382

Current Anthropology

and cognitive function. What else are we missing now, and what
will we miss in the future? Last but not least, chapter 13 carves
out a space for a new inquiry and asks what happens to our
digital content and lives upon death. Does it make sense to treat
digital assets as individual property or as part of a larger and
interconnected virtual realm that continues on in the world of
cyber ghosts long past the death of the machine?
Aging and the Digital Life Course neither offers an entirely
groundbreaking set of anthropological theories nor reframes
issues of capitalism and critical gerontology from any new
theoretical positions, which would have been nice to see in a
concluding chapter linking information and communication
technologies to various Foucauldian technologies of the body.
Research agencies, various international institutes, societies dedicated to gerontechnology, and scholars of science, technology,
and society (and even Leonardo da Vinci) have all contributed
to the pertinent issues at hand. What Aging and the Digital
Life Course manages to deliver, however, is engaging these long
standing issues in fresh and emergent contexts. There is a certain love for technology, a scientication that one can nd in
the works of Bruno Latour, here. Nonetheless, topics such as
perspectivism, technology and its application, human development, sociality, and life as an interactive eld can be found
throughout various chapters in Aging and the Digital Life
Course. More than just a commentary on the technological
products envisioned and required for addressing presbyopia,
loss of hearing, functionality issues, communication, or even
the nature of relationships in late life, this edited volume challenges us to call into question how technologies, such as web
based tools and information and communication technology,
might just reshape our conceptions and expectations of aging.
Aging and the Digital Life Course lays out some of the unintended consequences of particular technological promises and
practices and their effects on ageism and personhood. There is
value in this book, despite its unevenness.

Global Workers and the Unmaking and

Remaking of Class in the TwentyFirst
Century
Pauline Gardiner Barber
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie
University, 6135 University Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H
4R2, Canada (pgbarber@dal.ca). 28 II 16
Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor.
Edited by Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella. New
York: Berghahn, 2014.
There is something of a renaissance underway in the anthropology of work. While some anthropologists, including contributors to Blood and Fire, never faltered in studying the effects of global capitalism on working class lives and political
struggles, others abandoned the project. As this volume makes

Volume 57, Number 3, June 2016

abundantly clear, despite four decades of bafegab about neoliberalisms wealth generation and its trickledown effects, what
is good for capital is decidedly not and never has been good
for all, and especially not for working people. This volume
presents six examples of labor struggles and associated political violence from Colombia, the United States, India, Spain,
and Poland. Each chapter commences with a historical account
of working class struggles against powerful political coalitions.
Together they model the violent accomplishment of capitalisms making and unmaking of class relations under the guise
of neoliberalism as it unfolded in each context. It is a riveting
and sobering story conveyed through theoretically coherent
ethnographies carefully structured to represent a truly global
anthropology of labor.
The volumes title is from Marx, who evoked the image of
blood and re (1977:875) when describing the historical
movement that divorced producers from the means of production to turn them into dependent wage laborers under industrial capitalism. The title thus signals the historical depth
necessary for a truly global scholarship long absent from the
discipline. Eric Wolf (1982), cited throughout the volume, applied Marxs analysis of labor in the colonial world to challenge anthropologists on the new interrelationships and interdependencies of capitalism. Later, in the preface to a second
edition of Europe and the People Without History, Wolf saw the
need to explain why, as an anthropologist, he drew upon history and political economy to locate the peoples studied by
anthropology in the larger elds of force generated by systems of power exercised over social labor (1997:viii). By that
time, mainstream anthropology had turned inward, distracted
by postmodernism and the multiple challenges to the disciplines imperialist origins from the very people without history. However, as Carbonella and Kasmirs splendid introduction makes clear, Wolfs historical political economy, drawn
from Marx, is foundational for a truly global anthropology of
labor as the world sustains a protracted (and predictable) series of global political and economic crises.
While anthropologies of neoliberalism proliferate, and there
is more discussion of late about capitalism, this is less true
when it comes to studying class and capital (Carrier and Kalb
2015). Blood and Fire lls this gap and contributes theoretical substance to anthropologys sometimes theorylight take
on neoliberalism. Framing the discussions that follow, the introduction by the editors provides a theoretical map for a global
anthropology of labor from a Marxist perspective. It begins with
what we now recognize, in 2016, as an overly hopeful image
about expressions of political solidarity in various parts of the
world. But as the books examples reveal, protestors everywhere
confront a formidable force: capitalisms simultaneously destructive and creative accumulation strategies, pressuring labor,
its essential other, everywhere to conform or risk becoming
disposable.
In the introductions rst section, dispossession and difference, the editors outline how primitive accumulation, as a
recurrent process, relies on the production of difference among

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383

groups of workers across a global spatial scale. In their discussion of place, space, and power, they identify a dialectical
relationship between particular local struggles and the potential
for universal political ambition. Because localities are merged
and disaggregated in the production of new spaces for capital accumulation, the signicance of any local becomes an
empirical question for investigation. Readers are reminded
of Wolf s insistence on the relationship between labor made
visible through the wage relation and invisible labor outside
of that relation. Elaborated on throughout the volume, outsiders are likely to reside elsewhere across the region, the continent, or the globe. Capitalism can thus be seen to operate
through the multiplication of the proletariat and the simultaneous production of new labor and disposable populations.
Key questions for the volumes authors are (1) how has
social labor become everywhere diminished? And (2) why
has the link between the idea of labor demands and the greater
good become broken? In addressing these, the volumes chapters, taken together, make a convincing case for the renaissance of global labor studies and the multiplication of labor
perspective to replace the currently popular dualistic models,
which rely on outdated class maps in positioning people as
somehow outside of capitalism, be that as a precariat, in a
state of exception, or as excluded citizens. First up, Leslie
Gill analyzes neoliberalisms coming of age in Barrancabermeja,
Colombia. Elite class power was restored, while working class
and peasant solidarities became the target of extreme political
violence. Dispossession was enforced by a rightwing alliance
of entrepreneurs, narcoparamilitaries, state security forces,
and traditional politicians. Next, August Carbonella also depicts
collusion and cunning on the part of corporate and political
elites in their concerted attacks in the making and unmaking of
twentiethcentury Fordist working class solidarities in Maines
paper industry. Here we see how neoliberalism enhances the
geographic rescaling efforts of corporations as they dispossess
labor in some localities while creating employment elsewhere.
Central Mumbai is the setting for Judy Whiteheads discussion of class politics and spatial restructuring, which saw
the double waves of dispossession in Indias transition from
Fordism in the textile industry to exible contract work. Following mass political action during the late 1980s and 1990s,
about one million people lost their jobs, many moving to edge
cities, where the industry was reshaped to become reliant upon
contract labor. Piece workers earned onethird or onequarter
less than they did as wage employees in the former mills. From
this example, we see how exibility for capital equals dispossession of workers from livelihood security and their entrapment in the interstices of an exclusive urban geography.
Next we turn to the contours of class struggle in deindustrializing Europe, to the Spanish town of Ferrol, Galicia, birth
place of General Franco and of Pablo Iglesias, the founder of
the Spanish Socialist Party. Susana Narotzky analyzes Ferrol as
a space of extreme examples of confrontation and cooperation,
of military repression and working class mobilization. Here
again, the particularized local struggle of shipyard workers ght-

ing dispossession is contrasted with a more expansive form of

political mobilization, one that transcends class fragmentation
to become potent in working toward structural transformation.
Sharryn Kasmir considers the long history of dispossession
of US auto workers in her ethnographic analysis of the Saturn automobile factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Yet again,
the geographies of labor struggles for these workers reveals
how the corporation draws advantage from the localism of
US unions, as United Automobile Workers chapters act against
each other in competition for jobs. It is a competition that dissipates the potency of the union, while workers are subjected
to a major campaign about Saturns new labor relations promoting a Different kind of Company (225).
In the books nal chapter, Don Kalb explains how working
class resentment became rechanneled into rightwing populism in Central Europe. While the discussion focuses on the
hidden histories of one particular Polish pathway for labors
disenfranchisement, dispossession, and resistance, the chapter
serves as a kind of theoretical conclusion. Kalb applies the idea
of critical junctions (see Kalb 1997) to varying scales and
forms of powerstructural, tactical, and agential, taken from
Wolf (1990)to show how inequality and structural dependence can incubate a politics of fear and anger. Such ideas
add substance for critical investigation of neoliberal globalization and move us forward to a truly global Anthropology of
Labor.

References Cited
Carrier, James, and Don Kalb. 2015. Anthropologies of class: power, practice
and inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kalb, Don. 1997. Expanding class: power and everyday politics in industrial
communities: the Netherlands 18501950. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: a critique of political economy. Vol. 1. New York:
Vintage.
Wolf, Eric. 1982 (1997). Europe and the people without history. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
. 1990. Facing power: old insights, new questions. American Anthropologist 92:586596.

Parallel Worlds
Johannes Loubser
Stratum Unlimited, 10011 Carrington Lane, Johns Creek, Georgia 30022, USA, and Rock Art Research Institute, University of
the Witwatersrand, Origins Center, Yale Road, Johannesburg
2050, South Africa (jloubser@stratumunlimited.com). 28 II 16
Crow Indian Rock Art: Indigenous Perspectives and
Interpretations. By Timothy P. McCleary. Walnut Creek, CA:
Left Coast, 2016.
The book focuses on a specic portion of Plains Indian rock
art; those petroglyphs and pictographs made by the Crow people of south central Montana and north central Wyoming.
As an introduction to his book, McCleary justiably states that,

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