Making Difference: Concluding Comments on Work and Livelihoods

Abstract

Anthropologists often tend to stress the particularities of the cases they study through intense ethnographic encounter. This provides an extremely nuanced approach to process and practice that has become the trade mark of our discipline. It leads us to use complexity as an argument to eschew describing simple laws of movement for social processes. I find this a growing trend that places us in a politically irrelevant position. Often, the ethnographic detail appears as a free floating crystallization of contingent assemblages of items, agents, and connections devoid of historical logic. The problem, then, is why and how to explain human projects that seek to change the connections that exist into something different. Designing an image of the future and of the logical process leading to it is, fundamentally, creating the conditions of possibility for its transformation (Bourdieu 2003). The other, often forgotten, leg of anthropological enquiry is comparison which enables similarities to emerge while it renders differences meaningful in the larger picture. Through the pieces in this volume we begin to perceive a thread of commonalities that, paradoxically, serve to underscore the centrality of the differences that are played out as well as produced by the various actors involved in industrial production.