Careful capitalism: Children, residential kinship, and live-in domestic work in Costa Rica

Abstract

Limited publications address structures of residential kinship and live-in domestic work in Central America. Informed by participant observation fieldwork with three families, and open-ended interviews with employers (6) and domestic workers (5), this thesis discusses how kin relationships are created and sidelined through the industry of live-in domestic work in Costa Rica. Employers understand the industry of domestic work as a tradition to be upheld for proper societal standing. These relations of labour and kinship are sites of patronal benevolence that encourage the workers to limit their involvement with their families through poverty wages and patriarchal employment practices, and thus reproduce nationalist and gendered social orders that erase interdependence between employer’s tradition and worker’s paid labour. Furthermore, as a project of philanthropic social reproduction, selective kinship embeddedness of the worker and their child in the employer’s kin structures does not guarantee financial citizenship for the live-in domestic worker. Social mobility for the children of domestic workers is framed as depending on the worker’s present labour and on continued patronal investment. Furthermore, this thesis recognizes how workers, their children, and employers learn to understand structures of difference and navigate their shifting roles across social groups according to Marian ideologies of age and gender. This thesis offers a critical approach towards public issues anthropology as a social practice, and contributes to linguistic anthropological theorization on kinship, gender ideologies, and labour.