Interrupted futures: co-operative labour and the changing forms of collective precarity in rural Andean Peru

Sociological interest in precarious labour has focused on the existential insecurity associated with the discontinuous work relations of contemporary modes of production and the difficulties produced for the formation of effective modes of social and political solidarity. This essay, by contrast, explores the continuities of precarious living in the Southern Peruvian Andes over the past century, with a focus on how the affective force of social obligations and responsibilities to wider collectives (such as the family, the peasant community, or the co‐operative) both support and interrupt the search for more stable personal and collective futures. Approaching precarity as a relational condition, the essay traces how precarity takes form in the movements between formal and informal labour practices.