relation, which is based on the recognition of each party’s vulnerabilities and mutual dependence between employer and employee. Both parties provide each other with some stability and describe this labor relation with the notion of “family,” which demonstrates the possibilities and the limits of this form of solidarity. Yet, the vulnerabilities of both parties also expose the fragility of this labor relation.

AbstractWhat happens when the state removes the usual obstacles preventing refugees to ‘integrate’? Our article analyses the case of Ukrainians who fled the war to settle in France. Their legal status is different from that of ‘classic’ refugees: the EU directive on temporary protection gives them the freedom to move and the right to work. Moreover, they benefit from a rather positive attitude of the general public. The absence of racist stereotypes and institutional barriers, however, does not translate into easy integration into the labour market: 2 years after the beginning of the Ukrainian exile, two thirds of the refugees in Western Europe remain unemployed. Based on our fieldwork made in three French regions from February to August 2023, we analyse the predicament of Ukrainian war migrants. We conclude that granting formal access to jobs and putting racist discrimination on pause is not enough to overcome other handicaps: lack of language and other ‘soft’ skills; lack of social capital that would allow insertion into formal and informal labour markets; the burden of social reproduction magnified by forced single motherhood; and the temporary nature of one’s supposedly generous legal status. The latter turns the perceived privilege into a handicap: Ukrainians are tolerated temporarily and being increasingly differentiated into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ migrants. While those deemed ‘productive’ may be encouraged to remain in the EU, those who fail to integrate into the labour market are likely to gradually be cut off from social support and forced to return to Ukraine.