Exploring Limbo: The experience of job-loss and unemployment in a jewellery city in Italy

Abstract

The article investigates the experience of job-loss and the following unemployment. Based on the ethnographic research conducted in Valenza, Italy, between 2008 and 2012, the article challenges an interpretation of unemployment as a liminal phase. I argue former workers experience unemployment as a “Limbo” – an existential condition underpinned by the ambiguity of being and at the same time not-being a worker. The exploration of this “Limbo” sheds light on the emotional, physical and symbolic labour that laid-off workers undertake facing their new condition. This research offers elements to read the loss of a job as an exit from a community of practices and to investigate the ways in which individual negotiate this departure.

Keywords

• unemployment
• ruins
• “Limbo”
• community of practices
• economic crisis