godelier, work and its representations

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History Workshop.

http://www.jstor.org

Work and Its Representations: A Research Proposal Author(s): Maurice Godelier and Michael Ignatieff Source: History Workshop, No. 10 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 164-174Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288317Accessed: 29-05-2015 17:18 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 128.122.149.145 on Fri, 29 May 2015 17:18:28 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

LANGUAGE AND HISTORY Work and its Representations: A Research Proposal by Maurice Godelier This memorandum was written by Maurice Godelier as an invitation to anthropologists, historians, linguists and technologists, particularly in France and England, to join in a collective research project on work and its representations, across time and across cultures. As a first stage in the research there will be a seminar, beginning in January 1981, on work and its representations at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale of the College de France. Subsequently, it is hoped that there will be an international meeting on the subject to be convened by the French Anthropological Association, to be followed by a series of books assembling research from as many points of view as possible. If any of our readers are working in this area or have been planning research of thissort and would like to take part, or would simply like to know more about the subject, out of general interest, they should get in touch with Michael Ignatieff or Raphael Samuel at the Journal.

THE AIMS OF THE INQUIRY

Our object of study will be work and the words used to represent it. The words 'work', 'to work', and 'worker' have a particular meaning in our language and appeared at a certain moment in the evolution of our society. Their meaning has since changed several times in the course of our history. Our object then is a group of words and ideas which belong to a culture and to a period and only make sense within that culture.

In studying this field, historians have at their disposal words and things, that is to say, texts and physical objects bequeathed by the past, while anthropologists have access to words, things and also to living people who can reply to their questions. As we shall see, the choice of work as the object of comparative inquiry ought not to be taken for granted, since the idea itself is not common to all cultures or periods of past time.

Obviously, no one who is working in this area need follow this research proposal. It is simply an attempt to sketch some converging lines of research in order to make easier and more precise comparisons between different inquiries. Everyone should feel free to tackle the subject as they wish and also to criticise the ideas in this proposal. That will be to everyone's advantage.

SOME PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

In this section, we want to emphasise once again that the words 'work', 'to work' and 'worker' took on their meanings at a certain period in our language and have evolved in different contexts -in ordinary speech, and, for example, in the discourse of a science like political economy in which the idea of work became a central concept in the 19th century.

A brief look at the history and origins of these words makes it apparent that their


Work and its Representations 165

meanings are different in various cultures. We must try then to establish, beyond these ethnocentric starting points and in spite of them, a domain which seems worth exploring and for which it seems worth giving up some of the ideas which our society has conceived of itself and others.

The words for work in French and in other Indo-European Languages

According to Lucien Febvre, it was in the 16th century that the word 'to work' (travailler) entered French vocabulary, replacing, in part, two earlier words, labourer (now meaning to plough), and oeuvrer (no longer in use as a verb; as a noun, it means a work of art). Travailler (to work) came from the latin tripaliare which meant torturing with a tripalium, an instrument made of three stakes. Before that in about 11 20, labeur (now meaning toil), from the latin labor, became common usage for agricultural activity; also in the 12th century ouvrier (worker) made its first appearance, derived from the latin operarius (man of pain or affliction), a term which itself went back to two words, opus (an action or piece of work) and operae, the tasks or obligations which had to be performed in respect of someone else, as for example, those of a liberated serf towards his old master, or those of the artisan in respect of the customer with whom he had a contract. But even before these words had appeared, travailler meant to torture an offender on a tripalium and the travailleur in this case was not the victim but the torturer. Travail (the modern word for work) also meant a wooden device to which horses or cattle were tied when they were to be shod. In Spanish trabajo meant the same thing. But travail and trabajo also meant 'to bring into the world'. In the middle of the 15th century, there appeared one after another salarie (1450) (meaning a wage ear" r) and in 1480 proletaire (proletarian, worker), both of which remained rare until the mid 18th century. In the 14th century, before salarie there was also salaire (salary, wage) from salarium meaning money to buy salt (sal). Proletaire came from proletarius which in antiquity had meant a poor man who was exempt from taxation and who only had rights to citizenship by virtue of the number of his offspring (proles). Artisan appeared around 1546 and meant what we mean today by the two words worker and artist. Artisans and workers practice trades (me'tiers), which derived from ministerium, an inferior activity (10th century) (minis, meaning less, and sterium, meaning the work of a servant); while master (maitre) came from magister, 'the one who is the superior' in a trade (1 150), and compagnon (journeyman, co-worker) meant someone with whom you break bread (cum pane, with bread).

Around 1160, gagner (to earn) emerged from the Frankish (waidajan) which meant both to pillage and to go in search of food. The word gage (wage) came from the Frankish waddi, meaning a ransom to be paid, a guarantee, and later payment of servants, while in England the same word became wage. Around 1120 the word profit appeared, derived from profectus, meaning someone who has advanced or made progress, while the word beneffice (gain) appeared around 1190 meaning privilege or advantage.

These notes on the dates of birth of certain key words in French economic vocabulary, the companion words today of 'work', do not amount to a real history. They do indicate, however, that our vocabulary and our ideas were formed at different moments: in the 12th and 13th centuries at the height of the feudal period when towns and domestic manufacture first began to emerge; at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th with the rise of international trade, the colonial system, banking, and.state and private manufacture; and finally in the 18th century when the words for


166 History Workshop Journal

wage earner, worker and capital acquired their modern meanings. It is obvious how interesting it would be to reconstruct the evolution of the ideas

and words dealing with work and its representations for a large number of languages. In English we have the words work and labour, and in German werk and arbeit. Arbeit poses a problem of its own. Its evolution is still the subject of controversy. Some have suggested that it comes from an old German word whose connotations included the idea of an orphan, or a person deprived of an inheritance and for that reason obliged to depend on another for their subsistence.

In summarising the direction which the meanings of the words for work have taken in the last few centuries, we could say, with Lucien Febvre, that there has been a shift in meaning from words which first connoted painful activities bringing little merit to those who performed them, and even degraded them and placed them in a condition of social inferiority, while today the right to work, and the dignity of the worker, have positive meanings, at least in certain types of discourse.

The concept of work in political economy

When political economy was constituted as a new discipline in the 18th century, one of its key concepts was the idea of work. Work was seen as the source of the wealth of nations. Between the Tableau economique de la France (1759) of Quesnay, founder of Physiocracy, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), there emerged the idea of work in general, that is, work considered separately from all of its particular forms in agriculture, manufacturing or commerce. This idea of work appeared at the same time as the idea of value. What distinguishes these two economists is their interpretation of the source of wealth. For Quesnay, the only productive form of work was in agriculture, and he considered the industrial and commercial 'classes' as sterile. Nature aided by human labour was the source of all wealth. The other social classes divided its fruits among themselves. Thus at the same time and on the same theoretical terrain the ideas of work, class, value in use, and value in exchange were elaborated. Ricardo was to link work and exchange value much more closely than Smith. This raised a difficult question because a half century later Marx was to maintain that work certainly created value but it did not itself have value. Only the labour force itself had exchange value since, like all goods, it had a cost of production. But let us return to Adam Smith who in 1776 achieved the theoretical revolution which Marx was to define in 1857 in the following terms: Smith made great progress when he rejected the idea of a particular form of creative activity as the source of wealth in favour of a conception of work in general, that is to say, in none of its commercial, agricultural, manufacturing forms, but all of these forms of work in their common characteristics. But Marx added,

work may seem to be a simple category ... however, when seen from an economic point of view, even this simple category is as historical a concept as the social relations which have given birth to it. It is only when work has become, not only at a theoretical level but in reality itself, a means of creating wealth in general and has ceased to operate as a determination in its singular and particular forms that the abstraction 'work in general' becomes conceivable as a practical reality, as the point of departure for modern economics.

Thus Marx would have considered it absurd to go looking for the idea of work in


Workand itsRepresentations 167

general in precapitalist societies. In this, he is close to modern anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins who in Tribesmen (1968), had this to say about work in tribal economies:

Work is . . . intermittent, sporadic, discontinuous, ceasing for the moment when not required for the moment.... Nor is tribal labour alienated from man himself, detachable from his social being and transactable as so many units of depersonalized labour-power. A man works, produces, in his capacity as a social person, as a husband and father, brother and lineage mate, member of a clan, a village. 'Worker' is not a status in itself, nor 'labour' a true category of tribal economics. Said differently, work is organized by relations 'non-economic' in the conventional sense ... Work is an expression of pre-existing kin and community relations, the exercise of these relations.

In other words, what we westerners today mean by 'to work', 'work' and 'worker' will be represented in very different ways in those societies where - labour is not a commodity which individuals are forced to sell to others in return for subsistence because they are dispossessed; -resources come primarily from the immediate natural habitat of the society; - the resources themselves are not the property of any particular individual but belong to groups or communities which retain a certain control over their use; - there are no units of production organized as separate entities distinct from the social groups, kinship system, or extended or nuclear families which make up the local group; - the major purpose of production is not to make a profit or accumulate wealth but to produce use values necessary to the material reproduction of the individuals and of the social relations in which they live; -the reproduction of social relations implies the production and circulation of valuable commodities which are accumulated as treasure (Indonesia), and are the object of gifts and counter-gifts which never balance each other out and which serve to legitimize the claims of certain individuals to acquire or maintain ranks, titles or privileges in local, regional or intertribal hierarchies (for example, the Kula exchanges between the islands on the southeastern trip of New Guinea, the potlatch of the Northwest Pacific coast Indians etc.); -work itself consists of tasks or operations which most members of the society know how to perform, even though there is a division of labour between the sexes, ages, orders, castes and classes.

Among those societies in which the economy is based on production and gift of use values, and those founded on production, sale and purchase of commodities, there are many differences which ought to be precisely studied in order to understand what would correspond, in each case, with how we use 'work', 'to work' and 'worker'. What activities should we focus upon?

In the West we commonly give the name of work to all the activities by which we extract from nature the means of our existence. Today, however, we have widened its meanings to include all of the activities for which we achieve payment. This has given rise to controversy since very different, even opposed, types of economic relation have assumed the same social form. So work refers at the same time to relations between people and nature and between people and their fellow beings. Understood as a relation to nature, any work process is a sequence of individual or collective acts



designed to extract or detach from nature substances which either in their immediate form, or after having undergone a variety of transformations in their forms and properties, become objects of use for human beings, means of satisfying different needs.

We ought then to explore systematically the different ways in which societies bring together the natural resources which they use to produce their material conditions of existence: hunting, gathering, fishing, agriculture, animal raising, domestic craftsmanship, specialized artisanal production, commerce, exchange, and of course what we call 'domestic' work which involves the preparation of items for daily consumption and which is frequently combined with child care. We ought to add that all of these activities contain moments or aspects of what we could call 'intellectual' activity and that intellectual work can also be a separate activity of specialists (see Raymond Firth Primitive Polynesian Economy, ch. 5 'Ritual in Productive Activity'; ch. 6 'Economic Functions of the Chief'.)

All of these activities are based on different forms of division of labour which assign tasks to individuals according to their sex, age, rank, their membership in an order, caste or class etc.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that any study of the 'status' of a given task and of the person who performs it, of the representations of work and worker, cannot be confined to what happens 'on the inside' of the work process, that is, to the relations and representations of those doing the work. There are many societies in which groups of individuals who do not participate directly in the work process have certain rights to the produce, the land or some of its resources etc. At the extreme, as in the case of some of the slave societies of antiquity in which the master delegated power to an overseer, often a slave, without taking any part in the work process, there can be a total separation between the worker, ownership of resources and the product of labour.

It is a mistake, therefore, to confuse the work process and the production process. The production process means not only the relations between people and with nature within the work process, but also the relations (of external actors) to the work process itself and their rights over its product.

Any study of the status of work and the worker must go beyond the concrete details of the work process itself. If there are relations of subordination, domination and eventually of exploitation among the sexes, orders, castes and classes, these appear not only in the way work activities are organized and represented. These relations are also present before and after these activities take place, in the relation of the 'actors' to the conditions and results of their activity.

Work as a philosophical vision of man and his history Since the Encyclopedists of the 18th century, or at least since Benjamin Franklin, there has been a philosophical current which defined man as homo faber, as a maker of tools, and which interpreted his history in terms of his particular capacity to transform nature through labour and in doing so to transform his own social being.

Historians of ideas have yet to trace the exact origins of this idea that human beings transform nature and their own nature. This idea cannot be found in antiquity. J.P.Vernant has shown that such an idea would have been considered a scandal, both philosophically and morally, as a profanation of the sacred order of things. This materialist conception of man as the maker of his own history in the act of



transforming nature, as creating societies in the act of reproducing the material means of his existence, was a new idea, constituted in a critical encounter with the philosophies and religions which preceded it. This concept, on the other hand, did not necessarily signify an opposition between an active human nature and a passive natural world, as western thought has tended to assume, even though today an 'ecological' view of work and production has begun to temper or even criticize the myth of man as lord of nature.

Here again, we must look to history for the origin of these ideas. It is from Marx's pen, in Capital, that there comes the idea, not original to Marx or the Marxists for that matter, that modern industry based on the direct application of science to production had 'torn away the veil which hid from man his own social process of production and which rendered the different branches of production which had been spontaneously divided, into so many enigmas, even for those within the production process itself.' He pointed out in the same passage that until the 18th century the different trades had been considered 'mysteries' requiring the initiation of apprentices into the secrets of production.

We have left to one side the idea of work developed in the natural sciences: the 'work' of a machine etc. But this brief resume of three usages of the concept of work, in ordinary speech, social science (political economy) and in the philosophy of human nature and history has been sufficient to reveal the implicit or explicit meanings which a western anthropologist brings to bear on the problem of work and its representations.

With these historical and theoretical provisos in mind, what exactly is the area which we wish to explore, beyond and in spite of this ethnocentric starting point?

WORK AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS: THE AREA OF STUDY

There are two areas to explore - a. The activities we call work and the representations which members of society

give of them. These representations will vary according to age, group, sex, and according to whether particular groups take part in the work without controlling it, control it without taking part, control it and take part, neither control it nor take part.

b. The representations of the actors themselves, those who 'do' the work. Three possible types can be envisaged: representations formed by the actors themselves by virtue of their taking part; representations of these actors by those who either do not take part or are excluded for reasons which enhance or devalue their social status; finally, the representations of members of other societies (neighbouring groups, foreign observers) who evaluate these activities and those who take part in them from the outside.

The connection between these two domains is obvious. It is the negative, positive or neutral social value attached to a task which defines the status of those who carry it out, and thus simultaneously defines the status of those who do not take part, either because it degrades them or because it would raise them above their normal social position.

The representations of activities we would call work are not limited by and cannot be reduced to the social values attached to their performance or non-performance. We need to examine the ways in which hunting and agriculture are conceived in given societies. Is hunting seen as a war against the animals, and is war conceived itself as a



hunt, or is hunting seen as an exchange permitted according to a religious agreement or understanding with the 'lords of the animal kingdom' as in Amazonia, North America or Siberia, or according to a pact with the Forest, the benevolent deity who watches over its children, the animals and the Pygmies? How are agricultural activities like seeding, planting, harvesting conceived - as an act of union with the Earth Mother, or as an act of aggression which must be compensated by sacrifice? How is animal raising represented? The castration of pigs? Helping mares or camels to give birth? Milking? Killing beasts? In antiquity, only sacrificial meat was eaten in the city and butchers were considered almost like priests.

At the same time, in every society there exists a social hierarchy among activities. Hunting is often held in higher regard than gathering or agriculture. There is a whole system of representations which defines the hierarchy of these values and which both explains and legitimizes the social effects which result from this hierarchy. In societies where men dominate, women's tasks are often considered inferior and unworthy of men. The dominant social representations frequently are intended to 'prove' the inferiority of women's tasks, when in fact they are inferior simply because they have been consigned to women. This is not always the case, however, and among the Pueblo Indians, for example, pottery-making, a woman's activity, was not considered an inferior task. It was the same with porcupine quill embroidery among the Plains Indians. In general, it is a mistake to take the division of labour in a society as the starting point for understanding the representations which a society or certain parts of it construct of that division. The division of labour is an effect of the social hierarchy, not its cause.

Thus we are not only working towards a 'semantics' (the science of meaning) of work and the social relations of production, although this is an essential point of departure. Instead, we hope to make a contribution towards the scientific analysis of the forms of thought which organize social reality at the same time as they give it expression. It is an analysis of the role of meaning and ideas ('ideel) in social reality.

Where should we look for data for this analysis? In language first of all, in individual and collective discourse as recorded by the anthropologists or as written down in texts or embodied in objects which the historian can then make 'speak': proverbs, myths which speak of hunting, agriculture, tools, the tasks reserved to men and women, the cluster of ideas which constitute the religious, philosophical and political interpretations of the order of the world and its disorder, whether in 'popular' or 'scientific' discourse.

It is obvious that our inquiry will require the participation of linguists and experts in technology. Linguists will be needed because language does not consist simply of words distributed in various semantic fields, but of a grammar as well. It seems difficult in fact to understand how in Japan work is thought of as a poetic and religious activity, requiring close collaboration between man and nature, unless one refers to the grammatical categories of the language itself and to the fact that they make no distinction between an active subject and a passive object, as is the case in Indo- European tongues. Experts in technology will be essential because so many material activities which we take for granted are performed differently in other societies. For example, the Japanese carpenter works his saw and plane in the opposite direction to our own. Technologists could help us to explain the connection within a culture between the way a material operation is carried out and the nature of the raw material which is being worked, whether wood, leather, bone or iron. Perhaps these differences in raw material help to explain essential aspects of the division of labour in particular


Workand itsRepresentations 171

societies. Why is it, after all, that in Africa certain related activities like weaving, dying and sewing have become specialized among distinct social groups, distinguished by sex, caste or pseudo-caste?

Finally, we need hardly point out that the study of work-related activity and its representations cannot become rigorous without a minute, qualitative and quantitative observation of the work process itself.

We want to offer three examples taken from history and anthropology.

a. Ancient Greece Here we will simply summarize the exemplary research of J.P.Vernant. In Greek, there was no term to designate work in general, or worker in general. There were the words ponos, designating painful activity, and ergon which meant task and which applied to agricultural labour and warfare alike. The verb poein meant to do, while pratein meant to make or to act. Vernant has concentrated on the uses of techne, from which we derive the word technique. He has shown that in the 8th century B.C. the crafts of blacksmith, pottery and weaving were considered in the same light as that of priests, bards and doctors (there are similar examples in Africa.) All of these activities were called technai, that is, activities implying the use of secret processes, specialized knowledge based on long apprenticeship and an initiation ritual taking place outside the oikos or family group. While these activities were conducted for the benefit of all members of the community, they were particularly directed to the richest and most powerful among then, the aristocrats who liked to be surrounded by artisans producing luxury goods, or musicians and singers whose presence enhanced their patron's status. Agriculture was not considered as a craft or techne. All citizens were both able and obliged to devote themselves to it. It did not require a secret apprenticeship but, rather, a virtuous attitude towards human beings and piety toward the gods. Such was the message of Hesiod's epic poem, Works and Days. Agriculture, like war, was the responsibility of free men, artisanal work, the task of a few. Agriculture enabled men to remain free for it made it possible for them to provide for their needs without having to depend on others, while the artisan was forced to depend on his customers in order to live and prosper. In short, agriculture like war was an activity which brought prestige to the doer both in the city and with the gods. It was not conceived as a transformation of nature. 'This transformation' - says J.P.Vernant -'even if it had been possible would have been seen as unrighteous. Working the earth was a form of participation in an order superior to human beings, both natural and divine... an act of personal exchange with nature and the gods, rather than a traffic with men.'

Vernant shows that the status enjoyed by craftsmen changed; from being semi- divine figures in the 8th century B.C. they became citizens of inferior status by the 5th century. This evolution in representations of the craftsmen and of his art formed part of the evolution of the city towards democracy, with the aristocracy losing a large part of its power, leading to the disappearance of the luxury craftsmen who had been dependent upon them. The status of the craftsman changed as he took up a new function within a new society. Agriculture itself, which had been celebrated in the early epochs of the city's history as the education of the citizen, became little by little an occupation unworthy of free men, and which a citizen could consign to his slaves, limiting himself to the giving of orders to an overseer hired to watch over them. The evolution of representations of agriculture and craftsmanship, and the transformation



of the status of those engaged in them, were linked to the evolution of the ancient economy towards an ever more intense use of slaves and servile labour.

Vernant's analysis makes another important point: the making of an object was not conceived in antiquity as a transformation of nature. The act of making (poiesis) was a form of movement (kineses) which embodied a form (eidos) in a material opaque to the spirit. This activity called upon a capacity within the individual which he put to use in his techne, an ensemble of secret processes. Now the form (eidos) of an object was defined by its use, and its utility was defined in turn by a need. The craftsman was thus doubly dependent upon the consumer. He worked for him, and it was the consumer who understood the object's essence in expressing the need which led to its being made. For a Greek, the necessary cause of an object was not the artisan, who figured only as the instrumental cause. The necessary or final cause was beyond the object and the artisan as well, in the form which was at once its essence and purpose, that is, its formal, necessary and final cause. Now the form and the knowledge of the form were in the mind of the consumer, not in the maker of the object. According to Vernant's apt expression, in terms of social meaning the Greek artisan was not a producer. The act of making something was not productive in itself. In this mental and social system human beings were not aware of acting (pratein, praxis) when they made things, but rather when they used them. 'The real problem of action.. . was not in the making of objects or the transformation of nature; it was in the control of other human beings, in defeating and dominating them. The highest forms of praxis was politics, the activity of free men, members of a community, a city which created them and which they in turn worked to perpetuate.'

One might say that the only activity worthy of a free man was political activity, which implied leisure and separation from manual labour. It is interesting to recall that in Rome the citizen enjoyed otium (leisure) while those who had to work lived by negotium from nec-otium (without leisure) which later was transformed into the French word for trade, negoce.

When, where and how did the western idea that work transforms both human and non-human nature begin to take shape? When did this idea begin to supplant the traditional notion of manual work as being base and unworthy of a free man? These are the questions which historians and anthropologists could begin to ask, and their answers would have relevance beyond the past.

b. Ancient China In a book due out soon, Michel Cartier tries to reconstitute the way in which work was conceived in ancient China through the works of the philosopher Mencius. As among the ancient Greeks, the Chinese peasants were soldiers but they did not live in the city and did not enjoy rights of citizenship. The social hierarchy distinguished a governing class, the shih, officers, administrators and judges who ruled with a sovereign at their head, a son of the gods, both lord of agriculture and warrior chief; beneath this class there were the nung, peasant soldiers whose manual labour produced the food and wealth of the kingdom; and beneath them the kung, the artisans; and finally, the most despised group, the lowest of the free men, the chang or merchants. Now in the Chinese language it seems that the same term lao is used both for the activities of the governors who work with their heads and the peasants who work with their hands in agriculture and on the field of battle. Lao designated both intellectual and manual work, in contrast to western thought. It referred to all such activity as laborious and



difficult but honourable. In contrast, the work of artisans and merchants was not considered as work in the sense of lao, but in the sense of ch'in, meaning activities which demanded only skill and patience, creating artificial goods which brought no particular merit to those who performed them.

It is interesting that all female activities were considered as ch'in, that is without merit, like the work of artisans and traders. One wonders what the formation of a 'working' class must mean in China today, if in ancient and medieval times artisanal and industrial labour were represented as dishonourable activities when compared to agricultural and peasant labour.

c. The Maenge of New Guinea In an article which complements the work of Vernant, Michel Panoff has shown how the Maenge, an agricultural people living today in New Britain, use three verbs with different connotations to designate what we would call agricultural labour: lege which means to 'order' or 'balance' relations; kuma, which means to 'expend energy' in a useful way; and vai which means to do what is necessary to achieve a determinate objective and, more broadly, ways of acting, customs. To cultivate the earth, to grow arrow-root, to raise a good garden for the Maenge is not to 'produce' something or to 'transform' nature. It is an action conceived of in terms of the intersection of the three semantic fields described above. Now what determines meaning among these three different levels is the idea that raising plants is making an exchange with the ancestors and with the gods. It is not transforming matter, but rather exchanging and maintaining by means of exchange a fundamental connection with the invisible forces of nature which include the still living dead and the all-powerful gods. When the Maenge are working on the beauty, the order, even the fragrance of their gardens, they are accumulating marks of honour like the ancient Greeks and the Chinese peasants. They interpret the abundance or poverty of their harvests as signs of their 'virtue', a capacity which their ancestors and their gods have given them to honour them and themselves.

What then did the Maenge think when a colonial power forced them to build roads or offered them 'work' for money in a cocoa or rubber plantation owned by whites who had invaded their island? How did their representations of traditional agricultural labour enable them to become aware of their exploitation in their new productive activity, in its new social form of wage labour?

These three examples taken at a distance from us, in the past, in the antipodes and in the present ought not to give us the impression that the study of work and its representations should be confined to the exoticism of past or present. Clearly an anthropology of industrial or peasant work in our societies ought to be developed using the same methods of participant-observation used in Africa or in New Guinea. What sense of himself and of his work would we find in a Breton worker who yesterday was a peasant and who still probably adds to his wage by continuing to work a small allotment? How does he think of himself, as a peasant or as a worker?

Today, in capitalist societies, it seems likely that there will soon be no possible passage from the peasantry to the working class. The countryside is no longer the reservoir of the working class that it was in the 18th and 19th centuries. Wage labour from now on is being reproduced among a population which has been working for wages for generations. But today wage labour is losing or has already lost all of the positive aspects which it still had in a period when industrial and urban workers could



contrast it, consciously or unconsciously, with the constraints of peasant labour and the family and communal forms of servitude which weighed on the freedom of the individual. Manual labour seems to be valued less and less by workers themselves, in part because there is scarcely a trace left of that autonomy which peasants and craftsmen used to enjoy, but also because manual labour is more visibly than anywhere else the nexus of relations of subordination and exploitation which many social groups, the young among others, are resisting. Work, manual or otherwise, is more and more being pushed to the periphery of personal existence, hastening a process which was widely recognized and denounced even in the 19th century. Beyond the individual level, work has been displaced from its central role in social relations in general. It is still unclear what will be the consequences of this profound transformation and displacement in the role of work.

Translation: Michael Ignatieff

4ii A People and a Proletariat Essays in the History of Wales 1780-1980 edited by David Smith

There is a crisis of Ulsh national identity. It can only be understood by an explanation of the two hundred years that have made modem Wales: a history of industrial and urban growth, and latterly, of decline; of changing pattems of community and belief; and of continuous self-definition within, and against, British history and culture. The authors, David Smith, Gwyn Williams, leuan Gwynedd Jones, Brian Davies, L.J. Williams, David Jenkins, Emlyn Shemngton, Peter Stead, Hywel Francis, Kim Howells and Merfyn Jones are members of The Society for the Study of Walsh Labour History, Llafur. 0 86104 321 9 ?4.95 pbk 0 86104 322 7 E10.00 hbk ii Literacy and Revolution: the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire

edited by Robert Mackie A critical assesment of Freire's work to promote worldwide literacy as a vital key to revolutionary social change. Where does he come from? How do his metoods work? Has he successfully synthesised the Influence of conflicting Intellectual currents- academic liberalism, catholic radicalism, marxism and existentialism? 0 86104 330 8 ?3.50


Article Contentsp. [164]p. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168p. 169p. 170p. 171p. 172p. 173p. 174

Issue Table of ContentsHistory Workshop, No. 10 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 1-236Front Matter [pp. 151-151]EditorialLanguage and History [pp. 1-5]

Robinson Crusoe [pp. 6-24]Household and Kinship: Ryton in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries [pp. 25-60]Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1843-1914 [pp. 61-89]Coventry Communism: A Study of Factory Politics in the Second World War [pp. 90-118]EssaysThe Emergence of Shop Steward Organization and Job Control in the British Car Industry: A Review Essay [pp. 119-137]The Revolutionary Tradition in Islam [pp. 138-150]

Local History'When the Riot Act Was Read': A Pub Mural of the Battle of Southsea, 1874 [pp. 152-163]

Language and HistoryWork and Its Representations: A Research Proposal [pp. 164-174]History and the Politics of Language in France: A Review Essay [pp. 175-183]

Teaching HistoryHistory-Writing in India [pp. 184-190]The National Museum of Labour History [pp. 191-193]

Historian's NotebookThe Portrait [pp. 194-196]Comprehensive School Reform and the 1945 Labour Government [pp. 197-204]

Report BackHWJ Readers' Meeting 28 June 1980 [pp. 205-206]Dublin History Workshop 5 [pp. 206-207]Bradford History Workshop 2, 15 March 1980 [pp. 207-209]Lynn History Workshop [pp. 209-210]Science and Society History Workshop 23rd and 24th February 1980 [pp. 210-211]Museums and Education [p. 211]Art + Society 2 and History Workshop 13 [pp. 211-213]

Readers' LettersIslington CP [p. 214]Old Mont Boys [p. 214]A Rough Area [pp. 214-215]Response to Tony Judt [p. 215]Ethnographic Method [pp. 216-217]Socialist History [pp. 217-218]Bradford Ilp [pp. 218-219]Bookdealers + Libraries [p. 219]History in Algeria [pp. 219-220]

Noticeboard [pp. 221-233]ObituariesMiriam Daly [p. 234]Walter Rodney [p. 235]

Back Matter [pp. 236-236]

godelier, work and its representations

Documents