Invisible Labor. The Sociomaterial Implications of More-Than-Human Work

Resumen

Across Western intellectual traditions, labour has been treated as an exclusively human activity, grounding moral worth, property, subjectivity, and emancipation. Even when anthropology has demonstrated the historical and cultural contingency of such an idea, it has often left intact the human exceptionalism on which the concept rests. This special issue interrogates that assumption by engaging critically with the notion of nonhuman and more-than-human labour from an anthropological and interdisciplinary perspective. It investigates whether, and under what conditions, it is meaningful to speak of nonhuman labour, and when forms of doing and relating become configured as “work” within socio-ecological assemblages. Bringing together insights from anthropology, STS, multispecies ethnography, and labour theory, the papers collected in this issue explore how nonhuman beings – animals, plants, microbes, and other living and non-living entities – participate in processes of production, reproduction, and value creation. At the same time, the issue critically engages with the limits and risks of extending the category of labour beyond the human, questioning whether the category itself is an adequate analytical tool once the human/nonhuman divide is dismantled. The introduction, therefore, offers an overview of the current debate, the conceptual genealogies and the existing extensions beyond the human, addressing the resistances and frictions generated by posthuman approaches. The last part introduces the contributions of the special issue, which delineate empirical and theoretical accounts of multispecies work, labour, temporalities and responsibilities in a more-than-human world.