Masters Theses

Date of Award

12-1993

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Sociology

Major Professor

Don Clelland

Committee Members

John Gaventa, Sherry Cable

Abstract

Making ends meet for workers in the periphery of the global economy has always required a delicate balancing act between needs and means for survival. Little attention has been paid to household livelihood strategies which are both adaptations to, and resistant to the culture of capital. This ethnography investigates cultural and economic livelihood strategies used by household's in a changing world-economy. Drawing on data from a case study of a semiproletariat household in a rural east Tennessee community, this report examines as its central question: In the face of severe economic dislocation, how do rural, working-class, households, located in a peripheral region within the core, make ends meet? Substantive questions used to develop this investigation are: (1) How are multiple livelihood strategies organized; (2) How do multiple livelihood strategies operate?; and (3) How are these strategies both persistent and changing over time? The research setting is Rosey Hollow, a small community surrounded by the Clear Fork Valley in east Tennessee. Snow ball and purposive sampling were used to develop a respondent list. The research methods guiding the work include participant observation, conversational interviewing, depth interviews, and archival research. Participatory research techniques were used throughout in a conscious effort to break down the role of the researcher and researched. The data base includes exploratory interviews with twenty households, eight depth interviews conducted with those households who best modeled the use of multiple livelihood strategies, and a case study of a single household. Census figures are used to describe the state of the economy and basic living conditions in the general area. Archival data sources and interviews are used to provide a qualitative analysis of the variety of ways and means of making ends meet, past and present. The data is analyzed by searching out recurring themes, events, or strategies used to make ends meet in a rural economy. The major findings of this study are: people in the study operate on a seasonal cycle with nature; they are very dependent upon the land for sustenance; women and men's work, although different, involves equal inputs in the household livelihood strategy; persons are dependent upon some form of wage labor from both internal and external sources; exchange and reciprocity are major facets of any livelihood strategy; and the multiple livelihood strategies used by persons in this report show themselves as a form of cultural resistance to a dependency on capitalism. The results ascertained from this body of work have significant implications for world-system theory. The study demonstrates the complex connections of far cells of the world-system to the fluctuations of the world economy. The United States, a member of the core, has it's own periphery within it's boundaries. The workers in this peripheral region consist primarily of a subaltern class made up of semiproletariat households. One such semiproletariat household's way of life is described here. Such lives are not accidents, but historical embodiments of the way the system works here and now.

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