Anthropological Quarterly

ABSTRACT:

How do self-employed people count the time that they spend working? I consider this question, in the context of contemporary Northeastern Brazil, by returning to the classic anthropological problem of peasant time accounting. In the drylands of Bahia, smallholding farmers today tend to support themselves through cyclical labor migration between countryside and city. I focus on two sites of self-employment along this circuit: marketplace hawking in the city and peasant farming in the countryside. Contrary to earlier literature, I find that small farmers do indeed measure their work time in money terms. They do this even when they are working for themselves—even when no money actually changes hands. It is as if they count out a phantom wage. Strikingly, Bahians are much less likely to account their time as money when they work in the urban marketplace. Nonetheless, an important parallel connects the small farmer and the marketplace vendor. Although they use divergent techniques to measure their work time, both the vendors and the farmers draw a line to separate time that is counted from time that remains uncounted. To maintain this distinction—between the counted and the uncounted—is a core dilemma of the self-employee. I argue that the distinction operates so as to render time homogeneous—in other words, substantial, self-identical, and sequential. At the point where farmers and vendors watch their time turn homogenous, it becomes possible to understand self-employment as a class relationship. Class comes into focus as a kind of relation to time.