Sammendrag
Scholarly interventions into the concept of precariousness has recently expanded beyond considerations of a changing world of work in the global north, to explore both precariousness caused by increasing presence of market forces in rural spaces and for people stuck in urban informality in southern cities. However, less delved upon in terms of illuminating precariousness, is the observation that many smallholders around the world sustain themselves by “drifting back and forth between the slums of the urban periphery and the impoverished rural hinterlands” (Breman, 2013: 130). Based on research in Yunnan Province, southwestern China, among migrant workers working in the provincial capital of Kunming and in two villages in the adjacent countryside, this article unravels how smallholder households relate to the “new normal” of precariousness. It begins by identifying the intersecting economic, ecological and political forces contributing to the changing conditions for agrarian lives, where the increasing dependency on wage-work for survival and precarious urban based wage-work for peasants in the decade following the global financial crisis (2008- ). Describing the differentiated trajectories among smallholder households as some remain “surplus” and others are in-demand to wage-work, the paper illuminates how migrant workers aspirations confront and are adjust to the post-Global Recession situation of generalized precariousness. This paper contributes to a discussion on the emerging relational geography of precariousness among smallholders in the shadow of the Global Recession.
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