Tensions and Conventions of Kin - Work: An Ethnography of Family Businesses in Rural Scotland

Family and work are the most entrenching facts of social life, yet the paucity of studies that bring kinship and economic relations together has led to misassumptions about what ethnographic research into family businesses can do. Such research can reveal the dynamics of late capitalism and kin intimacies through the shifts in the relative balance of generational esteem and the entanglements of household wealth and regional businesses. I am interested in the kinds of work that make up town economy and its connections to the surrounding villages. I will do that through an ethnography of small family and kin-run businesses on one hand and the networks of kin that underly other kinds of labour on the other hand. The south-west Scottish market town Dumfries provides an ideal case study of economic and social entanglements. The Dumfries and Galloway constituency was part of the 18th century planned village movement that established labour and residential settlements in the countryside (Philip 2003). The complex effects of deindustrialization, devolution, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic on rural employment and economy continue to unfold in Dumfries. While relegated to the background in favor of economic debates, the contentions of localism, social class, and political representation feed the undercurrent of the question of Scottish independence today especially for rural 'out of the way' regions (Nadel-Klein 1991; Law and Mooney 2006; Smith 2011). Thus, my ethnography of Dumfries will tap into the moral and political economy of the town by investigating the traditions and prospects of family work. My ethnographic focus encompasses contemporary issues of the administration of rural and urban relations and the provisioning of households in deindustrializing economies.

Research Questions

My approach exemplifies a direction in kinship studies that seeks to understand how kinship networks are means of sustenance and livelihood (Malinowski 1930; Kondo 1990; Becker 1991). The study partakes further in anthropological questions of social and economic relationships (Bloch
1984), production (Meillassoux 1973), and distribution (Bear et al 2015) through an investigation of the tensions and conventions of kin working together. My particular focus is on the small family businesses that produce for their own sustenance and sell their products in the local market. My
sense is that family work exercises a transformational power over family dynamics and intimacies. It then follows to ask, how is work divided between the family members? How is succession planned within family businesses? How does family work engender its members? How do co-working family
members deal with money? Do relatives of these families buy from them? How do family businesses situate themselves within the town and the country?