The Nano Controversy: Peasant Identities, the Land Question and Neoliberal Industrialization in Marxist West Bengal, India

As the peasant-Nano opposition suggests, urban activists and intellectuals dubbed the movement against the land acquisition and building of the factory as a complete rejection of globalization and industrialization. This paper contests these public images of the protests against land acquisition by drawing attention to certain paradoxes that the Singur case presents (which I discuss below). I address these paradoxes through an ethnography done in villages where the controversy and the protests took place for two years (2006-2008). My ethnography suggests a perspective on protests against land acquisition in India, which is different from the usual narrative of capitalist industrialization and globalization that Marxists, such as David Harvey (2007, 2008) has put forward

The Gift of Solidarity: Women Navigating Jewellery Work and Patriarchal Norms in Rural West Bengal, India

© 2020 SAGE Publications. In the context of declining women’s participation in the formal economy in India, this article looks at how women’s work in the informal sector of jewellery-making emerges as a gift. Gendered discourses on work turn men, who worked as labourers, into supervisors who monitor and control work situations and sort and grade final products in jewellery workshops. Following Anna Tsing, I argue that jewellery products start their lives as gifts but as they move from women (who are seen as housewives and family members) to men (who are seen as professionals/experts within the workshop) and beyond, they become commodities. This journey from gift to commodity within the workshop is made possible by a gendered discourse on work and by the dynamics within small landholding middle-caste households. Further, I underscore that women’s informal networks often help them cope with the emotional and affective tensions of work and the demands imposed on them by the men and their own households. Women facilitate the transition from gift to commodity by colluding amongst themselves to work in these informal spaces to maintain household status within peri-urban villages of West Bengal

Narratives of risk and poor rural women’s (dis)-engagements with microcredit-based development in Eastern India

Microcredit has come under severe academic criticism in recent years, but the diversity of local practices and discourses that respond to and critique microcredit is still under-examined. By exploring emergent entrepreneurial practices and strategic loan avoidance in Darjeeling, India, expressed locally in narratives of “risk,” this article emphasizes the counter-hegemonic aspects of local engagements with microcredit. We contend that women are neither passive victims of nor willing participants in microcredit. They selectively appropriate the global discourse of microcredit to formulate a skeptical subject position that criticizes the practice. Simultaneously, they contest microcredit’s complicity with local patriarchies that exploit their labor and entrepreneurial activity. While critical of the indebtedness microcredit causes them, women value the entrepreneurial possibilities it opens up. We acknowledge the importance of the predominant Foucauldian–Marxist critiques of microcredit that posit it as another instance of “accumulation through dispossession,” but move beyond this view to focus on women’s creative engagement with microcredit

Fair Trade and Fair Trade Certification of Food and Agricultural Commodities: Promises, Pitfalls, and Possibilities

The global circulation of food and agricultural commodities is increasingly influenced by the ethical choices of Western consumers and activists who want to see a socially and environmentally sustainable trade regime in place. These desires have culminated in the formation of an elaborate system of rules, which govern the physical and social conditions of food production and circulation, reflected in transnational ethical regimes such as fair trade. Fair trade operates through certifying producer communities with sustainable production methods and socially just production relationships. By examining interdisciplinary academic engagements with fair trade, we argue that fair trade certification is a transnational bio-political regime; although, it holds the potential for reflecting global counterpolitics. By reviewing the literature on the emergence and history of fair trade certification, agro-food chains, case studies on certified producer communities and the certification process, this article shows that fair trade certification is a new governing mechanism to discipline farmers and producers in the Global South by drawing them into globalized market relationships. However, recent studies suggest that fair trade also leaves open the potential for creative iterations of the fair trade idea in producer communities to give voice to their situated struggles for justice. Thus, fair trade constitutes a contested moral terrain that mediates between the visions of justice harbored by producers and activists in the Global South and reflexive practices of the Western consumers. To map these critical developments around fair trade and fair trade certification, close ethnographic attention to the material and symbolic life of certification is vital