Dependency, Gender, and Labor in the Household
Research Group Leader: Dr. Hanne Østhus
PhD researchers: Malik Ade and Dita Auzina
Over the last thirty years, historians and economists have demonstrated the value of employing the household as a starting point when investigating social and economic relations of the past and present. The household is used as a basic analytic unit and understood as a basic societal organizational unit, consequently not excluding work performed outside the confines of the house itself. The Research Group (RG) utilizes such insights to explore labour relations and particularly labour-related dependencies within historical households. These include different types of work and workers with different types and degrees of autonomy such as house slaves, domestic servants and indentured servants, but also encompass individuals on less (or no) formal work contracts, such as children and kin. As workers who lived with their employers they challenge the dichotomies encompassed in modernization theory of home and work, and of subsistence labour and commodified labour as separate.
Central Aims:
The coordinator's research is particularly focused on domestic service and slavery in pre-industrial Denmark-Norway. The PhD researchers attached to the RG investigate the domestic and public roles of Yoruba men and women (ca. 17th - ca. 19th centuries) and interactions between indigenous communities, European conquistadors and African slaves in the early colonization period in the Caribbean and Central American region respectively. Other types of research of interest to the RG include, for example, explorations of domestic servants in early modern Japan, house slaves in ancient Greece, or house serfs in medieval Europe. The inclusion of a variety of periods and geographical areas is meant to facilitate comparisons, which is an aim and advantage of the Cluster of Excellence "Beyond Slavery and Freedom". In addition, the RG seeks to contribute to the Cluster's theoretical exploration of the term "dependency" by comparing it to and utilizing insights from gender history research on related terms, in particular power and authority.