An approach from "social reproduction": commensality and consumption in construction sites

Abstract

As part of a socio-anthropological investigation whose general interest has been to analyze work processes in relation to the health of workers in the construction industry in Rosario (Argentina), this article presents an analytical approach around one of the replacement modalities of energy worn out within the construction site. Commensality, as a social and cultural articulator of food intake, is key within those breaks where energy is replaced. In this article, Commensality is approached from an ethnographic perspective that focuses on the knowledge and practices that workers themselves build, namely, on the experience of those who suffer. In addition to that, studying the replacement of the energy worn out according to a typical and common pattern of the workers group, follows the use of the concept of “social reproduction” that allows thinking as a totality the spaces and times of production and consumption. Likewise, this perspective is linked to the objective of making studies that deal with health and construction more complex (usually they tend to reproduce the hegemonic biomedical approach), in order to contribute to the construction of knowledge on the subject from a critical and anthropological perspective.

Likewise, this perspective is linked to the objective of making studies dealing with health and construction more complex, most of which reproduce the hegemonic biomedical approach, in order to contribute to the construction of knowledge on the subject from a critical and anthropological perspective.