Techniques of non-personship: How butlers maintain social distance while serving elites in physical proximity

Elite milieux contain a fundamental tension: between, on the one hand, the impetus of elites to exclude non-elite bodies from their spaces to maintain exclusivity, and, on the other, allowing non-elite bodies into their spaces to carry out the labour they depend on. This paper explores how this tension is managed by service workers themselves through the practice of ‘non-personship’, a labour craft component oriented towards procuring social distance between labourer and employer . Drawing from an enactive ethnography of the butler profession, it illustrates how different embodied techniques of non-personship are deployed vis-à-vis the level of physical proximity exhibited between server and served. In contrast to related ‘invisible work’ scholarship that tends to stress the economic devaluation of labour, my analysis stresses symbolic devaluation and the relevance of this as service work in elite contexts becomes both increasingly prominent and physically proximate.