Shadow Work

Ivan Illich has a penchant for coining phrases - sometimes without making sure the path is clear for his new vocabulary. When he speaks of a "shadow economy" or "shadow work," he doesn't mean the "secondary economy" of work for exchanges other than wages or, alternatively, blackmarket activities (the sort of economy that doesn't show up on a government balance sheet). What Illich means is an ill-defined area of work which has historically accompanied the development of wage labor, but which is itself done for no wages; since wages have come to denote useful work, shadow work is then construed as non-work. Illich's one good example of shadow work, however, is housework in its latter-day form - divorced, that is, from the creation of genuinely useful things that all family members once made in the household. Both shadow work and wage labor are contrasted to "vernacular work," another Illichism meaning tasks or skills learned informally which go into making genuinely useful things. The five essays collected here are part of an ongoing project which will, for one, trace the historical development of all this; but these particular contributions tend to simply repeat the same incantation. Among them is a historical account of the imposition of a "taught mother tongue" to replace vernacular language, which Illich attributes to the Spanish contemporary of Columbus, Elio Antonio de Nebrija. To decide if there's really anything here, we'll have to wait and see what results. For now, these essays remain provocative but slight. (Kirkus Reviews)