As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, a different set of optics is required to grasp the ways in which work is practised and understood in wage-scarce economies across the world. The urgency of this exercise is exacerbated by the overlapping crises that have marked this young century. In 2009, a year after the global financial crisis of 2008, Keith Hart and colleagues published an edited volume entitled The Human Economy in response to a growing interdisciplinary thirst for other ways of thinking and doing the economy. They argued that a human economy requires four key elements: a relevance to everyday life; an application to diverse situations; a recognition of plural needs and interests (beyond income and consumption); and an expansive commitment to addressing ‘humanity as a whole’ (Hart et al, 2010a, 5). Before embarking on the intellectual exercise of imagining what the post-crisis human economy could look like, the authors urge us to pay attention to what already exists: ‘The human economy is already everywhere. People always insert themselves practically into economic life on their own account. What they do there is often obscured, marginalised or repressed by dominant economic institutions and ideologies’ (Hart et al, 2010a, 5). More than a decade later, the signs of a post-crisis ‘human economy’ remain elusive. Instead, protracted uncertainty and austerity have become the norm as the world grapples with the confluence of global financial crises and global health pandemics.

This chapter examines how people make a living in conditions of protracted uncertainty, and the ways in which the labour involved in doing so comprises a diversity of ‘cultural logics’ (Gidwani, 2008) and social and economic forms that are too often overlooked (Hart et al, 2010a). The chapter responds to recent invitations to ‘rethink work’ and broaden debates beyond what constitutes formal or informal labour, by encouraging ‘openness to plurality of form’ itself (Hart, 2009, 158). The aim here is to offer ethnographically informed reflections that might deepen our understanding of how diverse economic activities are organized and narrated through ordinary individual working lives in different regions of the world.