Why do we work? Necessity? A sense of calling? To bring meaning to our lives? For anthropologists of work, the answers always begin with workers themselves. Through ethnographic fieldwork—a combination of open-ended interviews and participant-observation—anthropologists seek to understand workers’ own experiences of the work they do and why they do it. In this seminar, we’ll use ethnographic case studies of U.S. workers to investigate broader questions around the meaning of work.