Precarity

And he recognized then that the crux of his wretchedness had been the fear lest he might not acquit himself of his long indebtedness to Monsieur through yielding him satisfaction in some perfected fruit of his art; of which, in proportion as Monsieur was certain, Gaspard was rendered more miserable through the delay that augmented its precarity.

[I]t would have been simpler to maintain the high level of yields by periodical relocations of village field systems and by bringing fresh ground under the plough than to cultivate permanent agricultural bases, labour-intensive, difficult to maintain and risky because of the various precarities of nature (salinization, flooding …).

She looks at him, his round cheeks, his eyelashes, his damp hair. Does the boy sense, already, the precarity of all this?

"Precarity," or precariousness, is an essential element in true voluntary poverty, a saintly French Canadian priest from Martinique has written us. […] Precarity enables us better to help the poor. When a community is always building and enlarging and embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for the poor. We have no right to do so as long as there are slums and breadlines anywhere.

The individual precarity of persons thus provides a psychology for, a sense of plausibility for, a doctrine of collective precarity, thereby justifying a pseudo-unity under the nation state.

So far, we have learned that jobs can be obscure, but also that tasks or "jobs within jobs" can be obscure or made obscure. A phenomenon that catches a general tendency towards obscurity is what [Guy] Standing calls "uptitling" – to give a job a high-sounding epithet to conceal its precarity and, I would say, its substance.

The field of diaspora studies is similarly in process, reflecting and shaping new forms of migration and settlement, emergent forms of belonging and the precarities of ongoing global inequalities, dislocation and violence.