Money Makes Us Relatives: Women's Labor in Urban Turkey

by Jenny B. White

Within the rural immigrant community of Istanbul, Turkey, poor women may spend up to fifty hours a week producing goods for export, yet deny that they actually "work." This ethnographic study seeks to explain why women and men alike devalue women's work and to show how the social and gender ideologies that prompt this denial create a pool of cheap labor for the world market. Jenny White bases her study on two years of field research into the internal organization of women's piece-work and family-workshop production. She demonstrates that among these small-scale producers, labor for money becomes a kind of kinship relation, in which reciprocal obligation and debt-exchange occur. Women's work for pay becomes an extension of women's work for the family, in both of which labor is endlessly demanded and yet poorly compensated. Case studies of individual workers and workshop managers add a fascinating human dimension to the book. White reveals how women's participation in production networks offers the benefits of a social identity and long-term security, thus making ambiguous the standard formulations about exploited workers. These findings urge a reformulation of traditional theories of petty commodity production and gift exchange to account for the roles played by kinship and gender. This study will be of interest to a wide interdisciplinary audience in economic anthropology, women's studies, development and labor migration, and Turkish and Middle Eastern studies.

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[bowiesbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a book review on this for my ‘Kinship: the structure and the process’ course for my anthropology degree!