Au Pair E-Book

Daniel Miller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 468

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Many families leave their children for years to be looked after by young people about whom they know next to nothing, from places they have barely heard of. Who are these au pairs, why do they come and what is their experience of this arrangement? Do they, for their part, find that they are treated as one of the family, and would they even want to be? After a year of careful research, this book shows how most of our assumptions and expectations about au pairs are wrong.

This is the first book devoted to the lives of au pairs, their leisure as well as their work time. We see this world from the eyes of the visitors, and their unique perspective on what lies at the heart of our family life. The book does not flinch from documenting the realities of the situation Ð the racism and the problematic behaviour of the au pairs themselves, as much as the ignorance and exploitation they can be subject to. The book is a case study in how to come to feel modern life empathetically from the viewpoint of one of those many migrant groups we take for granted and rely on but rarely try to understand.

Leseprobe

AU PAIR

ZB – To my grandmother

DM – To our au pairs (well, most of them)

AU PAIR

ZUZANA BÚRIKOVÁ AND DANIEL MILLER

polity

Copyright © Zuzana Búriková and Daniel Miller 2010

The right of Zuzana Búriková and Daniel Miller to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5957-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed and bound by MPG Books Group, UK

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1    Why Not?

2    An Embarrassing Presence

3    The Hard Work and the Soft Touch

4    Sort of English

5    Bored in Beddlingham

6    Men

7    Out of Time

8    Conclusion: Structure, Behaviour and Consequence

Appendix: Academic Studies of Domestic Labour

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We cannot name our informants individually, either au pairs or host families, because that would breach our agreement with them to preserve anonymity. We hope this will not be taken in any way as a sign of our ingratitude. We are both hugely grateful to everyone who provided us with their time and their own insights. The generosity of the au pairs to Zuzana was remarkable. For her, this was never just an experience of collecting information. As in the true sense of participant observation, these are basically the stories of the friends with whom she spent a year, many of whom gave her unqualified trust and companionship. They may not agree with everything we have to say, but we hope that our mutual efforts will lead to better understanding and justice in the institution of the au pair.

We are also very grateful to the Leverhulme Foundation, which provided the essential funding of the project. Zuzana would like to express her gratitude to IWM in Vienna, where she prepared the project as a junior visiting fellow. Grant VEGA 1/0632/08 (Sociologická a antropologická analýza spotreby produktov a vol’noasových aktivít na Slovensku) enabled Zuzana to spend a month writing with Danny in London. Since completing fieldwork, she has been employed at the Institute of Ethnology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and later also in the anthropology section of the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Masaryk University in Brno. She worked on this manuscript while employed at these institutions.

We are very indebted to the following people, who provided us with thoughtful comments on sections of the manuscript: Miloslav Bahna, Ivana Baji-Hajdukovi, Danijela Djurši, Martin Fotta, Nicky Gregson, Jan Grill, L’ubica Herzánová, Jana Levická, Deirdre Mckay, Anna Pertierra, Ira Price, Michal Šípoš, Helena Tuinská and anonymous readers from Polity Press. This book was also fed by numerous discussions with colleagues and friends, including Bridget Anderson, Rosie Cox, Mirina Fornayová, Radovan Haluzík and Lenka Nahodilová.

Zuzana would like to thank to Ján Gregor, Jozef Gryga, Milka Pribišová, Helena Tuinská and Elena Želibabková for their friendship and trust during the project. Her sister, Petra Slamová, made her stay in London much more pleasant than it would have been otherwise. She is especially grateful to her granny and to her partner, Peter Sekerák, for all their love, support and encouragement during the years of writing. Without them it would have been much more difficult if not impossible to finish the book. Danny is particuarly indebted to his own family, to his wife, Rickie, and also to his children, Rachel and David, who, in retrospect, now appear as the subjects of his own early participant observation work on this institution. Finally we should like to thank John Thompson and Polity Press for their help and guidance through the process of publication.

PROLOGUE

This is a book about what it is like to be an au pair in a Western European city – not just working for a family, but the whole experience of deciding to become an au pair, seeing oneself as an au pair, and its longer-term consequences. It is based upon spending a year hanging out with au pairs and conducting an ethnography, the standard methodology used by anthropologists. We undertook this work because, as with most forms of domestic labour, we suspected that most people tend to take this institution for granted. They may use au pairs when they need to, but are somewhat embarrassed by their presence and even by the existence of the relationship involved. Yet we would hope that most of us would actually want to have some better sense of what the consequences of such an arrangement are for the people who make this journey and work in the somewhat strange situation of living with a family but not actually being part of that family.

For an academic book this work is quite unusual in containing almost no academic references within the main body of the text. So we are hoping that much of it is a good read, uncluttered with constant external referencing. Nevertheless we certainly also intend it to be viewed as an academic contribution, based on scholarship, original analysis and insight. To achieve this we have tried to experiment with several styles of writing, combining individual stories with more analytical chapters.

There was a second reason why we have left our engagement with the academic literature to an appendix and to differentiate our study from the mainstream academic research on domestic labour. That literature is concerned primarily to reveal the exploitation and inequality found in this form of work, and it is thereby directed to domestic workers largely in their capacity as labourers. In this book, by contrast, our primary commitment to au pairs has been that of ethnographers. Au pairs may be concerned more about relationships with boyfriends or with London than with their host families. Many of the topics that we explore have to do with intimate issues of embarrassment, humiliation, mutual misunderstanding, and uncertainties that are not formally aspects of labour.

One of the strengths of an ethnographic approach is that it provides material to humanize its subjects – to treat them as just ordinary people, with their own foibles and imperfections, and not only as victims or perpetrators of a process. We do examine issues of exploitation, power and prejudice. But we could certainly imagine positions being reversed – how, given the opportunity, the au pairs would have behaved much like their hosts. There was racism, stereotyping and opportunism in exploiting the other on both sides. This is why we are also concerned in our concluding chapters to analyse the institution itself and see how it is often institutional structures that have fostered rather than prevented such exploitation.

In contrast to most forms of domestic labour studied by academics, the institution of the au pair did not arise out of the international division of labour or from a servant culture. It started from a more egalitarian tradition by which German and English middle-class families sent young women to spend time with French and Swiss families, largely to improve their French. This was a much more reciprocal sense of engagement that followed from exchanges of schoolchildren between families, and is mainly a reflection of the dominance of language. The official model is of a pseudo-family arrangement in which the au pair is supposed to be incorporated within the household more as a member than as a labourer.

We restricted ourselves to the study of Slovak au pairs in the London region. Slovaks may well be one of the largest groups of au pairs in London relative to population size. Our research took place at a time when the typical au pair was starting to come from locations such as Slovakia, Turkey or Croatia rather than from Paris or Stockholm and employers were beginning to extend from the first and second zones of the London underground to zones 5 and 6. We were concerned to investigate the degree to which this represented a change in the institution. Au pairs are now coming with different motivations, while families may not see Slovaks within the same egalitarian framework as they do Scandinavians. Our fieldwork also took place shortly after the time when Slovakia joined the EU. This meant that one of the main reasons people might choose to become an au pair – to gain a visa to visit the UK – was no longer valid. Despite this, au pairing seems to have retained its central role for young Slovak women coming to London.

The project consisted of working with fifty au pairs, who, because they sometimes changed families, represented eighty-six host families. Zuzana recorded interviews with all fifty au pairs. But the primary methodology of anthropology consists of participant observation, which seeks the broadest possible engagement with every aspect of the lives of the people whom the anthropologist seeks to understand. In addition, we both work within a particular subdiscipline called material culture studies. So, as well as talking with au pairs and observing their lives, we paid particular attention to details of how exactly they decorate their rooms within the family house and their attitude to things such as cleaning materials, food and clothing.

Zuzana is herself a Slovak, from a region in which it was becoming increasingly common for young women to become au pairs. As an ethnographer she spent nearly every day of her year in London in the direct company of au pairs. Although she was very careful to ensure that the au pairs were aware that she was there in her capacity as academic researcher, generally this hardly constrained the development of friendship and companionship. In many ways these were ideal conditions for participant observation. Most of the au pairs spent the day in isolation looking after children and cleaning houses. Not surprisingly, they welcomed the presence of a fellow Slovak who could also assist in these tasks. Zuzana’s study often developed into more general friendships in which she shared a wide variety of experiences and confidences.

Danny, by contrast, comes from a North London, middle-class Jewish milieu, the typical background for a household employing au pairs, and had himself employed sixteen au pairs from a range of different countries in raising his own children. He was well placed, then, to carry out a small complementary research project on those who employed au pairs. In some cases he worked with the same families that Zuzana was seeing from the other side and in others he used his own networks. Although there was a considerable imbalance in the time spent in fieldwork, in every other respect this is an entirely joint project. As well as working with host families, Zuzana introduced Danny to many of the au pairs and the places they frequented. The whole book has been written collaboratively, with each aspect of the material being discussed, much of it while sitting side by side at a computer, supplemented by rewriting exchanged through e-mails between London and Bratislava.

All the names that appear in the text are fictitious, and other minor changes have been made in order to ensure that we kept the promise made to all informants, to respect their anonymity. The same name always designates the same person. All descriptions are taken from actual observation or interviews, unless we specify otherwise. But in the interests of anonymity some details are switched between different persons. The chapter that is written as a day in the life of one au pair is built from many different days, and involves several au pairs. All participants were informed by us of our status as researchers who were intending to publish this material under conditions of anonymity.

Each chapter of this book is written in a different style. Chapter 1 consists simply of the story of four individuals, with a brief, more generalized conclusion, while chapter 2 is a more conventionally academic discussion based on material culture analysis of the relationship seen through rooms, cleaning and food. Chapter 3 uses a different genre – a day in the life – describing the work of an au pair, but this is followed by the completely different interpretation of the same relationship by a host mother.

Chapter 4 tackles one of the most difficult aspects of the encounter, which is that of racism, as seen on both sides of this relationship. The next two chapters move out of the house and examine the leisure activities of the au pairs and their relationship with men. Again we flow between more literary methods for conveying the stories of the place and individuals to more generalized academic descriptions. By chapter 7, however, we feel ready to move to a more academic analysis of the time spent in London, using the model of a rite de passage. This leads to the conclusion, where we felt we needed to take responsibility for making our own recommendations as to how to improve the current situation – recommendations that we believe would help curb the tendencies towards exploitation which we have uncovered, and thereby help families as well as au pairs. Finally the appendix provides both a brief immersion of our particular study within the larger comparative study of domestic labour and an effective reading list for those who want to learn more about these kinds of relationships.

–– 1 ––

WHY NOT?

Barbora

As with several other major decisions in her life, Barbora’s decision to become an au pair was made while sitting in a shed surrounded by a circle of appreciative pigs. Actually people also appreciate Barbora, who is often seen as the life and soul of social gatherings, radiating warmth from smiles that arise from genuine generosity rather than any desire to be liked. A friend described her as looking like a small bird, though with disproportionally large attentive eyes and a contagious laugh. She is effervescent, though not particularly pretty, and her sparkle is balanced by the feeling of solid stability that speaks to her village background and seems to put people at their ease. Despite this, for Barbora herself, the only place that seemed completely calm and free of the stress that somehow attaches itself to all relationships with people was in her retreat at the pigsty. Pigs also seemed to sense that she is a village girl who has grown up knowing their ways, and were entirely at ease in her company. Yet it was her close relationship with pigs that ironically had become one of the reasons why she now had to escape from stress by becoming an au pair.

Barbora’s detailed observations of pigs had led from an impoverished village upbringing to being within a few weeks of completing a PhD on critical factors in pigs relating body weight to reproduction. This was the reason she had visited this particular sty in southern Slovakia nearly every day for the last three years. But today (in early June 2004) she discovered for the third time that the department had failed to purchase the software required for her to complete her analysis. This failure had brought to the surface a truth she had tried to suppress for a very long time – that actually the potential career that would have followed, had she been able to complete this work, had far more to do with her mother’s ambition than her own.

The decision was not entirely of the moment. A week earlier, when she was already well aware that the departmental news might not be good, Barbora had been sitting with the pigs and calculating. While there were many things at that point in her life she did not want, her fantasies for the future all seemed to be focused around one thing, giving these pigs a proper home. Admittedly, in this farmstead of the future there was probably an adoring husband and many happy children, but they all seemed to come naturally as accoutrements to accommodation that after three years’ research she knew would be absolutely perfect for the pigs. But this vision would cost money. The only way she could think of to raise the capital and at the same time to escape the combined stress of parents and academic frustration was to plan for a year as an au pair. Who knows, maybe this might be followed by an internship at an ecological pig farm she had read about somewhere in the British countryside. Perhaps the reason why in this vision of her future the pigs were in the foreground and a husband in the background was because she had also recently broken up with her boyfriend, who, in contrast, seemed quite clear about his academic ambitions – a single-mindedness that, she had felt, would very likely be to the detriment of whoever turned out to be his partner.