2023 Winter Editorial: What Matters in Work?
Citation: Levick, Emily and Urmila Mohan. “2023 Spring Editorial: What Matters in Museums and Cultural Heritage?” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/editorial-winter-2023 [date of access]
(Note - Articles are published weekly, on a staggered basis. This editorial will be updated as new articles are published.)
Work is “good to think with”, situated at the intersection of various socio-cultural and ontological contexts and complexities—and for our purposes—practices, materials, and interactions. What does ‘work’ mean, make, and do in different contexts? As a noun, work is associated with effort, labor, occupation, and achievement while, as a verb, it suggests the process of operating, forming and cultivating something. Through the notion of cultivation, a context in which the word culture itself arose, we see the overlap between work and culture. For instance, terms like handiwork and fieldwork suggest different locations, techniques, and types of work. In this issue we cover a range of contexts from the work of clergy to weavers and embroiderers, and span geographic areas from the Americas to Asia. Work’s connection to making and building things as values, objects, images, actions, environments, governments, is an integral part of cultural variance and social (re)production.
The domain of work sees diverse entities being exchanged, incorporated, recognized, idealized, etc. through actions. Why are some activities more easily perceived as work while others are not? What are the conditions under which some forms of work are elevated while others are invisibilized? Work is critiqued for its reproduction of inequalities, and is also closely related to wide-scale economic and political shifts through mechanization and capitalism; historically, clock time has moved people from seasonal occupations and agricultural times to the "linear time" of urban, industrial organization. Further, the physical nature of work has also changed. For example, the notion of immaterial labor refers to the increased use of cognitive, affective, and communicative skills in modes of production.
The idea of “work as a calling,” or vocation, especially in a spiritual context, serves as a contrast to the notion of work for subsistence, also supporting the practitioner’s search for meaning and their contribution to society. Often, ideas and processes from one kind of practice are carried over to another. Peter Bush, a Presbyterian minister in Canada, explores the intersection between religious faith and work and considers what it is to be a professional church worker following the norms of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. In “Amateur or Professional?: Reclaiming the Role of the Amateur at the Intersection of Work and Religious Faith”, he raises the issue of how “professionalization of clergy impacts the work-life of clergy including shaping their religious lives outside of work. Professionalization invites a splitting of work from the personal creating two spheres of life, this contrasts with the all-encompassing claims that the religious makes on life. Further professionalization has shaped clergy into risk managers, whereas religious belief is an invitation to risk-taking trusting the unseen which cannot be fully known.” Bush uses media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s discussion of the ‘amateur’ versus the ‘professional’ to argue that amateurs can take risks, including the risk of “losing because they love, while professionals are unable to risk because they are bound to, and by, the community of other professionals.” Work becomes a means to understand conditions and demands of faith, including the Judeo-Christian assertion that human beings are called to love the Lord their God with their entire being.
Relief carvings of Gaṇeśa and Viṣṇu on rock formation at Poeng Komnu. Phnom Kulen Cambodia, 2023. Photo by Elizabeth A. Cecil.
Subsistence and calling may both go together. In many traditional societies work and ritual are intimately interwoven. In “Stone Works: The Religious Power of Lithic Media in Contemporary Cambodia”, Elizabeth A. Cecil asks how Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’ intersect with the ‘work’ of historical conservation and preservation. In what ways are religious values expressed at historical sites through scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining, repairing, and beautifying religious sites and objects? Finally, can these works of piety be integrated within current conversations around the conservation of ancient temple and religious sites in Southeast Asia? This essay brings images collected during field research at premodern Hindu and Buddhist temple sites in Cambodia into conversation with historical sources that contextualize the reciprocal relationships that exist between religious practitioners, sites, and objects. Cecil observes “the ways that ancient Khmer sites continued to ‘work’” as sites of pious labor with “investments of time, energy, and resources, the practices of ritual performance, the exertion of devotion and efforts that attend the maintenance of powerful places and potent objects.” She concludes that “the efforts of practitioners and the efforts of the deities are reciprocal: each works for the benefit of the other.”
All work is embodied in some form and leaves its traces on bodies. People experience and differently articulate a range of symptoms and conditions such as stress, tension, fatigue, pain, injury, and various diseases in relation to their labor. In “Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India” Tanuj Luthra casts a spotlight on “how precarity, a defining experience of contemporary working life across sectors, inscribes itself in laboring bodies and psyches in contemporary urban India.” Relying on fieldwork, Luthra reflects on encounters between patients and informal doctors in low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, India, for work-related ailments, as events that exist at the intersection of medicine and labor. From informal sector work to supposedly good jobs in “India Inc.”, he wonders if “health is socially constructed, [and] in what ways does labour construct it?” Attending to the embodied and affective aspects of work, he asks, “How might we benefit by critically interrogating contemporary working life through the prism of health? Conversely, how might dominant, biomedically reductive conceptions of health be expanded by tracing their relationship to work?”
Textile work has traditionally been part of Tsotsil and Tseltal women’s domestic duties in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. However, recent national and foreign interest in artisanal handiwork has led women from the region to start selling their work. In this commercial foray, artisanal work emerges as a trade, one that entails accommodations between women’s economic activities and their home life. While most women carry out their artisanal work at home alongside family members, the way in which they define the nature of their work and its relation to their other domestic activities varies considerably. Rachel Barber’s video and text essay “Artisans by Trade: Working as Weavers and Embroiderers in the Chiapas Highlands” profile three textile artisans from the Highlands region, highlighting the distinct ways in which they organize their work and fit it together with their family life and social relations in their communities.
The speed at which ChatGPT has penetrated higher education has been nothing short of astounding. ChatGPT is able to respond to prompts or commands and generate original content: in other words, it can write. For writers and readers ChatGPT may trigger anxieties about the very essence of authorship and originality, which in turn reflect certain deeply held notions of subjectivity. It is hard not to feel unsettled by the current moment. In “Writing, Aesthetic Judgment, and the Spectre of ChatGPT” Alexios Tsigkas reflects on the very practice of writing itself, and the values we ascribe to it, at this very moment at which its upending seems likely. He approaches writing, and reading, as fundamentally intersubjective aesthetic practices: to write is to make a judgment, to deem an experience worthy of capturing, worthy of sharing. Like all judgments, it is an outward plea for assent. To read is to accept that invitation, to yield oneself to another's perspective. Are we ready to cede the exercise of aesthetic judgment to artificial intelligence?
The Gowanus Canal Conservancy demonstrates that an industrial neighborhood is an environment worthy of sustained care. Image: Maggie Hansen and Loren Almendarez.
In “Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors”, Maggie Hansen introduces three projects of political gardening and illustrates sustained approaches to re-imagining human relationships with the land, while advocating for policies that support our shared environment and the labor that cares for it. She explores how maintenance and stewardship of urban landscapes can be considered care labor involving ongoing, physical work and specific local knowledge. She looks at how the perceived value of such work, conveyed by narratives around land care labor, is different depending on who is doing the work and how they are compensated. Recreational gardening on private land may be framed as self-care, while paid landscape maintenance is predominantly performed for low wages by immigrant workers and people of color. Another category, political gardening, frames the work of generous volunteers as a contribution to social change, though the political impact of this work requires additional efforts of advocacy.
In our Book Review section, Emma Cieslik writes about The Jugaad Project’s first edited volume. Titled “Disrupting Individualism through the Effects of Interactions: A Review of ‘The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices’ (Routledge, 2024)” Cieslik relies on a written interview with Urmila Mohan, the editor of the volume. She notes that this volume is grounded not only in social scientific and other ideas but in relationships built over the period of the making of the book, reminding her of how the work of writing and editing is often invisibilized. She conceives of the book itself as “a world held together by transformative threads, inhabited by diverse entities.” She proposes that efficacious intimacy, modeled in this volume through religious and political embodied experience, proves individualism and its imaginaries illogical by situating relationships in proximity of contact and/or feelings and the making of deep connections.
In many indigenous households of the region, rice wine is offered to guests as an honorific welcome drink. Rice wine for these communities is also an essential medium for interacting with forest spirits, performing rituals, and celebrating harvest festivals. However, much of the work that goes into making rice wine such a popular custom often remains unrecognised. This invisibilisation is rooted in the informal and vulnerable nature of women’s homestead-based brewing work, stemming from Liquor Prohibition Acts and prohibition movements, changes in indigenous religions and ideas of morality, or the easy accessibility of Indian-made Foreign Liquor in the region. In “Women, Work and Wine: Shifting Cultures of Brewing in Northeast India” Upasana Goswami and Abhishruti Sarma reflect on changing ideas about work by looking at shifts in discourses around heritage brews of Northeast India.
Recommended from our previous publications:
On Scholars’ Work
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/archaeologys-destructive-legacy
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/interview-jason-de-leon
On Care Work
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/spectres-of-obligation-care-across-realms-in-northern-thailand
On Women’s Work, Domestic Spaces, and Innovation
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/sedekah-benih
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/drawing-out
On Work and Public Space
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/spaces-of-idol-crafting
