Microenterprise development, industrial labour, and the seductions of precarity

Microenterprise development is underpinned by an ideology that the solution to poverty is the integration of the poor into market relations. This article addresses the paradox that its ‘beneficiaries’ may be dispossessed industrial workers who already have a long history of participation in the capitalist economy. Exploring the transformation of garment workers in Trinidad from factory employees to home-based ‘micro-entrepreneurs’, I argue that working conditions and labour rights have deteriorated under the protective cover of seemingly laudable policies to promote economic empowerment via self-employment. Showing how microenterprise initiatives contribute to women workers’ ‘adverse incorporation’ (Phillips, 2011) into global production networks, this article calls for renewed attention to the labour politics of microenterprise development

Introduction: thinking about Caribbean media worlds

This special issue brings together cultural studies of media with current themes in Caribbean studies and anthropology. The papers were part of an interdisciplinary conference panel focused upon Caribbean Media Worlds. At the outset, we wanted to demonstrate that there are several specific reasons why the Caribbean makes a particularly interesting case study for examining the cultural practices, relationships, micro-political encounters and identities that surround the distribution and use of media technologies. The collection here examines media in interaction with the world of which it is part — in this case, that world is imagined as `the Caribbean'. The main goal of this introduction is to contextualize the studies by presenting key ideas within Caribbean research as a backdrop against which the conceptual and analytic frameworks which emerge in the contributors' articles can be better understood

From Ethnographic Knowledge to Anthropological Intelligence: An Anthropologist in the Office of Strategic Services in Second World War Africa

This article explores the overlapping modalities and practical purposes of anthropological ethnographic knowledge and political–military intelligence gathering – the commonalities as well as the boundaries between them – through an analysis of the career of the anthropologist Jack Sargent Harris (1912–2008), a secret operative for the United States’ Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War in Nigeria and South Africa. Calling upon archival and oral historical sources, the article relates Harris’s training in Boasian cultural anthropology and as a professional ethnographer of African societies and cultures to the ways he recruited informants, conducted surveillance, related to foreign Allied officials, utilized documentary evidence, and worked to establish authority and credibility in his wartime intelligence reporting. The article argues that political purpose is a central artefact of anthropological ethnography as it is in other ethnographic modalities even if the justifications for these endeavours remain distinct