The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.323 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
This article explores the relationship between precarity as a labor condition and precarity as an ontological experience in the lives of urban poor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The focus is on a garbage dump on the outskirts of the city where thousands of Rio’s poor, known as catadores, reclaim recyclables for a living. Attending to cyclic moments in which these workers leave the dump for other jobs and then return, I explore how everyday emergencies in Rio’s periphery often clash with the rigid conditions of regular, wage-labor employment. These comings and goings of catadores result from a tension between the desire for “real” work and the desire for what I describe as relational autonomy, made possible by the conditions of wageless work. The article considers how specific histories and experiences of capitalism in the global South differentially shape the articulation of precarious labor with precarious life. I conclude by suggesting that the returns of catadores to the dump do not signal an end for Rio’s poor, but rather constitute a politics of detachment that enables life to be lived in fragile times.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Cultural Anthropology
- Topic
- Political Economy and Marxism
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Simon Fraser UniversityNational Science Foundation
- Keywords
- PrecarityArticulation (sociology)CapitalismAutonomyPrecarious workSociologyPoliticsWork (physics)Global SouthPolitical scienceGender studiesGeographyEconomic geographyLaw
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes