Working the Fabric: Resourcefulness, Belonging and Island Life in Scotland's Harris Tweed Industry. By JoanaNascimento, Berghahn Books. 2023. 230 pp. New York: Berghahn Books Series: Anthropology at work; volume 4 ISBN: 9781800738829 (hardback) ISBN:

In her new ethnography, Working the Fabric: Resourcefulness, Belonging and Island Life in Scotland's Harris Tweed Industry, Joana Nascimento artfully examines the work–life strategies of people who confront economic uncertainty. She argues that despite different work strategies and life experiences in the Harris Tweed industry, her interlocutors in Scotland's Outer Hebrides shared similar values and morals regarding flexibility, resourcefulness, and dedication to their craft in their endeavor to achieve “lives worth leading” (28). Furthermore, Nascimento contends that economic anthropology is in a unique position to contribute to greater understandings of the dynamic and complex methods that people employ to mitigate uncertainty in work, belonging, and place-making. Nascimento's book draws from her participant observation in weavers' homes and Harris Tweed mills, where she learned not only how to complete weaving tasks but also how to speak Scottish Gaelic. Through interviews and surveys, Nascimento provides invaluable insight into how people experience and imagine local and global politics, economics, environments, and histories. Throughout the book, she is keen to make a theoretical contribution to scholarship on precarity, which is entwined for her interlocutors with notions of “freedom, autonomy, resourcefulness, and the inevitability of change” (43). She also sustains a generative dialogue with scholars like Susana Narotzky and Fiona Mackenzie as she calls for an expanded concept of labor/work to better understand how specific local and global conditions, histories, and uncertainties shape how people experience and form perspectives on belonging and property ownership. In the first chapter of Working the Fabric, Nascimento explores “island life” and “island resourcefulness.” She focuses on local histories and experiences of remoteness and engages with the relevant anthropological literatures to describe how dominant notions of remoteness have fostered inaccurate, and often romanticized representations of life in the Outer Hebrides. At the same time, she argues that these representations must be taken seriously when exploring the tensions between local experiences and outside imaginations of remoteness in an increasingly connected world. Thinking with Edwin Ardener, she also makes the case for greater attention to the physical, economic, and political dimensions of proximity and distance. In her second chapter, Nascimento follows the tweed van as it makes journeys around the island. She is interested in how tweed drivers navigate their material, occupational, and social situations and concludes that anthropology should pay careful attention to processes that enable commodity circulation. These processes revolve around the essential labor—often unrecognized—that mediates the material exchanges, as well as the social circulation of insights into the (un)certainty of the Harris Tweed industry. Through her exploration of the daily journeys of the tweed van and the interactions of the tweed van drivers with weavers, Nascimento offers an engaging account of, as she puts it, the “social relations and individual subjectivities emerging in and produced by the multi-scalar implications of the Harris Tweed industry” (111). In the third chapter, Nascimento explores the stories and experiences of self-employed weavers in the Harris Tweed industry and how they conceptualize “different arrangements … not only particular skills, dispositions, and labour practices, but also distinctive ways of understanding the intertwinements of ‘work’ and ‘life’” (145). Here she argues that looking at “experiences of time and notions of value” (147) can provide insights into the different networks and experiences that characterize current work systems. From this perspective, Nascimento describes how her interlocutors view weaving as a part of life, without strict separations between work and daily life. For these weavers, the virtues of patience, resilience, and self-discipline are linked with an occupation that is perceived to offer a greater sense of freedom despite the uncertainty in the industry. The fourth chapter finds Nascimento reflecting on notions of “anticipation.” Again, she is interested in how local and personal experiences flow into industrial histories and how, together, these threads shape shared ideas with respect to resourcefulness and “island life.” Nascimento argues that anticipation—how people prepare for future changes based on the past—is a critical aspect of work relationships and of the ways that people develop a shared sense of place. Through anticipating change, workers cultivate a kind of resourcefulness for navigating uncertainty on the islands. Here Nascimento offers not only an in-depth ethnographic depiction of labor experiences but also a theoretical and analytical alternative to understanding labor precarity. In the book's fifth chapter, Nascimento explores Harris Tweed as a “heritage industry” and how this marker shapes both internal and external understandings of the island. She argues that “shared repertoires” (233) of belonging, remoteness, and regional traditions allow people to engage in the dynamic creation and re-creation of place. She echoes her call for a broader theoretical understanding of labor and work, insisting on the need for expanding our thinking on production to also include social and cultural production. In this way, we might grasp in a more expansive sense what makes work productive in the Harris Tweed industry. She also calls for attention to local memory, which helps animate practices in the present. Working the Fabric is a dynamic contribution to economic anthropology. It engages ethnographically with a place where “economic disruption is experienced, instead, as a part of a very long history of labour uncertainty, out-migration and depopulation” (38). Owing to political and economic dynamics, as well as the associated uncertainty, Nascimento highlights how Harris Tweed weavers and workers engage in occupational pluralism, fulfilling the need to be resourceful and anticipate uncertainty when met with both ups and downs in the industry. Ultimately, through her argument for expanded concepts of “work” and “labor,” in her concluding chapter, Nascimento vividly uses the weaving of Harris Tweed as a metaphor for how people with different backgrounds, personal experiences, and means navigate the uncertainty of island life to build lives they believe are worthwhile. Overall, Working the Fabric offers an engaging and thought-provoking depiction of labor and uncertainty in the global Harris Tweed industry. Nascimento's in-depth and vivid exploration of the various stages of Harris Tweed creation captures both the material and social labor—or the material and social fabric—that is required to build a valuable commodity. Through engagement with theory and attention to historical context and detail, Working the Fabric is well-suited for both seasoned scholars and students, who will appreciate its approachable but detailed picture of contemporary labor uncertainty in the Outer Hebrides.