On the cultural meaning of work in postindustrial societies

The paper d i ;;cusses the queRtion ofthe cultu ral mea n i n g ofwork in posti nd ust r i a l societies and pleads for a wider anthropological perspective o n t h i s topic. Based on a critique of postmodern discou r::;e;; of o u r society it wi I I be ;;bowed that work i n uu r individualistic society sti l l has a central and positive meaning a lthough it u n d e r­ lies the typical ambivalence ofmodernity between l i berty and discip l ine . Prej u d i c­ es aga i nst the u nemployed, j ust as the memories and experiences of workers i n a mining community, show a positive attitude towards work. Even under unfavou r­ able conditions people develop specific and creative ways to organize work what refers to more than j ust the neces;; i ty of subsistence.

"happy fa mily life" take precedence over "a satisfying job". This is merely an arbitrary example of the thesis that the significance of work has been eroded in our postindustrial world. There are countless such findings and there seems to be agreement in large parts of the scientific community, that in the course of a general change in values, work no longer occu pies the central position it once did.
In what fo llows I would like to investigate these assertions, by showing first of all the role the imagery of the debate about postmodernity plays in this context and how that influences discussion of the importance of work. I will compare that with results drawn fr om my own field research and demonstrate, that to talk about an erosion of the significance of work for people in our society is something of an over simplification.
Admittedly it's perhaps an accident, that the debate about postmodernity is reaching its cli max at the end of our century, but the end of the millennium may encourage some thinkers to indulge in speculation. At any rate, the fa ct is, that in postmodernity all the supposed certain ties of the previous period are being put in question. In particular, new technologies in the area of transport and communications give rise to the outlining of scenarios, for which there is often no evidence as yet, but which are de scribed with an imagery which is all the more extravagant. Anthony Giddens has, not with out reason, noted critically, that the concept of postmodernity refers, among other things, to "living through a period of marked disparity fr om the past" (Giddens 1990: 46). David Har vey, for example, sees changed economic condi tions -the transition fr om Fordism to flexible accumulation -as resulting in an increased volatility and transience of fa shions, products, production techniques, labour processes, ideas, ideologies, valueH and eHtablished practices (Harvey 1994: 50). Jle agrees with Pa ul Yirilio, th at ti me and space have disappeared as mean ingfu l dimensions of human thought and be haviour (ibid.: 67). Acco rd ingly, in a period in wh ich everything is fl uid and in m ot ion, identi ties become ever more fragile and u nstabl e.
The sociologiRt Zygm unt Bauman has de scribed the consequ en ces of postmodernity in a number ofwritings. ln a lecture at the Institute ofAdvanced Studies in Vienna he presented the social characters of the to urist and the vaga bond -in an earlier version fo r the journal Das Argu ment there had still been the flaneur, the vagabond, the touri st a n d the gambler (Bau man 1994)as constitu ti ng the two poles be tween which the inhabitants of postmodern society moved (Bauman 1 996). 1'he n ame of th e game is mobility, because it is the absolute condition fo r everything which postmodern man desires (ibid.: 6). The degree offreedom of choice in this respect corresponds to status in the social hierarchy; the tourist moves of his own fr ee will and on his initiative lor what he be lieves to be so -J.M.I, th e vagabond, because constraints fo rce him to do so. The central issue for a postmodern strategy ofliving is no longer the achievement of a stable identity, but an avoidance of being defined: Postmodernity "means the exhilarating fr eedom to pursue any thing and the mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it" (Bauman 1992: VII). In a world of such uncertainty attitudes to work and profession also inevitably change. On the one hand, "In this world, not only jobs-for-life have disappeared, but trades and professions which have acquired the confusing habit of appearing fr om nowhere and vanishing without notice can hardly be lived as Weberian 'vocations' -and to rub salt into the wound, the demand for the skills needed to practise such professions sel dom lasts as long as the time needed to acquire them" (Bauman 1996: 3). On the other, Bauman fo rmulated -carefully perhaps, as he thought, but nevertheless -the thesis, that in contempo rary society, the consumer's fr eedom of choice has the same decisive role which the concept of work (job, occupation, profession) had in mod ern society (Bauman 1992: 223). Basically, many 56 di fferent ideas flow into the prognosis of a disintebrration ofpostmodernsociety, which !i nds expression in a far-reaching transformation of our system of values and norms.
As a cultural anthropologist, one will be on one's guard against predictions of this kind, since there are several aspects which give cause for wariness. First of all, we should ask our selves the simple question, what actually still holds our society together, in view of the pro cesses of dissolution which are supposedly tak i ng place in it. The postmodern debate is partic ularly marked by a lack of empirical evi dence which could support the arguments being put fo rw ard. Isolated observations become general isations and interpretation begins -in com plete contrast to Clifford Goertz's requirement of the anthropologist -long before any attempt whatsoever is made to grasp the complexity of human thought and behaviour with its "multi plicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another" (Geertz 1975: 10). It is precisely in this context, that the Swedish ethnologist Orvar LOfgren has recently demanded more thick de scriptions of "how people in different temporal and social milieus link identities and territo ries", and demanded a historical perspective "in order to sharpen analytical precision and to fit contemporary developments into a fr amework of longer term historical processes" (Lofgren 1995: 363).
I would like to demonstrate this lack of empirical depth of field with reference to two small examples in Harvey and Bauman. David Harvey thinks that volatility and transience contribute to making a secure sense of continu ity more difficult (Harvey 1994: 57). Then, how ever, he cites research by Rochberg-Halton, according to which the inhabitants of North Chicago don't attach the greatest importance to the "costly trophies of a materialist culture", but to objects, which express the relationship to loved ones and relatives; for him this is a reac tion to the overstimulation of a consumption oriented culture (ibid.: 58f). It does not occur to him, that this might be a matter of the persist ence of existing attitudes and value systemsat any rate it's not a new phenomenon.
Similarly paradigmatic for so many misun-derstandings between po�;�;ibility and reality seems to me to be Bauman'�; examp le of' the photographic paper (and the resulting fil mily albums) of' modernity and the video tape (the definitive medium) of' postmodernity. Wh ile the fo rmer captures irreversible an d idcntityfi.mn ing ev ents, the latter can be wiped and re-used, is intended to capture nothing fi1rcver, to make space fo r th e events oftoday only at the expense of yesterday's, impregnating everything that is considered worth recording with the universal 'for the time being' (Bauman 1994: 389). Bau man, however, doesn't enquire as to actual use.
The fa ct that things can be erased, docs not automatically mean that they arc crased. ln my experience, the identity-fo rming events record ed on video tape arc not wiped, except uninten tionally, which can tu rn into a drama -just as when the equivalent photos are torn. Such lines of argument have for some time been evident with reference to work, though not all of them should be seen in the context of the postmodern debate. Although the concept of work has a long semantic his tory ( cf. , i. a., Moser 1993: 15fD, work and/or gainful employment only became the constitutive principle of mod ern societies with industrialisation and the related recurring upheavals. This is primarily because, among other things, only through the Industrial Revolution was a distinction made between work and leisure (Turner 1982: 32).
This distinction is of the greatest significance, since it characterises the area of tension within which the concept of work has since fo und itself -pulled between work as a central category for the understanding of society and human exist ence altogether, and the attempt to relativise the importance of work.
In order to work out the position of work in a postindustrial society -given all the possible regional and national differences -what is needed is a careful ethnographic approach in Geertz's sense: "Doing ethnography is like try ing to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of') a manuscript -fo reign, fa ded, fu ll of el lipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalised graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour" (Geertz 1975: 10).
I. shall show below, what a wealth of seemi n g contradictions have grown up around the com plex of work, all of which , however, have Rome thi ng to do with its significance in our cultural system . My own research on this subject wa�; carri ed out in Au stri a -in Styria and Vi enna and is based on observation and a large number of qualitative interviews. On the one hand, I was concerned with th e subject of work and unemployment (Moser 1.993), and on the other Ta m at present working on a project on socio cultural chan ge in a decli ning mining region (Moser & Graf 1997;Moser 1.997). In all these investigations, it turned out that work contin ues to have a central signi ficance fo r people.
However, it is necessary, "in short, Ito] descend into detail, past the misleading tags, past th e metaphysical types, past the empty similarities to grasp firmly the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals within each culture, if we wish to encounter humanity fa ce to fa ce" (Geertz 1975: 53). Transferred to research in an industrial society, that means, that it is not enough to glance at the material fr om outside -it would be more accurate to say 'from above.' Only the whole context of life world and lived circum stances affords the necessary insight. Clifford Geertz quotes Wittgenstein, who thought, we often do not understand the people of another country, even when we speak their language: "We cannot find our fe et with them" (ibid.: 13). This is perhaps the harshest criticism that has to be made of many superficial assessments of the importance of work. 'Armchair anthropolo gists' was the name given to those researchers, who only dealt with other cultures fr om the perspective oftheir desk-by way of the descrip tions of third parties. Many investigations of a change in values resemble precisely this per spective. Their hypotheses -if they are tested empirically at all -are sketched out in accord ance with the ideas ofthe desk-bound reseacher and are based on prejudice. The world looks different, consequently we must pursue the laborious path into the field, "to understand our own Others as well as the other Others in the context of the culturally constructed worlds they live in" (Greverus 1996: 156) and -to go beyond Geertz -we must not only develop one rearling ofa manu:;cript of'culture', but severa l, in order to fi nd the most pluu:;ible. I fu rther more a�ree with the criticisms made fr om many sides of th ose anth ro pologi sts, who refer to a cri s is of ethnograph ic representation and "w ho have evidently had enough of the charm of work in the 'field' and now ta lk more about them selves than a bout their research object" (Bourdieu & Wacq uant 1996: 103). Here the discourses of the postmodernists, value ch ange th eorists and cri tics of eth nograph i c wri ting resemble one a n other both in th e lack of empi r ical material as well as in a narrowed vi ew of thi ngs, which often takes the writer's own expe rience oflife to be the whole of it. Ve ry frequent ly, th e image of a man oftbe comfortable middle class shows through in the descriptions of the ideal characters of post modern society.
A major problem in understanding work, is first of all due to the concept itself, because there is no adequate definition and the defini tions suggested by academics have -apart fr om other weaknesses -nothing to do with people's lifeworlds. The economic aspect is fr equently the centre of attention in discussions of work (cf. Moser 1993: 43f'O, which in the most ex treme fo rmulation understands work -or la bour power, which, however is not, and can hardly be analytically separated -as a com modity. As long ago as 1944, Karl Polanyi pre sented a critique of this approach, referring to work as a fictitious commodity. To include work and land in the market mechanism, means "to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market" (Polanyi 1944: 71). "Labor is only another name for a human activ ity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached fr om the rest oflife, be stored or mobilized" (ibid.: 72).
With that he points to the impossibility of the attempts of many economists to remove eco nomic interests fr om the larger context of cul tural and social relationships.
Bronislaw Malinowski pointed to the broad er context of work, embedded within a more extensive system of meaning, which presuppos es both a general state of knowledge about the moral intellectual and economic fr ame of refer ence and the necessity of communication (Ma-linowski Hl54: 62 H). Above al l , the collection edited by Sandra Wallmann, "The Social An thropology of Work", demonstrates th e com plexity of the subject fr om the anthropological perspective, Wallmann herself dealing with, among other things, the significance of the va luation of work (Wallmann 1979). These val uati on s also guide our perceptions, as I would like to demonstrate with an example from my own research. In the course of surveys conduct ed on two housing estates in Graz, a woman describe:;, in an interview, a fa mily whose mem bers fulfil for her all the criteria of an unwilling ness to work. She pays particular attention to the head of the fa mily. "When I come home at lunchtime", she says, "he's sitting out there in the back, sunning himself'. In conversation with this gentleman, who was interviewed on this very same bench, it then turned out that he, after 44 years of hard work, is unable properly to enjoy his retirement. Since, in his job, he constantly had to handle oils and gases, he developed an illness, which today fo rces him to spend as much time as possible in the open air. This spectacular misjudgement demonstrates a phenomenon, to which Pierre Bourdieu has also referred. " ... the social neighbourhood as place ofleast difference can also simultaneous ly easily be the point of greatest tensions. The objectively smallest distance in the social sphere can coincide with the subjectively greatest dis tance" (Bourdieu 1987: 251).
I don't, however, want to deal with the prob lems of neighbourly misjudgement, but rather with the pictures in our heads, which make such misperceptions possible. The example mentioned here demonstrates the importance of work in the woman's system of meaning and yet also makes clear that it contains an element of ambivalence. On the one hand, she cannot understand at all, how someone, whom she imagines to be of working age, can just sit around like that, and turns to the most obvious (to her) explanation of an unwillingness to work.
On the other hand, however, it could also be a projection, because, to her, the pleasure of sit ting in the sun may seem, at first sight, more desirable than her employment. In relation to work, this apparent contradiction often encour ages mistaken assessments.
Th e te nsion between work as burden and evil on the one hand, but on th e other m; fu lfil ment and cal ling is al ready eRiabl ished in the semantic history of the word. [n modernitythe age of ambivalence -this culminates in th e conflict. between the promises ofihc 1!-nlighicn ment and the specifi c demands ofindustrialisa tion. Peter Wa gner recently emphaRised th is in his A Sociology of" Modernity, when he argued that th e whole history of modernity was charac terized by the coexistence of discourses offree dom and discipline. "H makes certain ty pes of self-realization much easier to achieve, but tends to prevent others" (Wagner 1 994: XIV).As Michel Foucault had already ::;aid, "the 'Enlighten ment' which discovered fr eedom, also invented discipline" (Foucault l 977: 285). Admittedly power was now bound to rules and the individ ual was recognized as a legal subject, but due to the various practices of control , a 'disciplinary individual' has developed, who is a product of these new technologies of power (Breuer 1995: 50 From what would one otherwise be fr ee? Lei sure is a "non-work, even an anti-work phase in the life of a person who also works" (Turner 1982: 36). Unlimited leisure without work is one of the most terrible burdens which can be imposed on a human being. Gunther Anders criticises the equation of leisure and fr eedom with reference to unemployment. "The other way round, leisure, that is, non-work, is experi enced as a curse. And instead of the fa mous Old Testament one -(Genesis 3 , verse 14) -the new one will go as fo llows: 'Thou shalt sit on thine backside and ga wk at tv all thy life long!" (Anders 1980: 28). lie n ee, the importa nce of lei su re in ou r Rociety ca n increaRe, without that necessari ly changi ng the importance of work for h u m an beings.
Th e extra-econom i c aspects arc always i g nored in th is debate; these include, among oth erR , the structu re imposed by ti me, not least by the standardization of the life cycle, the acqui sition of status and prestige , the mediation of social contacts and the fi> rmati on ofRocial iden tity. Sometimes we only need to observe every day lite, in order to get an insight into normal ity. If, for example, we were to ask someone, "What do you do?'' and he repl i ed , "I travel ," we would assume he was a travell ing salesman, a steward or perhaps a tou rist courier. No one would conclude, in the light of Zygmunt Bau man's postmodcrn characters, "Oh, you're a tourist!" On the contrary, the questioner would be somewhat surprised at the response, "I trav el", since a profession or something equivalent -e.g. university, apprenticeship, school -is expected as answer to this particular question. The importance of work becomes especially clear fr om the attitudes to unemployment and the unemployed, which I researched in Styria a few years ago . At the time unemployment was already a permanent phenomenon, and fu ll employment was no longer a prospect. Accord ing to the assessments of a number of theorists of society and of a shift in values this should not be a problem, since work has lost its central position for people and for society (cf. Offe 1983; Marstedt 1994) or a large proportion of the unemployed did not want to work anyway (Noelle-Neumann & Gillies 1987). In the per ceptions of members of our society, however, unemployment represents an extraordinary problem, although both those affected by unem ployment and those not affected nevertheless respond to it with a surprising degree of emo tion. What is surprising about those not affect ed is the aggression which they display -at least verbally -towards the unemployed. I shall demonstrate this by way of two stereotyp ical response models, which turned up again and again in conversations with me.
The first stereotype disapproves of the lazi ness of many of the unemployed, who sit around at home and do nothing. On the one h and, reference is made to perso nal experiences with the u n employed : "He'R been Rigning on fi>r five whole years, he just lies at home all day." Or: "And not a stroke of work, they just slay at home all day; three or fi>ur years at home." Above all, the payment of unemployment be n efi t is, in gene ral, not regarded as an insur ance payout, but perceived as a cash transfer for which there is no return . An example is a hypothetical digression by Mr Ku rz, a business man: "But if someone signs on for six months, then he doesn't want to work any more. Because -no one tells him when he has to get up, no one tells him what he's got to do, he gets the money paid into hi s account. He only needs to be lucky enough, if you can put it that way, for his wife to be signing on too, and then fine, the two ofthem lie at home in bed and pocket two lots of dole. Well, why should they bother working." This statement succinctly expresses the fears which exist in relation to the pleasures of unem ployment. The real background is of no impor tance any more. Mr Kurz evidently doesn't give a moment's thought as to what effect the "idle ness" or the "dullness" of the never-changing daily routine described by him might have on the libido. In his story, which I don't want to give in detail here, he paints a picture of a dissolute, extravagant unemployed couple, leading a life of pleasure at the expense of the community as a whole. In view of the multitude of accounts, which describe how depressing or at least how dissatisfying unemployment is experienced as being, such notions can safely be consigned to the realms of fa ntasy.
On the other hand, remarks by the unem ployed are very often quoted, for example, "I'm not going to be as daft as to go and work, if I've got enough money to have fun at home." This remark, if indeed it was really ever made, can probably best be explained by reference to Howard S. Becker. In his theory of deviance, he showed that many deviant groups develop ra tionalizations, which are intended to represent their deviant behaviour as advantageous or as better than that of the majority (Becker 1963: 38£), so that their members can preserve th e ir sense o!' seiJ�worth as rational ly acti ng sub jects . In our case, someone ma k i ng the re mark quoted above could be demonstrating himselftn be a h omo oeconomicus, even i!' at every other level he is sti gma tised by being unemployed . His motto is then simply: Yi>U'vc got to work, whil e I pocket the money and don't have to do anythi ng. Asi de fr om the f�1ct, th at it's hardly possible to talk about a good li te , in fi nancial terms, during unemployment, as the relevant statistics prove, this approach "can be used as a communicative strategy in certain situations, in order to cover up an actual shame at an inferior status" (Neckcl 1991: 1.61).
The second stereotype deals with the possi bility of finding work. Ve ry many of those ques tioned thought that anyone could find work, if he really wanted to. The actual statements then go as fol lows: "People who want to work, will always find work." Or: "There's always some thing, if you really want to work." Or: "But only, I think, if someone wants to work, it doesn't matter what job or what line, then he'll always get something. If he wants to work." What probably plays a part here, is, above all, the not very surprising fa ct that even at times of high unemployment there are still situations va cant. Many of those questioned are surprised at the number ofjobs advertised in the paper. A 54year old civil servant said, "I don't understand it anyway, there are so many people unem ployed, and on the other hand they say they don't have any workers. What are the unem ployed doing? Why do they get benefit, if there are so many jobs, or you only need to look in the paper at the weekend, to see how many jobs are available.
A 71-year old pensioner, who likewise gives expression to his surpise at the number of unfilled vacancies, argues in similar vein: We really needn't have so many unemployed. Some of them don't want to work. Just take a look, there are so many jobs, I'm always reading the paper. So many jobs, but if you ask a company, why? -these people don't want to. Now, it can hardly be expected that everyone will be fa mil iar with the details of the labour market -some aspects are even beyond the experts. And, of course, the fa ct of unfilled posts when there is unemploymenteven high unemploymenti s n ot so surprising. This must be the case, other wise no company could expand, no one reti re, no employee die nor could anyone be fired. What is surpris ing in the statements quoted above, how ever, is the certainty with which mistaken in formati on is passed around. The civil servant would h a ve to h ave spent her fr ee time reading empirical studies of the labour marketin which case, she would, however, have some thingdiffe rent to say -and whether the 71-year old fo rmer engineering worker can really boast of intensive contacts with a number of compa nies may equally be doubted. At any rate the stories are presented in a form which is sup posed to lend them authenticity, thereby con firming what Clifford Geertz said in relation to common sense. "Religion rests its case on reve lation, science on method, ideology on moral passion; but common sense rests its on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority" (Geertz 1983: 75). These images ofthe unemployed have some thing to do with the significance of work for human beings. Transmitted during the various phases of socialization it represents a culture pattern in Geertz's sense -he refers to organ ized systems of significant symbols -which provide the orientation, without which "man's behaviour would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions" (Geertz 1975: 46). These cultural patterns are part of our collective memory, which preserves the store of knowledge of a group and through its reconstruction, always refers to contemporary situations (cf. Assmann 1988: 13). The world is complex, which is why human beings, with a restricted information capacity, are fo rced to simplify and categorize.
Consequently, observations which fit into an already existing picture, are more easily re membered or interpreted than those which de viate fr om it. This serves to order experience and to reduce complexity. That academics are not invulnerable to such mechanisms, has been demonstrated elsewhere in relation to the pre suppositions to be fo und in the models of econ omists (Zilian & Moser 1989).
This becomes especially clear fr om the situ-ation of the unemployed thcm:,;elves. They arc victims of lackofjobs -but arc declared to be i tR cauRe. Discrimination and Rtig-mati:;; atinn results (cf. Moser l 99:1: 81.fl), becau s e those affected arc seen as une m ployed idlers. This problem also has an interactive aspect, howev er, as Erving Gortinann has demonstrated. "Of cou rse , the individual con:,;tructs hi:-; image of himself out of the same materials, fr om which others first construct a social and personal identification of him . . . " (Gol'linan 1963: l 33).
Th e un empl oyed, th crcfbrc, have the same idea:,; about work as other people; they have the same prejudices about others who arc unemployed, they only sec th eir own prob lems with a greater degree of differentiation . They suJier from the loss of work an d frequ ently a personal feeling of shame develops, whose consequences have been succintly assessed by Sighard Neckel. "Shame is a strain on the individual and creates a fe eling of insecurity, shame isolates. To be ashamed causes loneliness. Shame ruins self confidence and other people notice that" (Neck el 1991: 17). The result is that many unemployed don't acknowledge that they are unemployed, but try to re-interpret their situation. So a young un employed woman with a small child, living with her parents, says, "I'm not unemployed at all I'm doing something." Another interviewee pro vided an extremely interesting interpretation of his situation. He doesn't fe el that he's one of the unemployed, this is only his situation at the moment: "Because a student, who gets a job in the summer, doesn't say all of a sudden that he's one of the workers, he remains a student." These unemployed seem to know about what Bourdieu has called the symbolic dimension of the social sciences, "because individuals and groups are not only objectively defined by their being, but also by what they apparently are, that is by a perceived being" (Bourdieu 1987: 246). Mr Gangl seems to take this equally to heart, when he responds to the question, wheth er he fe els he is one of the unemployed, "Yes, I could almost say, that, I wouldn't put it like that any more, I would say, that I'm a house hus band." Although Mr Gangl is far fr om satisfied with his role as house husband, as he let me know in the interview, he preferred to identify 62 with it, rather than with the unem ployed. The role of house husband can still pcrhapH be understood and perceived as a fr eely chn:-;en al ternati ve , in the case nfu ncmpl oymcnt, choice would be an unmistakable sign of an u nw ill ing ness to work. The unemployed sec themselves in a state of transition, such as has been de scribed by Vi ctor Tu rner with his concept of l i mi nality. Admittedly Turner applies his con cept prim arily to initiation rites, but he empha sizes "a certai n homology between the 'weak ness' and 'passivity' of l iminality in diachronic transitions between states and statuses, and the 'structural' or synchronic inferiority of cer tain person ae, gro ups, and social categories in political, legal, and economic systems" (Turner l 969: 99f). A state of transition -as in the case of unemployment -can be accompanied by low social status, so that only after leaving this state can there be a change in status again.
From that it can be deduced, that for the unem ployed it may also be appropriate for th em to more or less see through their state, in order afterwards to be properly integrated into the social system again.

Researches in a declining mining region in
Austria also emphasized the massive impor tance of work. In Eisenerz (literally Iron Ore) iron has been extracted fr om the Erzberg (liter ally Ore Mountain) for hundreds of years; now, however, the mine will soon be shut down. Since the 1960s, the number ofemployed has declined fr om 4,000 to 340, who themselves no longer work exclusively in the mine. The normal biog raphy of a man in Eisenerz, was that he was born into a mining fa mily, and it was taken for granted that he too would be apprenticed as a miner. As in the Ruhr, as described by Rolf Lindner, a relatively homogeneous social land scape came into being, which was dominated by a working class milieu, and which had little internal stratification (cf. Lindner 1994: 216).
Work always played a central role in this mi lieu, everything revolved around work: once there was the work in the mine, which dominat ed everything, today there is the lack of jobs, which everyone in Eisenerz declares to be the central problem.
Precisely the hard work in the mine demon strates what work still is, beyond the mainte-nance of:;ubsistcnce. Work for the miners down the pit, means, among other things, the over coming of tear, the necessary ski ll to wrest th e ore fr om the mountain, but above all the legen dary "com radeship", which was always being talked about. The miners characterized the pit as a place, which, in Marc Augc's sense, is marked by identity, rel ationship and history (Auge 1994: 92f): What counted in the pit was the collective; there's the history of the acci dents, which arc very precisely remembered and the miner someti mes even has an emotion al bond with the place, which finds expression in descriptions ofthc atmosphere. "So when you were down there and it began to creak, and a little bit of something fe ll down, then that was tension enough, that was, that was great", a miner told us enthusiastically. In general, much more attention should be paid to these symbolic dimensions when considering work.
In the last ten years the miners had to leave the pit when they're only 50 or 51, and via the status of long term unemployment with special rights (by virtue of a so-called Special Support Law), arc granted early retirement. This doesn't happen without problems, however, because the fo rmer employees still imagine themselves to be in the prime of their working life -which makes the situation much worse than in the case of the fa miliar phenomenon of pension shock. Ve ry suddenly their labour power and their experience are no longer needed; instead they are a cost fa ctor, which must be removed by dismissal -cushioned by a social plan. All the interviewees described the great problems which they had during this phase, until they had eventually fo und a substitute employment.
The symbolic relationships can be demon Only after the Second World War did the picture change again; on the one hand because the co-operation of the two sides of industry (social partnership) had resulted in a much improved social situation for the workers, on the other, because the influence of the Socialist Party had increased considerably in Eisenerz. Now on St Barbara's Day, there was once more a demonstration of where the economic pros perity of the town came fr om; at the same time it was also a demonstration of the trade union's power and because of the media character of the event, also of the Socialist Party -the senior Austrian politicians turned up in Eisenerz for the occasion. On the 4th of December, the whole of Eisenerz was in the streets and after the official ceremonies -which always included a commemoration for those killed in accidents, at which the whole of the local cemetery was turned into a sea of blazing torches -fe stivities continued for a long time in the public houses.
Today, as a result of the crisis, the elites have once more regained that power of definition which they did not possess in the heyday of the mining milieu. They are now in demand as experts -or make themselves in demand -and construct the valid pictures. As a consequence, on the one hand the miner's work is elevated in mu::;cum::;, in the show mine and in the ma inte nance of tradi ti on:; , while on tho other, the mentality of those employed in the mine is blamed for the fa ct thai the economic transfor mation, the shill to other branch es of economic acti vi ty and the anxiously awaited recovery arc not taking place at the desired speed. Hence pa rticipation in the St. Ba rbara's Day celebra tions is extremely small , peop le n o l onger fee l attached to the symbolic orders on which the celebration is based (cf. Douglas 1982: 2). 1i has become a kind of du ty fo r iho�;c �;ti ll working in the mine and for a few retired miners who are attached to the tradition . They arc joined by a few local dignitaries and �;nmc second and third rank politicians. Whereas once the streets were filled with crowds fr om th e town itself, today only a few of the curious watch the procession . The commemoration ceremony at the cemetery is the only event still attended by many people, who have not taken part in the rest of the ceremonies, in order to honour their dead.
Today, as Becker et al., write, the "previous unproblematic fu nctioning of socially distinct fo rms ofknowledge and patterns of interpreta tion ... " has come "under pressure to become consistent" (Becker et al. 1987: 3). The retired miners experience it most sharply, given to understand that their labour is obsolete and their values an obstacle to modern develop ment. The ideas in their head and social prac tice -Edmund Leach would say the relation ship of meaning between the "concept in the mind" and the "external world" (Leach 1976: 38) no longer correspond. Against this back ground, it becomes comprehensible, that both the miners and large sections of the rest of the population have ceased to support traditions, which without the identity fa ctors which were related to work, have lost their meaning.
The empirical examples, substantiating the importance of work, could be extended indefi nitely -and not only with reference to employ ment in the manufacturing and service sectors as my findings suggest. In her study of health and sickness in peasant community, the ethnol ogist Walburga Haas has shown that the aware ness of the body among the group studied is very strongly related to work and the work ethos. "Human beings are here to work, after 64 all", HayH an old peasant woman (Haa::; l 996: 70). Nnw th i s should not be taken t.n mean, that people arc not consciou s ofihc cffi1rt involved in work. ln my opini on it is precisely the fe atures ofburdcnsomonoss and effort inherent in work which constitute its value or sign ificance. Hu man beings as creators of culture, consta ntly appropriating their environment in a creative process, arc fu lly aware of the related costs. If we could manage everything so easily -the writing of an academic paper or working on a building site in scorching heat -then we would also lack the degree of satisfaction, which we draw from thc�;c aciivitie�;. At first sight it may look as if people's moans and groans about their work means that it has lost it�; significance. But Cliffo rd Goertz reminds us to substitute com plex pictures for simple ones (Geertz 1975: 33). It is in this sense that I also have tried to interpret my empirical material. If we investi gate the significance of work in our society, then