succeed in immigrating to South Korea but notwithout consequences for them and their families.

In the end, Freeman’s ethnography is about theways labor and kinship interact in complex and oftenunpredictable ways. In South Korea, labor proves asore point for Chosonjok wives. First, they resentrestrictions on their labor placed on them by husbandswho harbor patriarchal ideas of a jip saram (literally“house person”). Second, women do not buy intohousehold divisions of labor that place the responsi-bility for maintaining the household on the wife. InChina, on the other hand, labor migration to SouthKorea and “paper kinship” strain relationshipsbetween Chosonjok husbands and wives. Fittingly,Freeman ends her ethnography with interviews withthe men and women left behind. People pursue lives inHeilongjiang Province while their families are splitacross topographical and typological space, butkinship relations in South Korea and China arestrained through a variety of real and forged papers.

Anthropologists have known for some time thatlabor and kinship are inextricably linked, no more sothan in neoliberal regimes that instrumentalizekinship in various ways across transnational scapes.With Freeman’s ethnography, we gain new insightinto the complex intersections of life, labor, and thestate – insights that complicate familiar classificationsof immigrants into reified types and that suggest newavenues for our teaching and research.

DOI:10.1111/awr.12018

Au Pair. Zuzana Búriková and Daniel Miller.Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010.

Zachary M. Overfield,University of Texas at Arlingtonzachary.overfield@mavs.uta.edu

As domestic caregivers not formally classified as“workers,” au pairs have received little attention fromscholars of labor and immigration studies. ZuzanaBúriková and Daniel Miller ably address this aca-demic lacuna in their ethnography Au Pair. Theirapproach is evident when they write, “neither . . .immediate and personal reasons nor the larger politi-cal and economic factors can be understood except inrelation to each other” (30). Based on a year in thefield, hanging out with 50 au pairs and their 86 hostfamilies, Búriková and Miller successfully situate thelived realities of the individual au pairs within thelarger historical and socioeconomic forces. The coau-thors adopted specific ethnographic roles as theyobtained their data. Búriková worked with the aupairs, whereas Miller worked with the host families.

Combining interviews, participant observation, andanalysis of material culture, Búriková and Miller payclose attention to the reasons Slovakian women opt tobecome au pairs, their relationships with their familiesand the exploitation that can result, the racism theauthors frequently encountered among au pairs, theunexpected boredom of being an au pair in a subur-ban community, their relations with men, and the lifeof an au pair as a rite de passage. They explore thedeeper complexities about what it means to be an aupair in London. Through this ethnography, they con-front the stereotypes that typically surround this formof migrant domestic work. The increasing employ-ment of au pairs in middle-class homes in London isan aspect of contemporary life in which notions ofcare and quality time take on a new urgency. Theauthors focus mainly on female Slovakian au pairs andhow their nationality and other attributes influencetheir experiences.

Organizing their account in eight chapters with aprologue, Búriková and Miller deftly interweave theconcept of the rite de passage into the experience ofbecoming an au pair. The authors argue that whilemen in Eastern European countries, such as Slovakia,have military service to serve as a rite of passage, aupairing serves this role for women, who experience aperiod of liminality while in a foreign country and arereintegrated into their more traditional roles whenthey return home. Historically, au pairing offered arare opportunity for young female immigrants seekingto work in the United Kingdom. Before Slovakiajoined the European Union, working as an au pair wasone of the few ways to work abroad for an extendedperiod in the United Kingdom (186).With the expan-sion of the EU, Slovakian au pairs possess a widerselection of work options. However, many still chooseau pairing due to the desire to become integrated intoa familial unit, which seemingly provides a more stableand safe environment than other kinds of work avail-able, such as full-time housekeeper or nanny (187).

Through the experiences of individuals in rela-tion to the wider socioeconomic currents, such as thechanging dynamics of EU regulations, the authorsattempt to understand the meaning behind becomingan au pair. The reader learns that not every migrantworker is trying to escape oppression, but many dodesire economic advantages that are not available tothem in their home country. Several informants wantto pursue an education. However, some young womenjust want to delay making major life decisions bytaking a break from what they perceive as their moreserious life (30).

A distinctive feature of the ethnography is itsincorporation of material culture studies. In oneinstance, the authors describe the importance ofphysical letters between an au pair and her long

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distance boyfriend (142). In another, the authorsoutline the common practice of host families purchas-ing IKEA furniture in pristine white for their au pairs(40). Some au pairs interpret this as representative oftheir replaceable nature, whereas others perceive thefurniture as a blank canvas to establish a personalspace for themselves.

The ethnography also provides the host families’perspectives in order to balance the representation.The family as a social ideal plays a crucial role in AuPair. Some of the most rewarding analysis comes whenthe authors explore the idea of the pseudo-family(176). They observe that, “The concept of pseudo-family was appealed to when families were asking theau pair to work beyond their agreed hours, or theparents were coming home unexpectedly late” (176).Although the pseudo-family may be beneficial tosome, it creates a relationship that enables exploitationthat otherwise would not be tolerated (198). Perhapsthe pseudo-family is not a poor facsimile of the familybut better understood as a hyperbolic family. It high-lights and exaggerates the exploitation that occurs inso-called “authentic” families every day. In this way,Búriková and Miller open the reader’s eyes to thecontemporary family as a site of power dynamics.

Au Pair also reveals a complex entanglementbetween ethnicity, class, and the Slovakian au pairs’impressions of Jewish families. Búriková and Millerdiscuss how some au pairs hold deep-seated prejudicesand that the au pairs’ experiences with these families donot alter their preconceptions about the Jewish people.It would seem that structures of prejudice are unde-terred by actual experience (111–112). This is shownby the au pair Olívia, whose own culturally derivedprejudices against Jews are reinforced when she isaccused of stealing by a Jewish family (107–108).

This ethnography appeals to academics andnonacademics alike and will provide an accessibleread about au pairs, the families that host them, politi-cal economy, and migrant domestic labor. The indi-vidual within the au pairing institution must besituated within the historical socioeconomic circum-stances of today’s world. Au pairs are not homogenousentities, easily definable, but complex human beingsmotivated by differing intricate factors. For readerswith an appetite for the literature on labor studies, theappendix provides a helpful overview of the scholar-ship. I would recommend this ethnography to stu-dents and scholars desiring a nuanced depiction of thelives of au pairs. Búriková and Miller’s ethnographyshould encourage more anthropologists of work tofurther explore this unique mode of employment.

DOI:10.1111/awr.12019

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism,Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries.Kathi Weeks. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2011.

Christopher Carrico,Towson Universityccarrico@temple.edu

The Problem withWork is a book with many impli-cations for anthropologists of work. It is broad in itstheoretical scope and focuses attention on work as asite for political struggle. It aims at decentering thework ethic as the lens through which we view work’spolitical significance and sets about trying to build thecase for, and lay the theoretical foundations for, apostwork or antiwork politics.

The most important theoretical antecedents thatWeeks’ book engages are the autonomist refusal ofwork and the 1970s feminist “wages for housework”movement, which sought to highlight the significanceand value of unwaged reproductive labor. She makesthe case that in the postindustrial, post-Fordist era,the ideas of these movements have a wider significancethan the immediate political projects in which theywere engaged, and she advocates the use of utopianpolitical demands like those that were deployed by theautonomist and wages for housework movements.Thebook suggests that demands for a basic income, andfor shorter working hours, might be appropriate start-ing points for an emerging postwork politics.

The Italian autonomist critiques of “produc-tivist” Marxism are part of a debate that is at least asold as Paul Lafargue’s (1989 [1883]) The Right to beLazy. Two quite different approaches to labor can befound in Marx’s own writings. For instance, in Marx’s1844 writings, we find a critique of wage labor fromthe point of view of unalienated labor – that is, work ascreative expression and outside of the context ofexploitation and relations of dominance and subordi-nation (Marx 2007 [1844]). The realm of self-realization is seen here to be through work, within therealm of necessary labor. In contrast, in Capital, Marxwrote that “The realm of freedom really begins onlywhere labour determined by necessity and externalexpediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond thesphere of material production” (Brudney 1998:162;Marx 1981 [1864–94]:958–959). It is with this latter,antiwork Marx that Kathi Weeks stands in The ProblemwithWork.

One of the main characteristics of the 1970sfeminist debates about domestic labor was the way inwhich Marxist categories were used “in the service offeminist enquiry” (118). Although some first- andsecond-wave feminists “more or less accept[ed] thelesser value accorded to unwaged domestic labor” andfocused their struggle on equal pay and equal access

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