Theorizing Unemployment: Toward an Argentine Anthropology of Work

The recent crisis related to neoliberal economic policies in Argentina brought more of a focus in Argentine anthropology to issues related to work and unemployment. The anthropology of work, before the crisis, was a neglected area of the discipline. I am proposing that we pay theoretical attention, in and beyond Argentine anthropology, not only to labor relations and conditions, but also to the subjectivities and collective actions within the growing unemployed and underemployed population in Argentina. Unemployed individuals still conceptualize of themselves as workers; it is how they have constructed their identities. A theoretical focus on the unemployed in the anthropology of work will contribute to our understandings of heterogeneous capitalist relations and subjectivities.