Knowledge, Skill, and the Inculcation of the Anthropologist: Reflections on Learning to Sew in the Field

Abstract

This article explores employment as a mode of participant observation, by analyzing the complex relationship between skill acquisition, embodiment, and anthropological analysis. It highlights the importance of thinking critically about the body, including the ethnographer's own body in the field. I describe working in a garment factory and learning to sew as part of my doctoral research on the garment industry in Trinidad, West Indies. I argue that disciplining the body into a particular craft is also a process of incorporating (or “taking into the body”) the ideologies of work that structure skill's meaning and practice. By describing my own difficulties “disembodying” what I learned in the field (in order to intellectualize the experience) I show how learning practical skills and enacting them everyday can be both a vigorous and perilous form of ethnographic research.

Introduction

Why “work” in the field? The ethnographic value of learning skills and participating in informants' everyday lives is well established in the anthropological literature (Okely 2007). Indeed, as early as 1937, E.E. Evans-Pritchard described participant observation as day-to-day involvement in ordinary activities, necessitating a physical engagement with material culture:

By [participant observation] [anthropologists] mean that in so far as it is both possible and convenient they live the life of the people among whom they are doing their research. This is a somewhat complicated matter and I shall only touch on the material side of it. It found it useful if I wanted to understand how and why Africans are doing certain things to do them myself: I had a hut and byre like theirs; I went hunting with them with spear and bow and arrow; I learnt to make pots; I consulted oracles; and so forth. But clearly one has to recognize that there is a certain pretence in such attempts at participation. […] One enters another culture and withdraws from it at the same time. One cannot really become a Zande or a Nuer or a Bedouin Arab […], one always remains oneself, inwardly a member of one's own society and a sojourner in a strange land. Perhaps it would be better to say that one lives in two different worlds of thought at the same time, in categories and concepts and values which often cannot easily be reconciled. One becomes, at least temporarily, a sort of double marginal man, alienated from both worlds.

(Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976:243)

In this passage, Evans-Pritchard affirms the importance of participant observation in anthropological fieldwork while raising questions about the relationship between practical engagement and scholarly insight. Everyday participation in informants' material worlds is depicted as a complicated and potentially painful process, rendering the ethnographer both marginal and alienated. Evans-Pritchard acknowledges that the “pretence” of participation may serve to emphasize – rather than bridge – the ontological distance between ethnographer and informant, who remain locked in the “categories and concepts and values” of their native societies (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976:243).

In this article, I probe the issues raised by Evans-Pritchard and consider their implications for the anthropology of work. Drawing on the experience of learning to sew during ethnographic research in Trinidad, West Indies, I argue that in learning skills alongside our informants, and practicing these skills in their midst, the principal danger is of internalizing local points of view too much, rather than too little. Disciplining the body into a particular craft is shown to be a process of incorporating (or “taking into the body”) the ideologies of work that structure skill's meaning and practice. When I learned how to sew in Trinidad, I was not only taught an aesthetic orientation toward clothing and techniques of the body to draft, cut, and stitch garments; I was also schooled in a particular perception of sewing as an income-generating activity. These local discourses about sewing became incredibly convincing to me. When I returned home from the field, I struggled to divest myself of such views in order to look at the relationship between skill acquisition and work practices more critically. This, of course, is a common problem whenever we deeply engage in our informants' lives and endeavor to see things from their perspectives. Yet I argue that ontological complicity can be particularly pernicious when we learn and perform skills in situ as part of fieldwork, because the process of embodiment allows skills and the ideologies contained within them to recede into “subsidiary awareness” (O'Connor 2005:188).

Bourdieu's seminal arguments about disposition and the habitus expose learning and mastering skilled tasks as the subtle inculcation of social values and norms in addition to the physical adoption of techniques of the body (Bourdieu 1977). Yet, in exploring the role of the body in social reproduction, his theories of habitus have been applied more vigorously to the study of craft, apprenticeship, and education than to industrial labor (cf. Dilley 1999; Herzfeld 2004; Simpson 2006). I suggest that for anthropologists researching labor and industrial production, scholarship on craft, apprenticeship, and the “inculcated” body provides a valuable approach for theorizing not only what work means to people, but also what it does to them. Anthropologists using employment as form of participant observation must probe the relationship between physical experience and the production of ethnographic knowledge. How can embodied subjectivity be used as an instrument of inquiry? And how might ethnographers disembody what is learned in the field, to offer corporeal experience as an object of analysis?

Context and Fieldsite

My doctoral research examined the lives and livelihoods of women employed in the garment industry in Trinidad, West Indies, during a time of immense upheaval: the opening of local trade barriers to ready-made garments from abroad. Although industrial garment production thrived in Trinidad under protectionist measures from the 1950s until the 1980s, a deep recession in the 1980s followed by three structural adjustment programs with the IMF and World Bank compelled the government of Trinidad and Tobago¹ to embrace a range of neoliberal trade policies, including the “liberalization” of the garment trade (Greaves 1974:8–12; Yelvington 1995:58–60). When tariffs and import-licensing restrictions on foreign clothing were removed in the early 1990s, Trinidad's garment industry began a steady decline; local firms generally found themselves unable to compete with the quality and price of clothing newly arriving from North America, Europe, and Asia (Tourism and Industrial Development Company 2003).

Although trade liberalization and the globalization of the garment industry have been experienced as an economic “boom” in China, India, and Sri Lanka (De Neve 2005; Hale and Wills 2005; Lynch 2007), these same processes have been experienced in places like Trinidad as desolation, disappointment, and industrial decline. The logic of neoliberal capitalism dictates that parts of the globe where wages are relatively high and workers' rights are comparatively secure must now be excluded from the large-scale production of clothing, even for domestic consumption. The goal of my research was to investigate the effects of this new trade regime on the organization of labor, the politics of production, and the material conditions of work in Trinidad's garment sector. Inspired by critical medical anthropology, I wanted to understand to what extent these macroeconomic processes might become inscribed on the bodies of workers, in forms ranging from occupational injury to changing conceptions of skill and the body under “postliberalization.” Essential to this project was placing myself and my own labor at the center of production by working on the shop floor of a local garment factory.

During 15 months of fieldwork in Trinidad (August 2003 to November 2004), I worked in two garment factories, rotating among the three primary domains of garment work: bundling (preparation), assembling (stitching), and finishing (inspection and packaging). This article focuses on the first factory that employed me: Signature Fashions, a Trinidadian company producing high-end apparel for the firm's two-dozen stores in the eastern Caribbean.² In exchange for my labor, the factory owners gave me access to their factory in the form of unpaid employment for 9 months. From October 2003 to June 2004, I came to work each morning along with approximately 40 other factory employees, and left with them at the end of the workday. For the most part I did overtime and weekend work whenever it was required of the workforce as a whole.

As a Trinidadian company, Signature Fashions has weathered the challenges of trade liberalization by investing in design and marketing for its small (“exclusive”) range of contemporary, high-fashion clothing. With control over its own brand-name shops in Trinidad, Tobago, and throughout the Caribbean region, Signature Fashions ties its small-scale manufacturing operations to rapidly changing consumer tastes in the high-end regional market. Signature Fashions has also prospered by intensifying production and casualizing its labor force. Although permanent workers are guaranteed 5 days of work per week, evening overtime and weekend work might be announced with little warning. Some Signature Fashions workers belong to trade unions in secret, but the factory is not unionized. Late payment for a week's work was commonplace, and payment for sick leave, holiday leave, and overtime were unevenly implemented.

With an average age of 39 years old, most of the workers at Signature Fashions are Afro-Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian women aged 35–55.³ Most Signature workers began waged employment during their teenage years; stitchers usually hold several factory jobs before working at the Signature factory in careers punctuated by retrenchment, child birth, and periods of sewing at home for private clients. This demographic profile marks a contrast between Trinidadian garment workers and the young women in many other parts of the world who, over the past 4 decades, have been recruited into export-oriented garment work along the “global assembly line” (Fuentes and Ehrenreich 1983; Hale and Wills 2005). Trinidadian garment workers are by no means “new” entrants into the paid labor force; they are generally long-standing members of the urban proletariat with long histories of work in both formal and informal sectors of the economy. At the time of fieldwork, Signature Fashions workers were paid the national minimum wage of TT$8 (US$1.30) per hour. Because so many of them could sew whole garments from scratch, many Signature Fashions workers made additional income sewing for friends and neighbors at home – earning up to TT$1,000 (US$166) at Christmastime, when Trinidadians of all faiths and income levels commission new drapes and cushion covers to decorate their homes (Miller 1994).

The Seamstress' Habitus I: Worker Strategies of Skill Acquisition

Sewing has two main components: drafting patterns and cutting them into cloth (both glossed as “cutting”) and assembling the pieces together (“stitching”). Most Trinidadian garment workers are first taught to sew by female kin or through being send “by a lady who sews” during their early teenage years. For many working- and middle-class girls, at least during the 1960s and 1970s, acquiring the ability to sew was seen as a fundamental task for achieving a gendered “respectability.” Basic skills in sewing afford a sense of self-sufficiency, and are regarded simply as being able “to do something for yourself,” which can help an individual “make do” in difficult economic times (Senior 1991:129–133). Sending a daughter to learn from a local seamstress is a way to equip her with specialized training in preparation for work. As Dolores, a stitcher at Signature Fashions, said of her own daughter: “School wasn't there for her. Like, to pick up. And she wasn't wanting to do that. So we sent her to learn how to sew.”⁴

When a child is sent to a local seamstress to learn “sewing,” what is being sought are skills in both cutting and stitching. Young women who achieve proficiency in drafting and cutting patterns will be able to set up their own shops (either in their own homes, or in a rented commercial space), designing and sewing clothing for individual clients (cf. Reddock 1990; Browne 2004:204–207). Young women who only learn to stitch neatly on a sewing machine will be able to find work in a garment factory. Yet the division between the “independent seamstress” and the “factory worker” is remarkably porous. Seamstresses who cut and stitch for private clients may seek employment in the factories from time to time, particularly when work is slow, or simply for the experience of “coming out” to work. Conversely, women who make their living in the factories may also do a little sewing at home, to make ends meet or for the enjoyment of sewing for themselves and others (Yelvington 1995:2).

In addition to instruction by a neighbor or female kin, an extremely important way of gaining sewing skills is what Vanessa Maher, writing about Italian seamstresses, has called “stealing with the eye” (Maher 1987:135).⁵ Stealing with the eye, which in Trinidad is called “thiefing a chance,” entails sneakily observing skilled seamstresses and quietly attempting the techniques oneself. In the context of the Signature Fashions factory, “thiefing a chance” also refers to workers' secretly making additional copies of the company's brand-name apparel on the assembly line, which they surreptitiously distribute among themselves and smuggle home. By covertly trying out a sewing machine that she has been neither trained nor sanctioned to use, a worker can not only sneak a precious stitch on a garment she intends to “thief,” but she can also learn new technical skills (Prentice 2008).⁶

Signature Fashions workers often used formal employment in the factory to aid in their home business pursuits. Creative inspiration and knowledge of fashionable designs hold economic importance for the independent seamstress; the Signature Fashions factory was seen as a particularly good place to work because it provided stitchers with expertise and access to “designer” garments. Patterns were frequently pilfered from the shop floor, to be reworked into new styles at home, while garments for private clients were quietly stitched on the factory machines for a professional-looking finish. Workers described all of these acts as “thiefing me little chance,” generating celebratory discourses of their own boldness and cunning.⁷ The factory was conceptualized as a source of sewing techniques and design ideas, both of which can be profitably used outside of the factory context by the enterprising seamstress.

The Seamstress' Habitus II: The Anthropologist's Experience

When I began doing participant observation in the Signature Fashions factory, I was unable to stitch accurately or speedily on a standard sewing machine. Hence, I was assigned an “easy” machine to operate: the button tacker. Operating this machine required placing a button in the cup of the machine, holding a shirt beneath the needle, and depressing a foot pedal. Working in the factory not only helped me build rapport and camaraderie with other workers, it also gave me a visceral empathy for the trials of daily work. I found my body initially resistant to, and later in unexpected harmony with the rhythms of the workday. As the weeks wore on, I found myself able to sit at the machine for hours without fidgeting or growing impatient. I also developed the ability to carry on day-long conversations with workers sitting near to me, in the halting, staccato rhythms required to avoid a supervisor's scolding.

Over the course of my “employment,” I grew particularly intrigued by the shop-floor conversations from which I was excluded: those that centered on the technical and aesthetic dilemmas of sewing garments for clients at home. Amid the buzzing and whirring of sewing machines, Signature Fashions workers turned to one another with questions on how best to approach certain dressmaking dilemmas, or to boastfully describe the “sweet” and stylish clothing they were making for clients at home. As these discussions ensued, workers might also take small opportunities to “thief a chance” when their employer's back was turned, stitching up illicit clothing on the factory machines, or practicing new skills without permission.

Although Signature Fashions was considered a “good” place to work for a number of reasons (e.g., it was air-conditioned, the standard pay was minimum wage, and it provided access to the “latest fashions”), the company was not the center of its employees' professional identities. This point was impressed upon me by Glenda one morning.⁸ Sitting on wooden crates outside of the factory, waiting for the gates to open, we began chatting about my research. When I told her that I wanted to understand the experiences of “garment workers” like her, she stopped me and said, “I wouldn't say garment worker, you know. I am into the sewing, but I would not say ‘I am a garment worker.’ Me, I could do my little things, I could help myself.”

Indeed, “garment worker” is a term not readily used in Trinidad. The skilled workers who have remained in the industry since trade liberalization are likely to describe themselves instead as being “into the sewing.” This phrase captures not only the breadth and variety of garment-based livelihoods (in both formal and informal sectors of the economy), but also the pleasures of working with clothing as a knowledgeable agent. By claiming that “I could help myself,” Glenda emphasized that her sewing skills afford her a sense of self-sufficiency, and that they “help” her cobble together a livelihood.

Shortly after that conversation with Glenda, I decided that I should learn to sew as part of my research. Although participant observation in the garment factory was providing rich and detailed insights into the everyday politics of labor on the shop floor, I decided that a more nuanced understanding of garment workers' lives could be attained only by my learning how to cut and stitch properly. I would like to claim the decision as a sound methodological strategy, but at the time I was largely motivated by the desire to participate in what had become an alluring domain of activity. I desired for myself the pride and pleasure of selecting fabrics, designing a garment, cutting the cloth, and displaying or wearing clothing entirely authored by me. I also wanted to participate in the workers' shop-floor conversations about sewing not as a mere interloper, but as knowledgeable participant. Although I had made friends in the factory, and spent time with them in their homes and mine, I felt the growing need to gain a stake in the world of sewing outside the garment factory.

I bought a domestic sewing machine, and asked a neighbor to teach me to sew in the evenings after work. Donny was a professional tailor who sewed for clients in the daytime in a disused convenience store not far from my home in Port of Spain. Two or three times a week I would go to Donny's shop, and work on my latest garment under his supervision. As I got to know Donny better, as well as the young men and women who “limed” at the front of his shop, my visits became increasingly frequent.⁹ Two other local women – one in her 20s, and another in her 40s – were also learning to sew from Donny, and with time became trusted friends.

Donny often said, “to really be able to cut… means turning a flat piece of fabric to clothe a complex figure like the human body.” Drafting a pattern requires the use of an “inch tape” to “size” a person, and translating those measurements onto cloth. Once some basic principles of cutting have been learned, a seamstress can endlessly adapt even a relatively simple construction – like a skirt – into a range of stylistic effects: pleating, flaring, or adding a “fish tail,” and so on. My experience learning to sew with Donny, and interviews with teachers and learners in Trinidad, reveals an emphasis on nonlinguistic, practice-oriented approaches to sewing, with the teacher demonstrating tasks that the learner is required to perform as the teacher watches. Although the learner must rehearse her teacher's “way” of cutting, teachers recognize that each learner will come to “have her own style” of cutting, and that she must “take her time” to discover and develop her “own way.” Thus if learning a craft also means learning “culture,” as Marcel Mauss has argued (Mauss 1973), when acquiring the ability to sew Trinidadians also learn to see “skill” not merely as technical, mechanistic ability, but rather as a deeply personal expression of the embodied self, whereby personal flair reveals both innate ability and a cultivated “style” (cf. Carnegie 1987).

In contrast to cutting, which must be learned from a skilled instructor, learning how to stitch on a machine requires minimal instruction and a great deal of practice. Now that pedal-machines have been almost entirely replaced by electric models – in both factories and homes – stitching is seen as highly skilled only when the learner has attained a measure of fluency and speed with different operations on the machine. Stitchers say that practice will “set your hand” to sewing tasks, refining and sharpening the skill of stitching until it is speedy and efficient, and “come[s] like second nature.” As with cutting, stitching also presents the opportunity to develop personal flair and style in its execution.

In all, I spent 10 months learning to sew under Donny's tutelage. I learned how to draft and cut my own patterns, and to stitch together the pieces as skirts, shirts, trousers, and dresses. My technical abilities were never excellent, which Donny attributed to the fact that I spent many evenings typing (fieldnotes) when I should have been practicing my sewing. By learning how to cut and stitch, I learned how to “read” the different textures and colors of cloth available in the fabric stores, in order to select appropriate cloth for particular sewing projects. As the weeks of sewing instruction went by, I gained embodied competence in seeing and selecting fabrics, measuring and drafting patterns, and cutting and stitching clothing. Browsing the clothing stores in a shopping mall (either with informants or on my own) became occasions to peek inside a blouse or a skirt on display, to memorize its construction and attempt remaking it at home.

Wearing my homemade clothing to the factory always brought forth joking approbation from Signature Fashions workers; while they approved of my “trying” to sew, they playfully criticized my stylistic choices and technical capabilities. However, if I failed to wear my own creations, workers teasingly asked me whether I was “shame” (ashamed) of what I had made. The longer I spent learning to sew, jokes about my miserable “style” were overtaken by the workers' encouragement and support. The first time I wore a homemade skirt to the factory, Josephine, a 36-year-old coworker, playfully tugged at my hip and told me the reason why my skirt was “rampling up so” was that I had cut the fabric too small. When I appeared at work 2 weeks later in a skirt that fit perfectly, Josephine tugged at my hip and beamed, “That's right! You learning and you could real sew now.”

While my informants continually critiqued both the style of the clothing I made, and my technical capacities on the sewing machine, I was certainly acknowledged to be someone “into the sewing,” and thereby enjoyed the pleasures of membership in that informal guild.¹⁰ My questions about sewing would garner lively discussions in the lunch room, because they were seen as partly originating from my own interest in perfecting my craft. When informants visited my home, we eagerly pored over my many sewing projects in various stages of completion. Going to parties with Signature Fashions workers, my presence would be explained to strangers as “Rebecca, she come from America, she's into the sewing,” as if my skill and pleasure in sewing clothing was the most accessible and logical reason for my being in Trinidad. After returning to graduate school in England, and even 4 years later, I am asked to send back photographs of my latest sewing efforts.

Agency, Intentionality, and Effects

I left Trinidad with a firm sense of garment workers as active agents – self-possessed women who could successfully “cut and contrive” a living through creative participation in formal and informal sectors of the economy. Eager to seize whatever opportunities came their way, Trinidadian garment workers fashioned economic lives by thiefing a chance (in a whole range of ways), cobbling together livelihood strategies that embraced occupational multiplicity and own-account work on the margins of the formal garment industry.

In the first presentations of my research to scholarly audiences outside Trinidad, my conceptualization of garment workers as “agents” was salient (Prentice 2005, 2006). I described garment workers' triumphant stories of using the factory as a resource containing materials, machines, technical how-how, and fashion ideas – all of which the daring person uses for her own purposes. Signature Fashions workers defied common depictions of the industrial factory as a site of “deskilling” (Braverman 1974). Within the unequal conditions of the postliberalization garment sector, workers depicted their various acts of “thiefing a chance” as a bold decision to make the most of the structural conditions in which they found themselves. Postliberalization garment workers in Trinidad dared to seize moments of opportunity and turn them into projects of their own making. I did not recognize it at the time, but my analysis of Trinidadian garment workers as active agents, cutting and contriving a living on the margins of the formal economy, largely reproduced garment workers' own narratives of thiefing a chance. As I began to write my doctoral dissertation, this smooth analysis kept snagging on one thorny question: Why did the garment factory owners allow widespread illicit practices like thiefing a chance to flourish?

The search for an answer to this question led me, ultimately, to a more critical (and I believe more satisfactory) analysis of the experiences and circumstances of Trinidadian garment workers. Rereading Michael Burawoy's incisive ethnography of an American piecework machine shop – informed as it was with a Gramscian sense of hegemony and class politics – provided me with a starting place, by pushing me to reconsider the effects of everyday practices like thiefing a chance (Burawoy 1979). Burawoy describes workers attempting to gain control over their work-tasks through a range of shop-floor games collectively dubbed “making out.” Making out relies on complex interactions among workers – including cooperation and the enforcement of shared norms – which often incorporate the tacit support of shop-floor supervisors. For Burawoy, what is most significant about these games is that workers playing them not only participate in their employer's appropriation of the surplus value of their labor; they also participate in the obscuring of this surplus value extraction. By “making out” on the shop floor, workers gain an illusory sense of mastery and autonomy over their work, while at the same time consenting to their own exploitation. It is this element of consent (which obviates coercion) that gives such casual “games” a pernicious effect.

After months of returning to my fieldnotes, reading the scholarly literature, and crafting an analysis that drew from both sources, I concluded that although Trinidadian garment workers depict “thiefing” as daringly taking advantage of the structural conditions in which they find themselves, it is important not to confuse intentions and effects. In pursuing their own projects of production and self-making, Signature Fashions workers consistently conformed to managerial demands that they adapt to the “flexible” conditions of the postliberalization economy (Harvey 1989; Martin 1994). Thiefing a chance is a structuring feature of shop-floor life at Signature Fashions. It drew on, and contributed to, the “flexible” orientation of the factory by encouraging workers to skill up for new tasks, and reinforcing networks of mutual aid that were essential to the formal production process (Prentice 2008). As flexible workers in an instable and hostile economic environment, Signature Fashions employees come to embody new subjectivities associated with the neoliberal insistence on self-reliance, resourcefulness, and opportunism (Freeman 2005; Ferguson 2006), which are also deeply inflected by West Indian cultural mores that celebrate cunning, creativity, and nerve (Browne 2004). Signature Fashions had, in part, survived the vagaries of postliberalization because of the types of “agents” its employees had become.¹¹

I came to see that the notion of “agency” must always be assessed in relation to intentionality and effects. In my doctoral thesis, I argued that the decline of trade unions and the withdrawal of the state from worker's welfare (both facets of neoliberalism as much as the opening of trade barriers) forced garment workers to become exemplary neoliberal subjects. Not only do they have no one to rely on but their individual selves in everything ranging from pay disputes to occupational injury, garment workers have also mobilized local values of self-reliance, individualism, autonomy, and the valorization of cheeky “cunning” to get by in difficult economic times. In Trinidad, this ethos of individualism inflects within a historically racialized environment, in which managerial strategies of control rely upon, and thereby reinstantiate, ethnic difference (Yelvington 1995); forms of neoliberalism are thus shown to be critically local– beholden to particular legacies of economic history, politics, and social organization in any one place.

From a Gramscian point of view, Trinidadian discourses of skill in the garment factory – which emphasize skill as the property, responsibility, and even pleasure of the individual working agent – actually work in the service of capital, to workers' disadvantage. Because skills in sewing constitute the basic condition of participation in the labor force, workers see capturing those skills as an important, individual ambition. Although workers thief a chance behind the boss's back to prepare themselves for the work of the factory, such acts actually serve management's goals, by externalizing the costs of retraining workers, and avoiding more collective types of action (Prentice 2008). Recognizing the complexities of intentions and effects in the construction of capitalist labor relations prompts us to examine as well the role of desire (here, the desire for consumption) in shaping worker's response to unequal terms of employment.

I believe that these things took me a long time to understand, because I was enthralled by my informants' vision of skill as independence, autonomy, and pleasure. Should I have been surprised that their vision became my own as I learned, practiced, and delighted in the skills of sewing? Anthropologists of craft and apprenticeship have long argued that apprenticeships always “serve to pass on technical knowledge on the one hand and cultural values on the other” (Argenti 2002:497). The skilling of the body – the incorporation of skills – is never simply a mechanical process of demonstration and mimicry. Complex social instructions are conveyed in the training process, and subconsciously incorporated through practice and repetition (Dilley 1999; Marchand 2003). Michael Herzfeld, in a nuanced study of Cretan apprenticeships, shows how the “skilled” body is an “inculcated” one (to borrow Bourdieu's terminology). The apprentice learns ways of socially being, which are enacted through everyday bodily postures. These “dispositions” naturalize social hierarchy just as they endow the apprentice with a trade and a new social persona.

If we take from Bourdieu that structures (power relations, social hierarchies, gender ideologies, and so on) are actualized within the dispositions of the individual, we might ask what kinds of structures are actualized within the bodies of Trinidadian garments workers in the postliberalization period. Bourdieu challenges us to radically unpack the very dimensions of identity and social relations that most appear natural and self-evident. When I learned how to sew, I was not only taught an aesthetic orientation toward dress, but also a way of seeing sewing as a particular form of work: individually motivated as self-employment, even in a factory setting. I realized only later that the individualization of garment workers was a complex but localized feature of neoliberal development in Trinidad.

Conclusion

As Aaron Turner has argued, an “embodiment” approach in anthropology entails a shift “from the study of an enduring society or culture in itself to the ways culture is lived, and in the living of it, constituted” (Turner 2000:52). Although the anthropological turn toward “practice” and “the everyday” raises methodological questions about embodiment in ethnographic research, their specific implications for the anthropology of industrial work remain largely unexplored. If such social entities as hierarchy, habituation, gender, and so on become reproduced through incorporation in both the individual and collective habitus (as authors like Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Herzfeld suggest), then it stands to reason that intense, embodied participation in the ethnographic context will have a powerful impact on the anthropologist's critical insight. Because the body is such an important instrument of social reproduction and inculcation, we should not be surprised when the anthropologist, as an “embodied, sensing, acting, socially situated participant” (Turner 2000:53) becomes subject to its power. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard's early discussions of fieldwork anticipate precisely this point. Writing about how anthropologists may be “transformed by the people they are making a study of,” he concludes, “If an anthropologist is a sensitive person it could hardly be otherwise” (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976:245).

Roy Dilley reminds us that “Our experiences are not their experiences, just as our meanings are not their meanings, our explanations not their explanations and so on” (Dilley 1999:52). Nonetheless, Dilley demonstrates in his article on Senegalese weavers that mimesis is an important component of embodied participant observation. By learning how to weave, Dilley himself was able to feel the continuities between weaving as a physical act and other ways of being-in-the-world, including grace, restraint, and control. Learning to sew provided me with an embodied way of perceiving the world that I could not have attained through other means. Learning how to manipulate cloth, scissors, thread, and sewing machine with a seamstress' habitus reconfigured my relationship to these objects, and afforded me a sense of power in the skills I had attained. Having these skills and routinely practicing them in the real-world context of fieldwork provided me with access to the social worlds of my informants, and partial membership in their constituency of everyday concerns. Yet, just as in-depth, “embodied” participant observation was vital to my research, the difficult process of distancing and disembodying what I learned as a novice seamstress proved equally important to critical analysis.

Acknowledgments

The fieldwork component of this research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Thanks to Geert De Neve and James Fairhead for early discussions on this paper, and to Gavin Whitelaw, Dinah Rajak, and Jamie Cross for later ones. I am also deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this manuscript. Many thanks to the Society for the Anthropology of Work for sponsoring our panel, “Embodying Labor: Work as Fieldwork” at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in 2007. Thanks also to Genner de Jesus Llanes-Ortiz and Kate Nielsen for inviting me to present a version of this paper at their workshop, “New Directions in the Anthropology of Education,” at the University of Sussex in 2008.

Notes

1. 1.Trinidad is part of the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Because Trinidad is the more industrialized of the two islands, and has a different economic history to Tobago, I focus only on Trinidad in this article.

2. 2.“Signature Fashions” and all informant names are pseudonyms.

3. 3.As Kevin Yelvington found in a Trinidadian factory in the late 1980s, the ethnic division of labor is a central component of managerial strategies of control (Yelvington 1995). This is no less the case at Signature Fashions, where the allocation of factory positions is structured by racialized, managerial expectations regarding which kinds of workers “suit” which kinds of work. However, Signature Fashions workers commonly participate in self-motivated skill acquisition and networks of mutual aid that cut across all “ethnic” groups and occupational areas in the factory, even as they may harbor (and frequently vocalize) feelings of distrust or resentment toward workers whom they believe to be “advantaged” over them.

4. 4.The practice of persuading different children to pursue specific occupations has long been part of working-class family strategies in Trinidad and the Caribbean (cf. Carnegie 1987:33–38).

5. 5.Michael Herzfeld describes a similar process in Cretan apprenticeships, noting the long-standing association between “manual artistry” and “cunning and subterfuge” in European thought (Herzfeld 2004:1).

6. 6.These types of illicit practices became known to me only after I had established sufficient rapport and trustworthiness to be let in on such “private” knowledge – and even then, my initiation into these discussions was a matter of serendipity and accident. For a fuller discussion of the moralities of “thiefing” and the ethics of researching the topic, see Prentice (2008).

7. 7.Katherine Browne describes very similar discourses of informal (“off the books”) employment in Martinique (Browne 2004).

8. 8.Glenda was a 52-year-old seamstress at Signature Fashions with more than 30 years' experience in factory work and sewing at home for private clients.

9. 9.“Liming” connotes relaxed socializing, similar to the North American expression “hanging out.”

10. 10.Of course, as Aaron Turner notes, we cannot prima facie assume “communities” of actors to be already constituted prior to fieldwork, but instead must realize the shifting, changing ways in which (temporary, provisional) communities are made in the moment (Turner 2000:59).

11. 11.Management, which at its upper levels turned a “blind eye” to thiefing a chance, and at its lower levels participated in it, was only ever partially knowing about the effects of thiefing on production. As an employer, Signature Fashions refuses to train workers who cannot do work as assigned. Nonetheless, its constantly changing patterns, small clothing runs, and rapid manufacturing pace require not only a well-trained but adaptable workforce. These manufacturing requirements are curiously at odds with Signature Fashions' rigid, Fordist assembly line, and punitive forms of discipline. In such an environment, it should not be surprising that thiefing a chance is tacitly encouraged but officially forbidden. All participants scrupulously hide “thiefing” practices from view, because illicit acts countermand authority – the flouting of which creates a crisis (Prentice 2008).