Marxism, Sarcasm, Ethnography: Geographical Fieldnotes from South India

This paper addresses questions of ethnography in geographic fieldwork through research conducted on globalisation and work in Tiruppur, an industrial boomtown in South India. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in western Tamilnad State became India's centrepiece in the export of garments made of knitted cloth. This industrial boom has been organised through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of Gounders from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect, the whole town works like a decentralised factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. My research explores the historical geographic trajectories linking agrarian and industrial work, and the ways in which these histories are used in the present. In these uses of the past in remaking self and place, I interrogate the self-presentations of Tiruppur's entrepreneurs, as these “self-made men” hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to “toil”. This paper explores questions of ethnographic method emerging from a political-economic context in which globalisation has worked by turning “toil” into capital.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74823/1/1467-9493.00150.pd

Ethnographies of Power

What does it mean to work with radical concepts in our time of rampant inequality, imperial-capitalist plunder, racial/sexual/class violence and ecocide? When concepts from the past seem inadequate, how do scholars and activists concerned with social change decide what concepts to work with or renew? The contributors to Ethnographies of Power address these questions head on. Gillian Hart is a key thinker in radical political economy, geography, development studies, agrarian studies and Gramscian critique of postcolonial capitalism. In Ethnographies of Power each contributor engages her work and applies it to their own field of study. These applied concepts include: ‘gendered labour’ practices among South African workers, reading ‘racial capitalism’ through agrarian debates, using ‘relational comparison’ in an ethnography of schooling across Durban, reworking ‘multiple socio-spatial trajectories’ in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, critiquing the notion of South Africa’s ‘second economy’, revisiting ‘development’ processes and ‘Development’ discourses in US military contracting, reconsidering Gramsci’s ‘conjunctures’ geographically, finding divergent ‘articulations’ in Cape Town land occupations, and exploring ‘nationalism’ as central to revaluing recyclables at a Soweto landfill. Ethnographies of Power offers an invaluable toolkit for activists and scholars engaged in sharpening their critical concepts for the social and environmental change necessary for our collective future

Caste, Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women's Work and Agency in Rural South India

This paper reexamines the linkages between women's work, agency, and well-being based on a household survey and in-depth interviews conducted in rural Tamil Nadu in 2009 and questions the prioritization of workforce participation as a path to gender equality. It emphasizes the need to unpack the nature of work performed by and available to women and its social valuation, as well as women's agency, particularly its implications for decision making around financial and nonfinancial household resources in contexts of socioeconomic change. The effects of work participation on agency are mediated by factors like age and stage in the life cycle, reproductive success, and social location – especially of caste – from which women enter the workforce

Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity: waiting for social justice in Wentworth, South Africa

South Africans today inhabit a fragmented and discontinuous landscape, often despite their most cosmopolitan intentions. Grounded in the Coloured neighbourhood of Wentworth in Durban, this paper asks how remains of the past appear as differently temporalised artefacts, some buried in the archaic past and others more readily used to critique the present. In particular, I explore photographs of inmates of a concentration camp from 1902, township youth appropriating a specific commons in the early 1980s, black political photography from the late 1980s, and film wrestling with the ambiguities of post-apartheid political life in a Coloured neighbourhood next to an oil refinery. What unites these moments is not just a meta-theoretical concern with photography as both documentary and aesthetic, but the specific political uses of images, exemplified by the work of two black political photographers. Their practice provides cues for situating these other photographs in a long century of multiple dispossessions. The paper explores when and how photographs might shock the viewer into recognising resemblances, connections and potential solidarities, not just with the past, but with subaltern critique of racial space and subjectivity in the present. I suggest how we might view photographs from various moments relationally, to understand how, in one corner of contemporary South Africa, people continue to wait for justice despite uncertainty and official dissimulation, in a state of anticipatory frustration

The agrarian origins of the knitwear industrial cluster in Tiruppur, India

It is noted that the reorganization of work in Tiruppur into small-firm networks has propelled it to the centre of India's cotton knitwear exports. Industrial studies explanations remain unresolved in reconciling informalized, insecure labour alongside the possibility of an innovative 'industrial district'. An analysis of the industrial present reveals that not only are the majority of owners of the agrarian Gounder caste but they are also predominantly ex-industrial workers. The paper investigates the regional and agrarian processes through which Gounders of worker-peasant origins forged their class mobility through their 'toil', while also remaking the knitwear industrial cluster into dynamic small-firm networks