Anne Waldrop

Grandmother, Mother and Daughter: Changing agency of Indian, middle-class women, 1908–2008

Covering one hundred years, this paper recounts the life stories of three generations of middle-class women of the New Delhi-based Kapoor family. By taking the methodological view that individuals born approximately at the same time, within the same class segment, and at the same cultural place will be shaped by the same historical structures so that their lives to some extent are synchronized into a gendered, generational experience, these three life stories are viewed as voices that reflect their respective generational class segments. In view of this, the paper uses the three life stories to discuss changes in womens agency within the urban, educated, upper middle-class. Agency is here understood as control over resources, and it is argued that in order to understand changes in womens agency, one should take into account the impact of both social, economic structures and cultural ideologies. When analysing the three life stories, the overall finding is that the granddaughter has had more control over her own life than her mother and grandmother. However, by acknowledging that cultural ideologies and social economic structures are not always synchronized, a nuanced and many-dimensional picture of twists and turns in these middle-class womens degree and type of agency over time emerges.

Maid in India: Negotiating and Contesting the Boundaries of Domestic Work

Building on qualitative, unstructured interviews with domestic workers, this article seeks to illuminate the complexity of the specific strategies and negotiations adopted by domestic workers as they contest and challenge the sociocultural markers of hierarchical difference that their employers mobilize as they try to create boundaries and distinctions between themselves and their employees. To understand the dynamics of this boundary work, we apply concepts and insights from James Scott’s work on everyday resistance and hidden transcripts. We argue that while paid domestic work within the home is a social relation of extreme inequality characterized by fundamental domination and dependency between domestic workers and their employers, domestic workers deploy creative and innovative strategies to contest practices and ideologies of inequality and distinction put forth by their employers. In doing so, they provide a contestation, albeit partial and negotiated, of how social boundaries are used by employers to maintain difference and distinction from the workers.

Dalit Politics in India and New Meaning of Caste

Abstract This article focuses on the rise of Dalit political mobilisation in India and analyses the meanings of caste that emanate through the writings of some contemporary Dalit activists. It is argued that most of the influential anthropological interpretations of caste have had in common a tendency to treat caste first and foremost as a static phenomenon of ‘traditional’ India, and hence that these are insufficient in order to understand caste in India today. Caste has become increasingly important in Indian politics and in the process the meaning of caste has changed radically. It is argued that only a historical and structural perspective is capable of capturing the many manifestations of caste practices and ideologies over time.

Introduction to Special Issue: Qualitative Method/ologies in Development Studies

The articles in this special issue address a selection of questions in qualitative methods and methodologies in development studies, which is a topic that often seems to be overlooked or under-communicated in international journals. Searching through previous editions of Forum for Development Studies, we find only a few articles with methods as the primary topic, although method/ology is arguably addressed in articles’ methods sections. For method/ological themes one has to turn to thematically focused journals such as Ethnography, or to recent resource materials such as Sage Research Methods Cases (Hansen, 2018). Whereas the wealth of textbooks within social sciences provides comprehensive methodological elaborations or overviews of methods, they may not be ideally suited for the needs within development studies. Undoubtedly, publications dedicated to methodologies and methods for fieldwork in the global South are scarce, with Doing Development Research (Desai and Potter, 2006) as one notable exception. Furthermore, the changing nature of the digital and global world opens up for new methods at the researchers’ disposal. Far from the studies of the founding fathers and mothers of development studies and anthropology, globalisation and digitalisation processes impact on how one is able to perform research, i.e. on the methods – understood as the concrete techniques and practical choices involved in collecting and analysing data. Underlying such discussions there should also be room for methodological elaborations – understood as a systematically, theoretically, philosophical and disciplinary grounded reflection about the justifications for the chosen methods. This special issue was initiated in order to contribute to such discussions. It draws on an initiative by Professor emerita Turid Hagene that spurred the collaborative efforts of the Research Group on Development, Power and Inequality in the Section for Development Studies, Department of International Studies and Interpreting, Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway, and it comes out of two distinct experiences. First, it addresses concerns we have had in our own mainly qualitatively oriented research within the interdisciplinary field of development studies, where different disciplinary methodological traditions meet. Second, it draws on our experiences as lecturers in

Getting Behind the Walls and Fences: Methodological Considerations of Gaining Access to Middle-class Women in Urban India

Abstract This article presents and analyses two cases of ethnographic, topic-driven, fieldwork among upper caste, middle-class women in urban India, which is a field dominated by hierarchical social relations of class, caste and gender. The aim is to discuss the methodological challenges we encountered in delineating, ‘constructing’ (Amit, Vered, 2000, Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, London and New York: Routledge) and getting access to potential field-sites. Prospective informants lived their everyday lives criss-crossing between different types of social arenas within the city, inducing us to take a multi-sited approach (Marcus, George E., 1995, ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24, pp. 95–117). Moreover, these everyday social arenas were clearly demarcated and initially closed to outsiders by physical walls and social distinction, rendering the process of gaining access rather challenging. Here, we discuss these challenges and how we attempted to solve them. A central point is that ‘gaining access’ for most ethnographic researchers is a long process of meticulous planning, serendipitous encounters and ‘dead-ends’, that in itself is part of the ethnographic material. Furthermore, we discuss the relational aspect of qualitative research, wherein the researcher ‘puts his or her own body on the line’ (Okely, Judit, 2012, Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method, London: Bloomsbury, p.1). We argue that the manner by which the researcher is being positioned by the people studied – processes characterized by resistance, avoidance or even exclusion – often contain rich ethnographic information which must be taken into consideration. By highlighting this, we aim to demystify challenges often overlooked or under-communicated in ethnographic research.

From benevolent maternalism to the market logic: exploring discursive boundary making in domestic work relations in India

ABSTRACT Framed within a discussion of boundary work and its many facets, this article develops a critical understanding of the discourses that shape the material and symbolic hierarchies of power asserted by employers of domestic workers in Indian households. We analyze the nature of discourses that are mobilized in the boundary work practiced by different groups of employers in India as they negotiate their relationships with their domestic workers. Drawing on fieldwork in Mumbai and Chennai, our analysis outlines two different discourses within the nature of boundary work – one centered on the trope of benevolent maternalism and another which mobilizes a market-based trope – and delineate how these diverge and converge in the relationship between employers and domestic workers. We also show how these discourses differ according to two key factors: on the one hand, whether the employers hire full-time or part-time workers, and on the other hand, the specific positional attributes of the employers in terms of age, occupation, and family background. We argue that these two discursive categories are not watertight compartments, but are located on a spectrum, and that employers therefore exhibit elements of both maternalism and market-based approaches within the relationship with their workers.

The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai, by Liza Weinstein

Of all the slums in India, Dharavi in Mumbai is probably the best known and well documented. Famously labelled ‘The largest slum in Asia’, Dharavi has over the years attracted a number of journalis...