Bodyworkability

Abstract

This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. How do the tools and processes of disability assessment fragment, quantify, and measure bodies, body parts, and physical capacities? How do these medical and legal forms of compartmentalization translate physical capacity into a bioeconomically standardized ability to work, which I call “bodyworkability”? I explore these questions by focusing on coal miners' medical and labor experiences in the Soma Basin, Turkey. Bodyworkability describes the medico-legal substitution of body parts—limbs, muscles, bones, organs, tissues, nerves—with quantified units of standardized ability to work. The concept illuminates the distinction between physical capacity and the ability to perform specific types of work, enhancing understandings of both labor power and disability. The article centers on two disability assessment tools: the Table of Percentages of Handicap [Özür Oranları Cetveli]—or Barema, as used by the Council of Europe—and Balthazard's Formula/Index, used for individuals with multiple disabling conditions. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the concept of bodyworkability emerges from the lived experiences of miners who are injured, maimed, or diagnosed with occupational illnesses due to work accidents, disasters, and toxicity, and who struggle to obtain official disability recognition.