The bandit and his myths the collective production of violent charisma [Introduction]

From Pablo Escobar to Phoolan Devi, myths featuring bandits (more or less socially-responsible) have grown in popularity and reach and are disseminated through digital media. Constructed through processes of transcultural bricolage, these myths celebrate bandits, gangsters and mafia politicians, dead or alive, as effective weapons in the present. At the same time, they project an uncertain posthumous future for the bandit. In these myths, fact and fiction are fused to give birth to powerful fictional realities that exceed the life of these figures, giving them sometimes unexpected post-mortem careers. This introduction reveals how these fictional realities are elaborated through a process of ‘myth scripting’ that becomes constitutive of bandits’ authority. This concept is also our ethnographic object: we explore an everyday fabrication of seduction, fascination and terror indissociable from the bandits’ capacity to spur others to action that is essential to the criminal political economy

Migrant labourers’ struggles between village and urban migration sites: Labour standards, rural development and politics in South India

This article examines seasonal labour migrants’ social and spatial engagement with contemporary transformations in labour migration patterns, State policies and development issues in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. This state is at the forefront of the neo-liberal policies that have been rolled out in India since the 1990s. By looking at shifting temporalities, spaces and forms of labour contestation in South India, it considers how the forms, spaces and focuses of struggles of migrant labourers in the village and urban construction sites shape and are shaped by State policies which silence capital/labour issues in favour of development/poverty perspectives, village power relationships and the organization of the urban construction industry. Based on ethnographical fieldwork carried out with seasonal migrant labourers, both in their home village and in urban construction sites where they are employed as casual labourers, this article argues that the focus of labourer’s struggles is on village based social outcomes rather than on workplace issues. This is related to the absence of government labour regulation standards and rights within the city and to the flow of developments schemes in rural settings, cornered and redistributed by local leaders under logics of clientelism

Dilip Subramanian, Telecommunications Industry in India: State, Business and Labour in a Global Economy

In 1948, Indian Telephone Industries (ITI), a telecommunications equipment manufacturer, became India’s first State-run enterprise. In 2009, the company was privatized. Dilip Subramanian’s book provides a remarkable in-depth history of the journey of this Indian State-owned factory in post-colonial India, from the birth of the Nehruvian model of industrialization to the contemporary deregulation of the telecommunications industry. In a context of global neoliberal policies and discourses agai..

Producing ideal Bangladeshi migrants for precarious construction work in Qatar

The paper analyses the mediation of Bangladeshi construction worker migration to the Gulf and how multiple and unpredictable risks and opportunities are co-created by brokers, employers and the state. It examines how migrants navigate these to achieve imagined futures and their own role in co-creating precarity. The authors employ a relational lens to examine why aspiring migrants choose informal brokers over formal migration managers. The everyday practices of brokers in producing ideal Bangladeshi workers for the Qatari labour market and how this precarises migrant labour are unpacked. Migrant and broker interviews provide insights into the degrees of precarity experienced at different stages of the migration process. Entangled with these processes of precarisation are the strategies employed by migrant workers to resist precarity and transform their social and economic positions in the long term. The rich accounts presented in the paper provide evidence on the dialectical relationship between migrants and migration intermediaries which contrasts with popular discourses about brokers as exploiters and migrants as victims without agency

Waiting for the state: gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India

This article focuses on practices and meanings of time and waiting experienced by poor, low-class Dalits and Muslims in their routine encounters with the state in India. Drawing on ethnographic research from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, it presents experiences of waiting around queuing and applying for paperwork, cards, and welfare schemes, in order to examine the role of temporal processes in the production of citizenship and citizen agency. An analysis of various forms of waiting – ‘on the day’, ‘to and fro’, and ‘chronic’ waiting – reveals how temporal processes operate as mechanisms of power and control through which state actors and other mediators produce differentiated forms of citizenship and citizens. Temporal processes and their material outcomes, we argue, are shaped by class, caste and religion, while also drawing on – and reproducing – gendered identities and inequalities. However, rather than being ‘passive’ patients of the state, we show how ordinary people draw on money, patronage networks and various performative acts in an attempt to secure their rights as citizens of India

[Introduction] The making and unmaking of precarious, ideal subjects – migration brokerage in the Global South

The migration literature is often underpinned by the idea that migrants are either completely ‘free’ agents, individually choosing how best to achieve returns on their human capital and resources (Sjaastad 1962) or ‘agents of development’ for their home countries and regions (Turner and Kleist 2013). Conversely they are viewed as exploited slaves, being pushed into low-paid occupations and controlled by middlemen and employers. Unsurprisingly, in many close-knit societies a process as expensive and life-defining as migration is rarely undertaken as an individual act and is shaped by complex social interactions within kinship networks and beyond (Lindquist 2012). Brokerage is ever-present in migrant labour markets around the world, variously interpreted as occupying the ‘middle space’ between migrants and the state, helping migrants navigate complex immigration regimes (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012; McKeown 2012; Schapendonk 2017), acting as an extension of the state seeking to outsource border controls (Goh, Wee, and Yeoh 2017) and colluding with employers to cheapen and commoditise migrant labour (Guérin 2013; McCollum and Findlay 2018). It is increasingly recognised that an understanding of contemporary migration is not complete without an understanding of the mediating practices that facilitate and constrain it (Coe and Jordhus-Lier 2011; Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2018). This special issue investigates the role that migration brokers play in the subjectivation and precarisation of migrant men and women from marginalised classes and ethnicities in the Global South. It shows how these processes are critical for them to become a part of contemporary economic and political systems of international and internal labour circulation. It responds to the call of labour geographers for a deeper understanding of the ways in which diverse economic and social contexts result in complex forms of precarity (McDowell 2015) and adds to the evidence on the role of actors beyond the workplace in co-creating precarity (Buckley, McPhee, and Rogaly 2017)

Paperwork, patronage and citizenship: the materiality of everyday interactions with bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu, India

This article explores the material practices through which lower‐caste and poor villagers engage with bureaucracy in contemporary India. We take documents and paperwork – such as ration cards and community certificates – as a ‘lens’ through which to explore how paper materiality is infused with the politics of power, patronage, and identity. The article brings ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, South India, in conversation with two bodies of literature: one on the materiality of bureaucracy and one on the nature of political mediation in contemporary India. We demonstrate how everyday engagements with paperwork as well as processes of applying, form filling, and securing recommendations are constitutive of social and political relationships and, ultimately, of citizenship itself. Political mediation around paperwork and bureaucracy generates a hierarchy of citizens rather than equal citizenship for all, yet ordinary villagers transpire as anything but passive. Drawing on patronage networks, engaging in affective performances, and navigating a politics of identity, they actively negotiate access to the state in an attempt to claim their rights as citizens

The Entrapment of Unfree Labor: Theory and Examples from India

In this article we explore some aspects of contemporary unfree labor in rural south India. We draw on 130 case studies and (informally) extensive field research. We do so in order to make the central point that the conditions of unfreedom are variable and subject to change but that the basic vulnerabilities are significant. Being unfree in a labor relationship is a contingent effect of a set of factors. We stress the role of (a) entrapment of laborers, (b) immiseration within bondage, and (c) barriers to exit from the labor contract. In explanations, structural factors are also important. The article forms a basis for further empirical research in a variety of global settings even beyond India

One year soy protein supplementation has positive effects on bone formation markers but not bone density in postmenopausal women

BACKGROUND: Although soy protein and its isoflavones have been reported to reduce the risk of osteoporosis in peri- and post-menopausal women, most of these studies are of short duration (i.e. six months). The objective of this study was to examine if one year consumption of soy-containing foods (providing 25 g protein and 60 mg isoflavones) exerts beneficial effects on bone in postmenopausal women. METHODS: Eighty-seven eligible postmenopausal women were randomly assigned to consume soy or control foods daily for one year. Bone mineral density (BMD) and bone mineral content (BMC) of the whole body, lumbar (L1-L4), and total hip were measured using dual energy x-ray absorptiometry at baseline and after one year. Blood and urine markers of bone metabolism were also assessed. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Sixty-two subjects completed the one-year long study. Whole body and lumbar BMD and BMC were significantly decreased in both the soy and control groups. However, there were no significant changes in total hip BMD and BMC irrespective of treatment. Both treatments positively affected markers of bone formation as indicated by increased serum bone-specific alkaline phosphatase (BSAP) activity, insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), and osteocalcin (BSAP: 27.8 and 25.8%, IGF-I: 12.8 and 26.3%, osteocalcin: 95.2 and 103.4% for control and soy groups, respectively). Neither of the protein supplements had any effect on urinary deoxypyridinoline excretion, a marker of bone resorption. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that although one year supplementation of 25 g protein per se positively modulated markers of bone formation, this amount of protein was unable to prevent lumbar and whole body bone loss in postmenopausal women