í -1 ( m wě m m m Lilies of the Field Marginal People Who Live for the Moment EDITED BY Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart Westview Press A Member of the Perseus Books Group '%*>. H-ig^M m^ -^mm WMM ^M^ -MMffl - ' ÉHHľ ~ WĚĚBá ' * -"'WĚĚĚM Consider the Lilies of the Field Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ... Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.. . ." —Matthew 6:28-29, 34 The Present The original impulse for this book came from a sense that the ways of life of London prostitutes, Hungarian Gypsies, and Aegean Greek peasants—among whom we, the editors, carried out research—could be interestingly compared. These people live more or less in poverty at the margins of society, where they are often treated with contempt. Instead of adopting mainstream notions of work, productivity, and long-term economic planning, they appear to take a "natural" abundance for granted and to forage for their subsistence. Sex workers gather what they need from obliging markets, as Aegean Greek peasants and Rom Gypsies "harvest" money from state banks and the non-Gypsy world, respectively. In these cases foraging depends upon an idea of plenty; it is taken for granted that whatever you need is available more or less whenever you want it—there is no need to store, or to do without so as to hoard for the future. This "anti-economic" stance is part and parcel of a specific set of attitudes towards time, person, and community, as indicated in this Introduction. This abundant world is celebrated in rituals that create a community of equal and autonomous individuals. Greek men drink and gamble themselves free from the mundane and oppressive world around them rather as the Gypsies drink and sing themselves into a brotherhood of equals. While London prostitutes do not create a corresponding community, they too achieve a satisfying individuality in their personal lives. In such ways, all three groups invert their socially marginal positions and claim a significant personal autonomy. Since these achievements are explicidy and systematically contrasted to the longer term orientation of their neighbors, it seems ethnographically accurate to say that they live in opposition Pi A is co 2 Sophie Day Evthymios Papataxiarchís, and Michael Stewart to the mainstream. Certainly, at times, they are perceived as a threat to other, "respectable" ways of life. This book deals with a much broader range of social groups and individuals than the European comparison that we had in mind originally. But the other people presented in this volume share the effort to live in the present, with little thought for the future and little interest in the past. Some chapters describe what are commonly known as "cultures," others deal with stages of the life cycle, and still others present individuals who are exceptional in their own settings. Some of these people work as wage laborers, some forage in the forest or on the sea, and still others trade or till the land. In the midst of this almost bewildering diversity, a common commitment to the present moment becomes all the more striking. These are people who live resolutely in the short term, and, in privileged moments, they transform this short term into a transcendent escape from time itself. In what follows, this quasi-ritual status outside durational time is called "the present." This term is intended to refer very generally both to the short term—to processes of foraging for example—and to a ritual transcendental moment outside durational time altogether (Bloch 1977). But, where relevant, the "short term" (durational time) is distinguished from "the present" (ritual time). The achievement of a permanent, timeless present involves an exceptional inversion of mainstream practice, in which the present is seen as the location of suffering and deprivation that may—with luck, prayer, and effort—be overcome in the future. This view of the present can be found in nostalgic attempts to return to a previous golden age as well as in Utopian theories or millenarian visions. The quote from Matthew's Gospel that opens this Introduction concludes, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself; sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof For the early Christians, and for most of us, the ills of the world belong to the present. By contrast, the people found in this book imagine the present as other people imagine the future or the past: It is a source of joy and satisfaction. Through their fundamental commitment to living each day as it comes, these people invert their marginal status and put themselves at the center of their own moral universe. They also achieve a remarkable voluntarism in their sense of identity: the less you are concerned with past and future, the more true it is to say, "you are what you do." This particular form of transcendence is achieved through activities that celebrate the evanescent nature of accomplishments. Freedom and autonomy, then, are defined precisely by their momentary characteristics—which refuse to be caught in any framework outside their fleeting performance. Freedom and au-i tonomy stand in opposition to transcendental values associated with a variety of institutions that organize long-term social reproduction and, simultaneously, produce hierarchical relationships. Institutions associated with the long term come to be tainted by their associations with the state, with more powerful neighbors, and with processes of social control. Consider the Lilies of the Field 3 In response, people who live in the present try to disengage themselves from such institutions. Some of the people represented below have found that their sense of time or, indeed, timelessness constitutes a powerful tool of resistance and opposition to surrounding neighbors and institutions. In the mainstream, institutions such as the household—with its hierarchies and mechanisms of social control—appear to enable social reproduction through time and to connote a solid permanence. The people described in this book are prepared to try to do without such arrangements rather than enmesh themselves in a politically coercive world where they can find a place only as dependents. Yet, the achievements discussed below are colored through and through by a sense of loss. In refusing to build a long term through conventional households, for example, some of these people find that they cannot reproduce themselves at all, nor easily pass on their values and achievements to a new generation. Hungarian Rom see themselves as "orphans" who live in homes without "parents." London prostitutes find themselves conceiving children only to lose them, and Japanese day laborers discover they will grow old without the prospect of becoming incorporated into the shrines of their natal families as ancestors, and so they will wander through the rest of time as rootless ghosts. Plan of the Volume In the course of this Introduction, the ethnographic material found in the book as a whole will be framed by various theoretical debates. We discuss the "culture of poverty" and the "encapsulation" of hunting-and-gathering populations. We then address briefly the ideological aspects of living in the present; and, through the single example of the household, we offer an example of the difficulties experienced by people who attempt to live in the here and now, Finally, we consider briefly the multiple political uses to which these cultural attitudes have been put, both by the people immediately concerned and also by more powerful others. The book itself is divided into four parts, each prefaced by an introductory comment that locates the chapters with reference to our developing argument. Part One establishes the geographical and social diversity among cases in this volume, and the next two parts describe various strategies for living in the present. The final part raises questions about the academic and official discussion of mar-ginality. This organization of the volume does not reflect any determinist argument about "living in the present." Rather, it represents one of the many ways a comparison could be made across our sample so as to highlight a common ethos. Part One moves from Michael Stewart's account of Rom (Gypsy) horse dealers in socialist Hungary to Frances Pine's chapter on Polish peasants and concludes with an essay by Laura Rival on Amazonian forest foragers. At first sight, no three groups could be farther apart in terms of social organization. Rom even self-consciously contrast themselves to peasants, including mountain people like the Gorale. And the social/ecological setting of both these groups could not be more 4 Sophie Day Bthymios Papains, and Michael Stewart different from that of the Huaorani. And yet, we believe, it is possible to observe fundamental similarities that derive from a common orientation to the present moment. For instance, Stewart argues that the Rom representation of their subsistence activities is very similar to the Huaorani notion of gathering from a generous forest.' "Gypsy activity," románi butji, is described as scavenging, gathering, trading, begging, fortune telling. Such activities are united by an attempt to reap without sowing. Rom revel in the idea that it is possible to live without labor and production and to exist instead through the market and especially through trade in horses. As with the Huaorani and many of the examples presented subsequently, personal autonomy is achieved through gathering or tapping into abundant wealth, through sharing on demand, and through the immediate use of goods and resources. The Górale constitute a limiting case. It would be perverse to suggest that these peasants in the Carpathian Mountains represent themselves as foragers. Like other peasants of the region, they reproduce themselves mostly in and through the medium of households—in the sense of a named building with associated land and a group of co-inheritors attached by descent, marriage, adoption, and joint labor on the family farm. In what sense, then, can the Górale be compared with the Gypsies and the Huaorani? The answer lies in their relationship with the outside world. Their houses symbolize "the inside" of the Górale community, which is pitted against all the various forces of "the outside" world that the Górale have confronted over the past few hundred years. And these apparently autonomous and self-sufficient households are sustained through activities in that outside world—through markets and migration— where the Górale do not behave like "proper peasants" at all. Inside their homes the Górale seem very different from the Huaorani or the Rom, but outside they become "tricksters" who behave in ways remarkably like the "Gypsies." And in these brief moments, the Górale see their own households in a less positive light, for they look more like other institutions of social control and hierarchy in that outside world. The contrast between the Rom and the Górale introduces the volume because it indicates the extremes of a continuum that runs through the volume: whereas the Rom try and live exclusively in the present, these Polish peasants qualify for inclusion in the book only because they mark the limits of this orientation to the present. Resembling the example of other peasants in so many ways, the Górale example makes it clear that a commitment to the here and now can belong to mainstream values and behavior as well as to the margins; the difference is one of degree. This book is not, therefore, simply about other and more exotic folk, but about an aspect of many peoples' lives.2 The chapters in Part Two present strategies for living in the present on the part of two individuals'. Rita Astuti describes a Vezo woman in Madagascar who sells fish in the market, and Yasushi Uchiyamada evokes an untouchable woman in South India who engages in quasi-marital, cross-caste relationships. The analysis of such strategies is developed in the context of social groups and "minorities" in Consider the Lilies oj the field the third part to the volume. These are single-sex groups. Tom Gill's study of day laborers segregated at the margins of big Japanese cities, Sophie Day's study of female prostitutes in London, and Evythmios Papataxiarchis's study of chronically indebted Aegean Greek peasants provide us with examples of an explicit politics of the present and of the self. The fourth and final part juxtaposes Mark Harris s ethnographically based chapter on the caboclos of Brazil with Stephen Nugent's theoretical discussion, based on the same ethnogr; ' : "u -•"-"••* =nrh as "marginal" can be put by anthropv,^___- to suffer marginality and what an earlier generation would naveuiueu <■ ^..------ poverty." Nugent asks how best to present this kind of case material. An interview with an Egyptian doctor concludes the book with a life story in which an orientation to the present makes sense only in terms of the doctor's own perspective on place and history. Fanny Colonna's choice of an interview format was made specifically to avoid the reductionism inherent in explanation, and in this sense it provides a response to the anxieties Nugent articulates. ter on the caboclos of Brazil with btepuen nu6v,„...... the same ethnographic case, of the misuses to which terms such as "marginal apologists. Most of the people described in this book might be said i -L „„ „„.i;„r oeneration would have called "a culture of Accounting for the Present: The Issue of Marginality It has not been always easy to persuade an audience that what is ethnographically recorded in this book actually exists. Yet, we are hardly the first to try to put this phenomenon on the ethnographic map and, more particularly, to point out connections between social disadvantage and a cultural commitment to the present.' In particular, this book will remind many of an earlier literature that implied that the very poor at the edges of capitalist expansion had a culture of their own: the culture of poverty as described by Oscar Lewis and others in the 1960s. Trie Culture of Poverty For Lewis, a culture of poverty emerged at points of proto-proletarianization, when already wretched peasants made the first moves into modernity. The main features of this "culture" were: gregarious behavior, informal credit among neighbors, alcoholism, the use of violence to settle quarrels, consensual unions, male desertion, a tendency to live in matrifocal families, and an abiding interest in short-term achievements over and above the long term. Lewis's work was almost immediately attacked, and it is easy to see why. One problem, as Ulf Hannerz pointed out, was the addition of structural relationships to a list of cultural traits so that unemployment, for instance, became part of a learned culture (1969:180). This confusion rendered the model implausible, and offensive. Additionally, a methodological focus on the family divorced processes of socialization from the broader social and political context. Another problem was that the "marginal" was constructed as an object and reified so that it was not possible to appreciate the central role that these poor and disadvantaged people 6 Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart played in the reproduction of local and global capital (see Chapter 10). Lewis appeared to imply that the poor of Puerto Rico were "marginal" because their "deviant" culture made them so, thus reproducing the very ideology that sustained their oppression. However, for all its limitations, Lewis's work did contain important insights into a widespread cultural syndrome. In a descriptive, non-theorized way, Lewis observed an important contrast between the people he was discussing and classic proletarians, in his foreword to the second edition of La Vida, in which he tried to elaborate the notion of a culture of poverty, he stated baldly that "when the poor become class conscious, or active members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world, they are no longer part of the culture of poverty, although they may still be desperately poor" (1968:xJiv). This particular insight has been lost in later writing because authors have mistakenly conflated Lewis' observations with studies of more traditional working-class communities.4 They were helped in this confusion because Lewis himself considered ideas and ideologies to be mechanistic reflections of economic positions, such as poverty. His critics merely had to show that some poor people did not try to live in the present in order to undermine the correlation as a whole.5 In reality, a range of identities may be found "at the margins," just as Hannerz found in a ghetto of Washington D.C. a number of overlapping and, in part, opposed lifestyles—"mainstream," "swinger,""street-corner"( 1969:38-56). Leo Howe's material on the long-term unemployed in Northern Ireland illustrates this point beautifully (1990, 1998). Howe describes communities where work is the foundation of most other statuses that married men hold. These were lost with long-term unemployment. In the face of an official discourse that aims to distinguish the "scrounger" and "cheat" from "real job-seekers," most unemployed men represent themselves as would-be and willing workers. Their dependence on welfare payments was presented as a means to sustain them in their search for productive activity. Howe worked in both Protestant and a Catholic communities, and he shows how unemployment among the latter is more readily seen as a structural feature of the system than as a failure of individuals. More Catholics than Protestants adopt an ambitious stance vis-a-vis potential payments from the social security office. Rather like the Polish and Greek peasants, the Catholics are less afraid to appear as "scroungers" before representatives of a state to which they have little attachment. In the Protestant community, better incorporated materially and ideologically within the British state, the rhetoric of the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor is more effective at preventing any activity that could be represented as "scrounging." Howe's data demonstrate clearly that historical relationships with the state (and thereby also with work providers) decisively differentiate activities among communities of the long-term unemployed that are similar in formal, structural terms.* Another insight of Lewis's was to show that the very behaviors that enabled survival in a hostile world could have unintended effects, which themselves Consider the Lilies of the Field 7 helped reproduce the relationships through which these people were disadvantaged. Paul Willis later provided an ethnography, better grounded in theoretical terms, showing "how working class kids get working class jobs" as a result of the very defensive strategies that they developed to cope with a school system from which they were excluded (Willis 1977). Despite the very real problems in Lewis's approach, we have tried to recover these insights into the ethnographic phenomenon of "living in the present." However, a more recent debate on the distinctive traits of hunters and gatherers, and on the historical origins of this cultural adaptation, provides a broader theoretical framework. Foraging: For Food, Wages, and Other Goods Two links between the hunter-gatherer ethnography and the chapters in this book suggest themselves. First, there are similarities in cultural forms, including a common stress on mobility, gathering, sharing, and notions of affluence (see next section). Second, questions about the historical origin of these representations and practices are strangely similar. In both the hunter-gatherer debates and our own, a central question concerns whether living in the present is a phenomenon suigeneris, a sort of cosmological choice, or whether it is a response to encapsulation. Encapsulation refers to a process of incorporation or domination within pre-modern, colonial, and, now, nation states, where hunter-gatherers live in enclaves because they do not participate in the ways of life practiced by more powerful neighbors—they do not till the land, breed animals, pay taxes, honor the dead, build houses, and so on (Woodburn 1988). The ethnography included in this book throws light on processes of encapsulation in very different situations. It shows that living in the present is an active, not passive, response to conditions of marginalization and social exclusion, and that at times it constitutes an effective cultural and political critique. In this broader context, a comparison can be made between the strategies of avoidance that are classically associated with African foragers and the processes of confrontation and negotiation that are described by contributors to this book. The French anthropologist, Claude Meillassoux extended Woodburn's description of the temporal orientation of African hunters and gatherers (Woodburn 1968). He described their economy as "tied to the present, without any duration or continuity" and hence as characterized by an "almost complete lack of concern for the past as for the future" (Meillassoux 1973:194, italics in the original). Meillassoux argued that this "offers opportunities for individual freedom which is revealed by the sexual attitudes, the weakness of marital ties, individual mobility, the fragility and instability of social institutions both within the band and the nuclear family" (1973:195). These general observations hold good not only for many foraging societies but also for many of the cases presented below and, indeed, for Lewis's poor. S Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart As Bloch has pointed out, the problem with Meillassoux's technological determinism was that it ignored the variety among hunter-gatherers and failed to address the case of Australian Aborigines who combine foraging with an elaborate interest in a mythical past (1989:16-17). Woodburn's work among the Hadza of Tanzania contributed to a shift of emphasis (1979, 1982). He introduced the concept of "immediate return," which corresponds closely to what we are calling in this volume an "orientation to the present." He described Australian Aboriginal sociality in terms of a contrasting "delayed return."7 Woodburn showed how immediate return was based on notions of an abundant natural world in which individuals could move freely and had independent access to resources as well as to the means of coercion. In this militantly egalitarian world, all forms of dependency and binding ties were avoided. Returns on labor were immediate, and there was little or no investment in either goods or particular social relations. In ensuing debates, the problem arose as to whether immediate return was constructed sui generis and produced through the foraging way of life or was a reaction to encapsulation by surrounding and more powerful social groups. In Woodburn's view, encapsulation may have encouraged immediate return by way of political opposition to outsiders, but it was equally intelligible as a choice of lifestyle that others would make if only they knew its benefits. In other words, "the present orientation" could be generated by opposition to authority and dependence within a society as much as in opposition to outsiders (1988:62-64). Gibson's important study of the Philippine Buid (1986) brought these issues into focus, since the mountain Buid practice swidden farming and yet live in many ways like immediate return hunters and gatherers. Gibson attributed the egalitarian qualities of Buid social life, which involved a radical avoidance of all forms of dependency, to political relations with their predatory Christian neighbors.1 These latter constantly tried to place the Buid in their debt, or to forge other long-term relationships in order to bind them into the political and economic hierarchies of the lowlands. Gibson's argument is rendered all the more powerful through the ethnographic demonstration of the revolutionary consequences of one Buid man's attempts to lead his followers into "conventional" politics (1986:101-21). Property relations began to emerge in kin groups, and sharing practices between Buid changed. As household ties came to mediate the relations between individual and group, a political leader representing the whole community emerged for the first time. The sense of Buid identity itself was radically challenged (1986:115). The chapters on the Huaorani and the Vezo of Madagascar both illustrate that debates about origins may be misplaced in the absence of historical evidence. But Rival and Astuti also both argue that this should not preclude consideration of the current political uses and implications of living in the present. Rival argues that Huaorani culture is best understood as a social form sui generis, which arose in conditions as obscure as those that generated other cultures and societies within the Amazonian area. Huaorani lead their lives without past or future in an "v- ■fSW" ««Ssj. (ioti It is all the more striking then to conic across the examples of Neny, Gorale OO Cr? Consider the Lilies of the Field 15 traders, and London prostitutes, all of whom contest the values with which they are (symbolically) associated." The material in the book shows that women as well as men distrust the "householď'-insofar as it stands for onerous duties and responsibilities-and can step outside it. Individual dealers in Poland or Madagascar as well as in London appear to become "themselves" when they leave home. These women lose themselves in the "magic of the market" and, even if they work alongside many others in bustling noisy marketplaces, they may act as though they were on their own. In Neny's case in Madagascar, her pleasure in dealing is so great that she can barely drag herself away from the chance to broker a deal in order to fulfill social obligations to other Vezo and their guests. For her, the emphasis is as much on her own skill and risk-taking as upon the collective nature of the market. Among the Górale, the equivalent moment, when women forget their ties and responsibilities to other people, appears to be so transitory that its poignancy is tangible. Pine shows how women hawk their wares in the marketplace with a distinctive, "trickster" manner, reminiscent of the way that Rom playfully dominate gaios on the horse markets of Hungary. While working on the land in cooperative teams, for instance, personal autonomy and equality are willingly limited, but a different, more individualist perspective emerges when dealing with outsiders." From the perspective of the trickster, the house-based order is similar to the wider society, to which it is normally opposed, if only because both the household and state subsume the individual equally within a larger and long-term project of social reproduction and inequality.11 Single-sex celebrations of men have been discussed above in terms of a vision of the self where men harmonize their moods and their voices. In such contexts, these men consider themselves to have achieved an enhanced individuality; their identities are neither blurred nor merged. This state of being is similar to that achieved by some of the women as they cross various thresholds and shed their mundane obligations and commitments in favor of a heightened individuality. Therefore, this vision of the self cannot be tied exclusively to the realm of ostentatious consumption, and the settings in which autonomy is achieved appear to differ according to a number of characteristics, including gender. In this vvay, by moving beyond the standard opposition between a public male and a private female realm continuities between concepts of the self and living for the moment become more evident. This is not to suggest that the male and female selves are equivalent, nor, conversely, that they are invariably associated with alternative and oppositional models of the household." Rather, the household provides an important example of the apparently inevitable contradictions inherent in an orientation to the present. The material in this book also shows that multiple visions of the household can coexist. The communist state in Hungary saw in Rom houses a potent setting through which to encourage assimilation and a settled, sedentary life. "Successful" Gypsy households, led by respectable parents wisely accumulating resources to hand on to their children, were encouraged to abandon their fellow Rom and ^H SH IH.......Hk ^H, 16 Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart join mainstream, non-Gypsy society. State policy—organized around Hungarian officials' ideas of civilized, petty bourgeois domesticity—played upon a tension inherent in Rom life between the demands of reproduction in the household and an ideology of brotherhood that sustained Rom communities. The brotherhood was celebrated in a sphere of large-scale unisex celebrations in which women appeared to be relegated to the socially divisive and selt-interested household. A similar opposition is described for Aegean Greeks. Yet, here an additional tension between men who identify with the value of keft and householders is recorded (Papataxiarchis 1994). In both cases, women are represented at times as though they are compromised by their dealings with the outside world, by their commitment to saving for the long term and to planning, and by their opposition to some forms of conspicuous generosity and consumption. However, as suggested above, this apparent association of a wholesale orientation to the present with "brotherly" men—who live for the moment (male/public), in opposition to "wifely" women in households wholly involved in reproduction (female/private)—is misleading both in ethnographic and theoretical terms, if taken as the whole picture. Stewart shows how this model coexists with another in which the Rom are "orphans." Rom counteract gažo (that is, non-Gypsy) notions of the household by presenting themselves as though they were all children who perforce must depend upon the wider Rom community, the household writ large, for their nurture. Within this anti-authoritarian family, Rom grow up free to move from one house to another, to eat where they please, and to ignore demands made upon them by kin and non-Gypsies alike. This constitutes a particularly effective political method for dissolving standard connections between the long term and relationships of authority that were outlined above with reference to Bloch's approach to ritual. Rom, in other words, recuperate a notion of transcendent permanence without its associated hierarchies. The Hungarian state was therefore unable to delegate authority to household heads, who could govern the Rom on the state's behalf. The difficulties in these efforts to redefine the household are particularly apparent in Day's chapter, where two perspectives emerge. The one is associated with acute divisions between work and home, or public and private, that can become highly problematic. For many of these women, the home is seen as a haven from the world of work, at least for some future time when they will have their own children and join mainstream society once more. However, most find it hard I to build that future as they find themselves "addicted" to spending their money on trivia in the process of rejecting a "straight" lifestyle associated with the drudgery of ordinary jobs. Although freely spending earnings might seem similar j^^ to the practices of Gypsy or Greek men, to these women, it also appears lonely ^s-, and restrictive. They feel coerced into a solitary and isolated existence where they __^ experience little choice in what to do with their money. This sense of coercion applied to other aspects of life as well. Reassuring themselves of their own fertility, which their work calls into question, many women ,.í* »T .í.r.ť, .; í-.„ ■>■ •' «f ■■,,-■ -V ' ľ • W-*í:-.-"•' "\V- ' " Consider the Lilies of the Field 17 repeatedly became pregnant. However, these pregnancies were often terminated because women were not ready to step into the mainstream future associated with childrearing. Partly in reaction to the problems of this divided self in a divided world, a minority of the women tried to live in a unitary here and now. Doing away with a putative, respectable, bourgeois future of children, home, and husband, they remained oriented to a present in which they constantly remade themselves through dealings with money and other forms of enterprise in all facets of their lives, including motherhood. In a sense, these women gradually achieved an individuality that was also a basis for social relations with other, like individuals, as they reintegrated different aspects of their lives and turned consumption into a constant source of pleasure and profit. The household was realized as an aspect of the here and now, rather than as a potential future. This permanent present seems to provide one radical solution to the problem of division. Given the association between social reproduction and procreation, it is not surprising to find that single-sex gatherings recur again and again in this volume, since the business of social reproduction and procreation as a whole has been captured by the dominant ideologies to which these people are opposed.20 Few people represented in this volume go so far as to abandon reproduction altogether, but some members of the single-sex groups described in Part Three do without households and without children. Japanese day laborers living in hostels, Greek bachelors, and many prostitutes do not have children. Others, like Dr. Nis-seem, make use of other peoples' houses and enjoy "family" vicariously. Although not necessarily images from inside the household, other examples in the book also describe split images of the world—images associated with marriage, parenting, or death—. Rival shows that a tension between dependency and autonomy emerges at the time of marriage. AJthough individual autonomy is celebrated in most matters from an early age among the Huaorani, couples are often forced into marriage. It is only in the context of cultivating a particular type of manioc for the marriage feast that Huaorani complain of having to do hard work. Once married, and for as long as they have dependent children, the couple lives out various forms of stylized mutual dependence that are not found in any other relationship in this society. In all these ways, marriage is a locus of binding ties and dependence that Huaorani life is otherwise organized to deny. On the other side of the world, Astuti shows that the Vezo dead impinge upon the living by demanding long-term plans and economies. Substantial sums are saved and then invested in tombs or are consumed by the living during death rites. Vezo "short-termism" is what differentiates the living from the dead, and yet the Vezo have to engage with a long term. The lightness and pleasure associated with market trade is incompatible with looking after the interests of the willful dead and of ancestors, who would like to dominate the living just as aggressive kings and royalty wished to do in the past. Vezo attempt to achieve a balance: They submit as little as possible to the long term by devoting themselves as much as they can to the freedoms of the present. IS Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart Cartoon representation of'Kamayan," an archetypal day laborer, with nothing in his bag but freedom. The artist, Arimura Sen, works at the Labour Welfare Center in Karnagasaki, Osaka. (Originally published in Hotel New Kamagasaki by Arimura Sen. Tokyo: Akita Shoten, 1992.) The Politics of the Present It is possible to look at how people use a present orientation without assuming that it came into existence for and can be explained historically with reference to its curent uses. The ritual construction of a present is not just an escape from the real world but also changes the world. However, in the existing literature, the implications of this sort of action have not been adequately delineated because political anthropology has focused on instrumental action oriented to the long term." Though the literature on hunter-gatherers and the culture of poverty address these issues, from our perspective each of these traditions has its own problems. Hunter and gatherer ethnographies are commonly too romantic in their celebration of the tenacity of this distinctive way of life and rarely sufficiently attuned to ' the hardship and exploitation that follow from encapsulation. Conversely, the culture of poverty model is too pessimistic since it implies a passive adaptation by people who "can't help themselves." H~A. Concepts of resistance have recently given an impetus to the anthropological QT) studies of politics." In particular, they have encouraged the study of politics from a.^j "below" and in the context of everyday life, an analytical strategy that is shared by Consider the Lilies of the Field 19 the contributors to this volume. Further, as they were inspired by a Gramscian interest in the contestation of hegemony, these concepts of resistance have put the processes of legitimation and consent into question." Yet, many studies of resistance have suffered from essentialism and romanticism, particularly when it comes to describing the intentions of the poor (see Abu-Lughod 1990, Stoler 1986). The most serious limitation, however, has been aptly described in terms of an "ethnographic refusal," that is, the refusal of thick description: "Resistance studies are thin because they are ethnographically thin: thin on the internal politics of dominated groups, thin on the cultural richness of those groups, thin on the subjectivity—the intentions, desires, fears, projects—of the actors engaged in those dramas" (Ortner 1995: 190). A focus on resistance to domination has involved a curious assumption of internal homogeneity and even the backwardness of "culture" (with regard, for example, to religious beliefs), as well as a somewhat instrumental view of politics.24 The studies included in this volume display a willingness to engage with the ethnography and to confront unfamiliar forms of political practice, including its aesthetic dimensions. Terms like "pleasure" and "happiness" characterize these activities, which may have few points of contact with more mainstream, instrumental, planned action. Despite a lack of fit with conventional expectations—■ and in contrast to a view of resistance as "passive," "implicit," and "destructive"— the politics of the present is often constructive, politically effective, and in some cases obviously rewarding. The cases in this book illustrate, in varying degrees, combinations of all these three positive qualities. In some we find a defensive stance of nonengagement, which aims to define an autonomous space through reducing contact with the dominant order to a minimum. It is interesting that the examples illustrating this form of politics most clearly belong to the two extremes of the world system: the Amazonian frontier and Japanese late capitalism. The Huaorani imagine themselves as the prey of their neighbors and therefore have to keep as far away as possible, and some of the yoseba dwellers reject attempts by the state and the unions to extend allowances that would implicate them in the state welfare system because this would compromise their masculine autonomy. This stance can be a politically effective position even though it is not aimed at transforming the overall context. At one time, it may have looked as though the Huaorani could be forced off their land, but Rival argues that they have managed to convert the oil companies into another feature of the ever-providing forest, since these companies now provide an endless supply of desired goods for the Huaorani. A second form of resistant action seems to produce more conventional symbolic capital. The political success of Greek peasants in renegotiating their debts depended on the degree to which the government was attuned to the logic of their demands. In the course of the 1980s, when the socialist party (PASOK) came to power, the government became more responsive to peasant claims. In its populist practice, the PASOK government participated in a long-standing tradi- 20 Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart CO GO tion of clientism, but it also pursued a cultural logic of anti-statist protest that existed at village level. It adopted a discourse that personified the state as a very rich and powerful patron who was expected, for example, to show a spendthrift attitude, of the kind that is admired in the coffee shop. In this context the state was required to model its relations with economic partners in the European Union on the coffee shop, somewhat to their bemuscment, and then to generously redistribute its resources to its own disenfranchised citizens. In a third type of political use, an openly aesthetic politics constructs a "whole" person in the present moment, whose active individuality rests on a balanced combination of emotion and self-interest. Day describes this lack of division as a radical individualism, and Papataxiarchis describes it as keß fundamentalism. This too can provide an effective and pleasurable form of political action. Dr. Nisseem, too, represents a remarkable achievement. A sad historical comparison brings to mind all those who have gone to "share the lives of the rural poor" in Europe, including the Russian populists and so many others engaged in rural development. These revolutionaries and reformers often failed to achieve the political and social goals for which they set out. Nisseem, in contrast, by abandoning any future-oriented project of reforming and transforming the lives of others, has perhaps genuinely found a way of integrating the life-world of an intellectual with those he helps. As becomes clear in the interview—not by way of any boast or even an explicit claim, but simply by evocation of the conditions of existence today in Egypt—this project has also been politically successful in allowing the doctor to live as an "outsider," a Copt, in a place from which many would like to exclude him. Nisseem's transcendence of other forms of politics into a present of his own making is, in this sense, awe-inspiring. Finally, Harris shows how these stances can be combined among the caboclos. Avoidance is possible in traditional spheres of domination by outsiders—such as god-parenthood. Through a performative sense of self, caboclos also evade the normal consequences of permanent migration to the city and treat it simply as a form of "walkabout." Yet in other spheres, such as the marketing of fish through brokers or the exchange of votes for gifts, a strategy of connection is preferred. Caboclo politics stress both separation and integration. Evasion, truculence, aesthetic and instrumental politics all coexist over time. These marginal groups recognize that permanence is ascribed neither in nature nor in society but constitutes an image inscribed by more powerful people into the building blocks and institutions of their societies. They use the present as a source of empowerment and the means with which dependence can be translated I into autonomy. Thus the denial of time in favor of the very opposite of the permanent, of that most fleeting moment in the marketplace or at the gambling table, remains to some extent self-conscious. By way of conclusion, a more troubling aspect to the politics of the present needs to be addressed. In this Introduction, we have argued that the politics of foraging and of sharing (in a sense that excludes the reciprocal obligations associated with gift exchange) Consider the Lilies o( the Field 21 turn duration, or the short term, into a transcendent value through a sleight of hand. The pleasure of the markets in Hungary, Madagascar, London, and Poland, and of moving through the town in Brazil, the elevated spirit of Greek and Gypsy conviviality, and the happiness of the Huaorani siesta are all existential properties of the present. This achievement depends on displacing the present from its organic link to past and future within durational time. Through disconnecting the short from the long term, an "atemporal" present is constructed. When the people described in this book deny durational time and transform it into a transcendental present in the many ritualistic and performative contexts described, they attempt to put themselves (with mixed success) beyond social intervention. Just as a concept of permanence locates authority beyond human will, so, too, the present is hard to contest (Bloch 1989). It is, quite simply, outside time and all those relationships of duration on which the authority relations inherent to states are built into the daily lives of their citizens. But this liberation is not complete since living in the present makes people, as emblems abstracted from all historical context and relations, peculiarly vulnerable to appropriation by others. Living in the present often denies these people whatWoodburn has called "the badges of success" by which mainstream society judges people. Like hunter-gatherers who "are all too easily identified with the incompetent and impoverished within their own societies," many of the people in this volume can seem feckless or irresponsible in the eyes of their neighbors (1997-.352). But there is another way in which living in the present offers hostages to fortune. The alternative form of social life that is the present can be used by other people, including powerful elites, to build ideologies of society or nation. At best, these uses escape the attention or even the interest of marginal subjects, but having your image, your art, or your knowledge taken and used by others over whom you have little or no control is also a form of domination. During Stewart's stay in Hungary, erotic, soft-focused, "Gypsy romances"—a form of operetta with opera singers dressed up as Gypsies in the main parts—were occasionally transmitted on state television. These were loathed by the Rom. One, written by a man whom the Rom thought of as an assimilated Hungarian Gypsy, caused particular offense with its portrayal of Gypsies as free of all bourgeois cares and caught up in a libertarian sexual morality. (In fact, in sexual matters the Rom are studiedly puritanical.) A sense of domination was tangible to the ethnographer. The next day at work in factories, or shopping in the town, the Rom moved alongside non-Gypsies who now saw them through the images of television fantasy, and there was little or nothing the Rom could do to correct this false impression. The ease with which cultural representations and social relationships were, and still are, reduced to objects—cultures, subcultures, marginals—in anthropology, as in the wider world, accounts for many of the problems in work like Oscar Lewis's. In his recent account of East Harlem street culture, some thirty years after La Vida, Bourgois is aware that survival-of-the-fittest, blame-the-victim theories of individ- US Single-Sex Worlds holds—has to be understood in terms of the positive pleasure they experience, as well as in terms of social and economic exclusion. One of the sharpest critiques made of the "culture of poverty" literature was that it blamed the poor for their situation. In response to this criticism, ethnographers might be tempted to invert conventional rhetoric and attribute "marginaiity" exclusively to global processes. But this perspective would suffer the same problems as the one it attacks, since it makes it difficult to acknowledge that the way of life of Aegean Greeks, day laborers, or prostitutes may exacerbate a structurally imposed marginaiity. In some situations, marginal people may celebrate their "feckless," "irresponsible," or "spendthrift" behavior for the very real freedoms it confers. For much of the time, a present orientation works, in the sense that it is more enjoyable, pleasurable, and sociable (productive of happiness) than life in the long term. Many of the people here see themselves representing a way of life that is far superior to the "mean, tight-arsed bastards" who have forgotten why they are earning money in the first place and who have forgotten all the arts of sociality (see Miller 1994:82-134). _________6_________ Wage Hunting at the Margins of Urban Japan Tom Gill Japanese industrial relations have long been associated with close, long-term relationships between employer and worker, and metaphors describing the stereotypical company in paternalistic and familial terms have been commonplace.1 The model was never true for more than a minority of Japanese workers, and in recent years discourses centered on the "core and periphery" model (Chalmers 1989) have been steadily gaining acceptance. A core of elite workers enjoys the security of long-term contracts, whereas a periphery of increasingly easy-to-dis-miss workers gives the employer the flexibility needed to vary the workforce in tune with changing economic conditions. Day laborers (hiyatoi rödösha) are on the outermost rim of the peripheral workforce. As the name suggests, they are typically hired by the day and can be laid off the next day if not required. Their chief employer is the construction industry, which is especially vulnerable to changes in economic conditions, tendering outcomes, and the weather. It is a highly hierarchical industry, with a few giant general contractors at the top manipulating a long string of subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and sub-sub-subcontractors, to whom work is passed on at increasingly unfavorable terms. The small companies toward the bottom of the chain may have no more than half a dozen regular employees. When big contracts come along, they will supplement that workforce by taking on day laborers. Day laborers operate in various ways, and depending on which definition one employs, they may be numbered at well over a million in the Japanese economy.: However, my own research has focused on those—perhaps 100,000 in total— who maintain the traditional day-laboring lifestyle and who are currently suffering from severe unemployment. This traditional orientation entails finding work at a yoseba, an urban casual labor market. Work is transacted very early in the morning, either informally by street-corner recruiters called tehaishi or formally 119 24 Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart 17. This is quite unlike some other peasants of the region who adopt a bored, phlegmatic air when engaged in market trades. 18. On the de-naturalization of the household and the anthropological study of cultural models of domestic life see also, among others, Yanagisako (1979, 1987) and Netting, Wilk, and Arnould (1984). See also Okely for an early discussion of the conflicting models of English Gypsy women's behavior (1975). 19. Whereas Gypsy men's devotion to their performances (and their subsequent oblivion to household obligations) is celebrated, Neny's neighbors among the Vezo note that she cannot "keep" a husband. Neny, the Gorale, and the London women are not typically associated with large scale, single-sex celebrations and their transcendence of the world in a timeless present seems to be heavily qualified. 20. As Loizos and Papataxiarchis have noted, same-sex relatedness provides a context that favors the construction of alternatives to dominant models (1991:23-5). 21. In one sense, this whole volume could be read as a commentary on Marx's hugely influential description of the so-called "lumpen-proletariat" as "heterogeneous clusters of individuals who stand on the margins of the class system because they are not fully integrated into the division of labour, people who live on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, people without a hearth or home" (Marx and Engels 1958:55). While this may formally describe the position of these people within the social division of labor, we do not agree that the so-called "lumpen proletariat" cannot conceive of or embody the seed of an alternative social order. 22. See, for example, Scott (1985, 1990); Comaroff (1985); Ong (1987); Guha (1983). 23. The contemporary interest in resistance has been historically an aspect of a wider paradigmatic transition from structure to agency. Previous work on accommodation and reproduction tended to assume that actors are passive (for example, see Turner's (1974) treatment of marginals as actors mystified in the protective shield of the sacred). 24. A contrast maybe found in Herzfeld whose description of the "contest between ambiguity and order" that emerges as "everyday usage continually subverts the official code" suggests that ambiguity is inherent to "discourse" and destabilizes it. This fact creates the possibility of what one might call an internal critique (1987:133). 25. As Bourgois notes: the "street culture of resistance is not a coherent, conscious universe of political opposition but, rather, a spontaneous set of rebellious practices that in the long term have emerged as an oppositional style. Ironically, mainstream society through fashion, music, film and television eventually recuperates and commercializes many of these oppositional street styles, recycling them as pop culture" (1995:8). PART ONE Life Without Thought for the Morrow These first three chapters establish the ethnographic focus of this volume by juxtaposing very diverse groups of people: "proletarian" Hungarian Rom, "hunting and gathering" Huaorani in Ecuadorian Amazonia, and Polish Gorale farmers. As might be expected from discussions of the original affluent society (Sahlins 1968), the Huaorani assume an abundant world. What is surprising are the similarities between their outlook and the views of Central Europeans. All three groups assume that they can easily find what they need, indeed, even more than they need. Clearly, this notion of abundance is as much an ideological construct as the more common view that there is not enough to go round: the vision of limited good. And, as with other ideologies, it fails to become all-encompassing; so, although the Huaorani make much of "natural abundance" in everyday life, this view is heavily qualified during preparations for their marriage feasts. At this time, they cultivate sweet manioc, and the work is said to be arduous and painful. It has to be planned several months in advance. Later success in making drinks for the feast depends on a sexual division of labor, the absence of sexual relations between spouses, and fasting—in great contrast to other social relationships of Huaorani "extraction" (Rival 1992:185). However, when they come to feast, the Huaorani symbolically assimilate the manioc to other features of the abundant forest on which the guests can feed, such as birds in a tree. Although prepared by gardening techniques, the manioc is now called a "fruit," as if it grew spontaneously on trees. Rival and the other contributors show that an abundant world is associated both with life in the present and with autonomy. The independence daily displayed by Huaorani in gathering food is elaborated into extremely egalitarian relations of consumption, based on a mutual surrender of identical products within the longhouse. Autonomy seems to be based on individual self-sufficiency. Among the Gorale, in contrast, domestic relationships involve mutual dependencies. Households are prized precisely insofar as they are constituted through 25