Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol53no204
More than the Sum of Infrastructural Achievements: Youth Work Actions and the Phenomenology of the Moral Gift Economy
Andrea Matošević
orcid.org/0000-0002-8602-6353
; Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile u Puli
Abstract
The analysis of youth work actions, one of the most long-lived and widespread phenomena in socialist Yugoslavia, primarily means dealing with the principle of workers’ willingness to participate in them, during their organizational lifetime of nearly fifty years. Although the declarative reasons for the organization of youth work actions were often infrastructural, the result was always, and above all, of an anthropological nature. In other words, self-sacrifice, working enthusiasm and zeal as well as socialist competitions, as inherent and not only declarative parts of work actions, were articulated on the principle of a gift. Its tripartite structure consists of giving, accepting but above all of returning, and this is why the concept of moral economy is also inherent to work actions. However, in contrast to Potlatch or other pre-industrial institutions, in work actions we notice a switch from wastefulness to frugality. Although they might appear as diametric principles, the difference between Potlatch and work actions is embedded in the place of “consumption”. While Potlatch implicitly includes the destruction of or giving away material goods and values in order to gain honour and prestige, youth shock-work implies wastefulness from the very working subjects with the same goal. This is also denoted by the self-sacrificial [samoprijegoran] principle of its articulation. This sort of proletarization of many individuals had far reaching repercussions for the community in a broad sense of the word.
Keywords
youth work actions, gift, moral economy, shame, community
Hrčak ID:
170720
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2016.
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