Falina Enriquez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Trained as a cultural and linguistic anthropologist at the University of Arizona (B.A.) and University of Chicago (M.A., PhD), Dr. Enriquez studies music and language as an ensemble, one that sheds light on how people construct the world and emplace themselves—and others—within it. Since 2009, she has ethnographically researched the cultural politics of music in Recife, Brazil. She addresses this topic in her book, The Costs of the Gig Economy: Musical Entrepreneurs and the Cultural Politics of Inequality in Northeastern Brazil, published in 2022 by the University of Illinois Press. Her work has also appeared in journals like Current Anthropology and Luso-Brazilian Review, and in edited volumes, such as Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil, published in 2021 by Rutgers University Press.

This presentation will summarize insights from The Costs of the Gig Economy: Musical Entrepreneurs and the Cultural Politics of Inequality in Northeastern Brazil (2022, University of Illinois Press). This book draws on years of ethnographic study to compare the lives of music professionals who work in various traditional and contemporary genres. These artists and cultural workers have increasingly had to become more entrepreneurial due to specific cultural policies, market pressures, and, more generally, the normalization of temporary, unstable gig work. The book reveals that ostensibly neutral market solutions—and the ideologies that uphold these—reinforce and generate overlapping racial and class-based inequalities. While these processes and their effects are relevant in Recife, they are nonetheless linked to socioeconomic and cultural conditions that are shaping the lives of many people around the world.