Comment: McNamara, T. ‘Multi-Unionism, Union Bureaucracy and Untruth in Collective Ethical Self-making’

Abstract

The anthropologies of labor and ethics traditionally belonged to antagonistic poles of the academy. Ethnographers of labor were supposed to draw their conceptual cues from Marxist sociological theory and to value the type of political-economic data that sit far from stereotypical anthropological interest in rituals, belief systems, and so on. For their part, ethnographers of ethics drew on the theorizing of philosophers to meditate on the inner lives of their research subjects. This is a crude reduction of a complex history, but it is true enough that I can probably say it here. McNamara’s article belongs to an emerging trend in the anthropology of labor that undermines such divisions by relating power and economy to ethics, values, and affect. McNamara’s article is a serious, creative, and important piece of work.