On September 26th, the Institute for European Studies was pleased to host Daena Funahashi, Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, who presented her work “Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland”, to an audience of around ten.
Looking at the history of labor, Funahashi challenged the current conventional notions of work, energy, and economics by emphasizing the role of gift exchange and pondering the forces that drive us to do what we do. Funahashi disputed the idea of occupational burnout being the new hazard of the new economy, focusing instead on what we are willing to sacrifice.
Funahashi began by presenting her ethnographic fieldwork carried out in burnout rehabilitation centers in Finland, a country that experienced a complicated economic period in the 1990s, pivotal to the state’s subsequent restructuring. There, she observed that today's workers choose to give of their time, rather than giving out of social obligation. To illustrate her point, she then told the story of Hannah, a 67-year-old Finnish company employee who died alone at home of a heart attack, brought on by the stress of work. Her death, attributed to occupational burnout, shed light on the place of individuals in the workplace, the economic system, and its general structure of sacrifice. From this story, Funahashi reflected on the central question of what drives us to work, one that transcends the borders of Finland. Burnout is part of the apparatus that shapes our relationship to time. The idea that we sacrifice ourselves voluntarily is fiction. Hanna's death was bound to happen and is an untimely orientation to the present. The economic system makes us all equally vulnerable to the inability to restrain ourselves from self-sacrifice, just like Hanna. Indeed, it is an issue of capitalist structure governed by economic rationality, where human energy is considered finite and must be managed.
Funahashi challenged the occupational health narrative that burnout results from citizen-workers not realistically seeing themselves as an energy resource, raising a series of other insightful reflections on our economic systems, through analysis at the intersection of economic and historical subjectivity.