Massimiliano Mollona

Gifts of Labour Steel Production and Technological Imagination in an Area of Urban Deprivation, Sheffield, UK

The article focuses on how the workers of a small tool factory located in Endcliffe - an area of urban deprivation in Sheffield, UK - conceptualize, experience, and talk about the value of their labour and how changes in the wider politico-economic environment affect their notion of labour value. The article combines a Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process with an anthropological focus on the ideology of gift and commodity exchange, and explores the cultural specificity of processes of labour commodification. It argues that the combined effect of state neoliberal policies and extensive subcontracting by local steel corporations in Sheffield have turned small factories into hybrids between economic and welfare institutions, with mixed commodified and non-commodified labour on the same shopfloor. In challenging much of the recent anthropological literature on alienation, the article claims that alienation is the consequence of the workers’ (con)fusion of the ideology of labour as a free gift and the ideology of labour as a purely utilitarian activity, rather than of their sharp separation.

Observation, performance and revolution: exploring “the political” in visual art and anthropology

Following up on Marcuss seminal article on cinema and ethnography [1995] and weaving together anthropology, film theory and the analysis of four films—from the ethnographic, commercial, art and documentary genres—I argue that cinema can open a democratic and egalitarian space of observation of and interaction with “the other” and that anthropologists should approach their subjects in ways similar to some other filmmakers. But unlike Marcus, who considers films as metaphors of ethnography and advocates a posture of modernist distance, I look for juxtapositions between film and anthropology and, extending the Surrealist notion of “the double” across the fields of politics and aesthetics, I argue for a humanist anthropology, one that celebrates the dual nature of humans and cinema.

Trabalho e ação coletiva: memória, espaço e identidades sociais na cidade do aço

Situada na regiao sul fluminense, a cidade siderurgica de Volta Redonda, conhecida internacionalmente, tem um longo historico de organizacao e mobilizacao operaria, que se desdobra em termos de seus movimentos populares. O presente trabalho analisa as formas pelas quais militantes dos movimentos sindical e popular constroem suas memorias acerca das mobilizacoes experimentadas nesse municipio nas decadas de 1980 e 1990, verificando as representacoes de cidade que atravessam esse trabalho de memoria. Interessa-nos pensar, a partir deste caso, o imbricamento entre memoria, espaco e identidades sociais.