Antropoloogiline vaade tööle: mõtisklusi kaevuritest ja diginomaadidest
Authors:   School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia, Kesküla Eeva 
Published: April 2023

This article gives an overview of how to research work and labour from an anthropological perspective. Based on the examples of my ethnographic research with miners, teachers and digital nomads, I show how the anthropology of work is based both on the dark anthropology of suffering and the dispossessed as well as the anthropology of the good. Anthropology of work, like anthropology in general, is characterised by a holistic approach, cultural relativism and the ethnographic method. I present five points that I have developed in my own research. First, based on the political economy approach, I argue that at the core of the anthropology of work are global inequalities and their everyday expressions at the workplace. I bring examples of my work in an underground mine in Estonia where miners try to regulate and control the tempo of everyday work while the managers try to make them work faster and more, and how such micro-tempo of the everyday is an expression of larger class structures. I also bring an example of the overlap of class and ethnicity among working-class Russian speakers in Estonia. I then discuss how anthropologists also consider the wider political-economic dimension as the industrial accidents in a Kazakhstani coal mine are affected by the global economic situation as well as global inequalities. Secondly, following David Graeber, I argue that work should be studied as producing both material value and immaterial values. I discuss how miners find salary and respect for their job both important and how Estonian teachers produce value in the future labour force and values as the moral base of society simultaneously and feel that they should be given both a decent salary and an immaterial value expressed in their autonomy and professionalism for their work. In neoliberal Estonia, where different values dominate and other professions are more appreciated, they claim to be lacking both. Thirdly, I argue that anthropological research looks at work from a wider perspective than just paid employment and considers also reproductive work. I bring an example of the transformation of women’s work in a Kazakhstani coal processing plant where the specialist work of regulating the production process has gradually been taken over by cleaning work akin to domestic reproductive tasks, invisible and unappreciated. Fourthly, I emphasise the embodied nature of work and how it creates intersubjective relations between bodies and inanimate objects such as machines or computer programmes. Finally, anthropology as a discipline that does not take the status quo for granted, is a good tool for questioning the centrality of work and dominance of the Protestant work ethic in the contemporary capitalist world. Based on the example of my work with digital nomads, I discuss how these young professionals knowingly decrease their work hours and are trying to spend their time on other pleasant non-commodified activities. Despite this, it is hard to completely denounce the dominant Protestant work ethic. I conclude by calling for both dark and utopian anthropology of work and more interdisciplinary collaborations.