“We have always been in crisis”: An ethnography of austere livelihoods in Northern Portugal

Based on 21 months ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation aims to provide an ethnography of the crisis of livelihood in northern Portugal from the perspective of households. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Portuguese government signed a Memorandum of Understanding, which introduced a wide set of austerity measures. Such measures are frequently understood as a radical break from a previously stable socio-economic situation. In opposition to these popular narratives, I argue that livelihood-making in northern Portugal has been shaped by recurrent and persistent crises for a long time. This ‘crisis mode of livelihood’ is the result of the deep entanglement between household survival and the reproduction of capitalist cycles of accumulation. Refracted by state regulation, capitalist relations come to be embedded in the everyday crisis of household livelihood: the labour and working arrangements that are available, the avenues for provisioning that are opening or closing, the future projects that seem desirable, and the value constructions that are in flux. “We have always been in crisis and coped with it” was peoples’ most common response to my questions about the 2008 financial crisis. I investigate the material and social relations of this persistent crisis, as well as the ways people have learned to engage with state-led regulation, ideological projects and political practices as a matter of everyday survival. Showcasing how crisis can be a permanent condition, this dissertation offers an anthropological and historical account of the production of a particular working-class lifeworld in times of austerity