second half of the article, I examine changes in economic opportunity and urban infrastructural development that occurred between 2005 and 2015. As young men found employment or reentered the education system, their temporal relationship to the present
Search Results
Too much time
Changing conceptions of boredom, progress, and the future among young men in urban Ethiopia, 2003–2015
Daniel Mains
Emptiness and its futures
Staying and leaving as tactics of life in Latvia
Dace Dzenovska
—abandoned collective farm buildings, old mechanical shops, or woodcutting facilities—as markers of a bygone era of employment and, increasingly, social life. “There is no work in the countryside,” people told me over and over again, “there is only work in the post
Anticipating Relations
Beyond Reciprocity and Obligation in the Ger Districts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Elizabeth Fox
supply of meat to see a family through the winter). For some years, Badrakh worked in construction during the summer, recruited for jobs by Ulzii's youngest brother. While relational networks can provide access to employment and other necessities, they
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 32–46 (15 total)
Anne Allison
Emerging from the defeat of the Second World War, Japan shifted its national lens from empire building abroad to productivity and prosperity at home. Organized around a particular form of sociality and capitalist economics, citizens worked hard for 'myhomeism' - the attachments (of men at the workplace, women to the household, children to school) that fuelled fast-growth economics and rising consumerism. In the last two decades of economic decline and more irregular employment, the 'nestling' of family and corporate capitalism has begun to unravel. In the 'lost decade' of the 1990s, many young Japanese assumed the ranks of what activist Karin Amamiya calls the 'precariat' - those precariously un(der)employed, unable to assume the social citizenship of my-homeism, and existentially bereft. How are people not only surviving hard times but also remaking their ties of social connectedness and their calculus of human worth?
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 95–108 (14 total)
Sarah Michelle Stohlman, Alice Szczepaniková, Ewa Ignaczak, Oane Visser, Peter Scholliers, Sjaak van der Geest, Hans Vermeulen, Tomasz Płonka, Jaap TImmer, and Oscar Salemink
Sarah Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller (eds.), Uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration
Susanne Binder and Jelena Tošič (eds.), Refugee studies and politics: human dimensions and research perspectives, and Philomena Essed, Georg Frerks, and Joke Schrijvers (eds.), Refugees and the transformation of societies: agency, policies, ethics and politics
Paul John Eakin (ed.), The ethics of life writing
Chris Hann and the ‘Property Relations’ group, The postsocialist agrarian question: property relations and the rural condition
Anne J. Kershen (ed.), Food in the migrant experience
Michael Lambek and Paul Antze (eds.), Illness and irony: on the ambiguity of suffering in culture
Cristóbal Mendoza, Labour immigration in Southern Europe: African employment in Iberian labour markets
Thomas Carl Patterson, Marx’s ghost: conversations with archaeologists
Adam Reed, Papua New Guinea’s last place: experiences of constraint in a postcolonial prison
Shinji Yamashita and J. S. Eades (eds.), Globalization in Southeast Asia: local, national and transnational perspectives
"Who wants to marry a farmer?"
Neoliberal industrialization and the politics of land and work in rural West Bengal
Sarasij Majumder
This article seeks to understand why both anti-land acquisition protests and proindustrial rhetoric of provincial governments in India are fodder for populist politics. To understand this, the article explores the meanings that land and development have for the rural communities in West Bengal, India, who are trying to straddle the multiple worlds of farm ownership and nonfarm employment. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in various parts of rural West Bengal, this article argues that resistances to corporate globalization, taken to be unambiguously anti-industrial or anticapitalist, reflect complex intentions. Protesting villagers are ambivalent toward corporate capital, but their support for industries and protests against corporations are grounded in local moral worlds that see both nonfarm work and landownership as markers of critical social distinction.
Expanding Religion and Islamic Morality in Turkey
The Role of the Diyanet’s Women Preachers
Chiara Maritato
Despite scholars’ tremendous interest in the dynamics of Turkish laicism, little to no attention has been paid to the actors and the practices through which Islamic morality is propagated among society every day. This article investigates the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet)’s policy that has been increasing the number of women working as preachers since 2003. To what extent and how does the employment of the Diyanet’s women preachers affect the way in which religion and Islamic public morality grow and are spread in Turkey today? What specifically is women’s contribution in this respect? Drawing on an ethnographic observation of the Diyanet’s women preachers’ activities in Istanbul mosques, the article outlines how they contribute to reshaping Turkish laicism while diffusing Islamic morality in the public space.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 43–60 (18 total)
“While it lasts”
Strategizing with precarity in internationally funded project labor in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Nejra Nuna Čengić
This article traces transformations of labor through an exploration of a relatively new employment sector in supervised postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where internationally funded, temporary, project-based contracts are the rule. Focusing on atypical white-collar precarious workers who have strung together 10 to 25 years on successive short projects in IGOs and NGOs in Sarajevo (under the umbrella of democratization, peacebuilding and EU integration agendas), I investigate their ways of strategizing to accumulate such continuity through cultivation of three kinds of assets: sector-specific competences, favorable positionality, and a disposition of optimism. I argue that their “successful” strategizing, generally in line with neoliberal rationality and mainly developed within this sector, is facilitated by similar structural conditions of overall precarity, temporariness and provisionality in wider BiH society.
The meaning of Nandigram
Corporate land invasion, people's power, and the Left in India
Tanika Sarkar and Sumit Chowdhury
This article discusses the events at Nandigram in West Bengal where in 2006-7, a Left Front government collaborated with an Indonesian corporate group to forcibly acquire land from local peasants and construct a Special Economic Zone. The events are placed against the broad processes of accumulation by dispossession through which peasants are losing their land and corporate profits are given priority over food production. The article looks at the working and implications of the policies and the way in which a Communist Party-led government had become complicit with such processes over the last decade. It critically examines the logic that the government offered for the policies: that of the unavoidable necessity of industrialization, demonstrating that industrialization could have been done without fresh and massive land loss and that industries of the new sort do not generate employment or offset the consequences of large scale displacements of peasants. The article's central focus is on the peasant resistance in the face of the brutalities of the party cadres and the police. We explore the meaning of the victory of the peasants at Nandigram against the combined forces of state and corporate power, especially in the context of the present neo-liberal conjuncture.
Remaking traditional sociality, ephemeral friendships and enduring political alliances
"State-made" Dalit youth in rural North India
Manuela Ciotti
This article explores histories of social separation, impermanent encounters, and lasting political alliances between Dalit (“untouchable”) Chamar male youth and members of the upper-caste Brahman community in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, North India. The entry of young Chamar people into educational institutions followed by political mobilization and, for some, the transition into employment, has led them to appropriate spaces often beyond the purview of previous generations. Against the backdrop of Chamar histories as agricultural laborers, powerless political subjects, and actors of religious marginality, new forms of masculinity, sociality, and class formation have come into being. The article focuses on young Chamar men’s involvement in village politics, particularly during the 2005 local elections. It is argued that village politics—rather than inter-caste friendships, which remain short-lived as a result of caste discrimination—has engendered an arena of sociality where caste-driven interest produce more durable social links between young low-caste men and members of the upper-caste community. As India’s political history illustrates, the episode of electoral politics analyzed in this article brings together differently situated communities within the nation, highlighting how the unresolved question of caste discrimination conflates with the compulsion to political power. If young Chamar men are the new protagonists in this history, their role is the outcome of broader changes in the consciousness around political participation and the opening up of democratic possibilities for minority populations in a postcolonial setting.