Christian Strümpell

Work stress: Its components and its association with self-reported health outcomes in a garment factory in Bangladesh—Findings from a cross-sectional study

Bangladesh is one of the leading exporters of ready-made garments (RMG) worldwide producing at very low cost almost exclusively for Western markets. Empirical evidence on psychologically adverse working conditions and their association with health in the RMG setting remains sparse. Drawing on insights from previous ethnographic research, we conducted a cross-sectional epidemiological study among 332 RMG workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. High work-related demands and poor interpersonal resources represented key components of work stress and were important determinants of poor health. The key work stress components observed in this study partly differed from those identified in Western work place settings.

The anthropology of neoliberal India: an introduction

This special issue brings together ethnographic accounts exploring local and regional effects of transformations in India that social scientists have described under the heading of ‘neoliberalism’ (Alternative Survey Group 2007; Oza 2006; Patnaik 2007). Chief among these transformations in India are the economic restructuring processes after 1991 when the Government of India launched far-reaching policies of economic liberalisation, arguably under the pressure of global financial institutions. Acknowledging this significant turning point, we aim to highlight, however, the variegation with which neoliberal ideas, policies and technologies are dispersed and experienced among different segments of the population. In doing so, the authors of this special issue pursue an ethnographically informed ‘grounding’ of large neoliberal transformations. In Michael Burawoy’s terms, such grounding is about ‘extending out from the micro-processes to macro forces, from the space–time rhythms of the site to the geographical and historical context of the field’ (2000a: 27).

'We work together, we eat together' : conviviality and modernity in a company settlement in south Orissa

Among themselves and within their families, workers of a public sector power project in Orissa, constantly and intentionally, violate the restrictions on inter-caste contact that they perceive as prevailing in their various villages of origin. Subscribing to the teleology of modernisation, the workers dichotomise the industrial settlement and the village as ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ sites, respectively. Their withdrawal into these ‘backward’ villages for weddings and other rituals is explained with reference to the ‘outside’, peripheral character of the settlement. I argue that this conceptualisation hints at a spatial limitation of the institution of caste, and has, at the very least, facilitated the creation of a ‘modern’, caste-negating working class.

The politics of dispossession in an Odishan steel town

The article discusses how industrial workers in Rourkela, a steel town in Odisha, experience the large-scale job losses entailed by the recent restructuring of India’s first public sector steel plant. In this article, I argue that this manpower reduction presents a moment of what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession and which he considers as the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism. Importantly, I add to Harvey’s analysis that this process is experienced, and acted upon, in significantly different ways by different fractions of the town’s steel workforce. Taking a long-term historical perspective, I will show that these differences are rooted in the politics that the postcolonial regional state of Odisha has pursued in the town since the 1950s. In methodological terms, the argument put forward in this article follows Burawoy’s (2000) call for an ethnographic ‘grounding’ of global processes such as neoliberalisation that pays attention to how such processes shape and are shaped by local histories of dispossession and resistance against it.

Sons of soil, sons of steel : autochthony, descent and the class concept in industrial India

Inspired by E. P. Thompsons modelling of class as the contingent outcome of historical processes, this paper explores how autochthony and descent came to inform the boundaries of industrial workforces in the Indian steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela. We suggest that if class is a historical object, then it relates to other forms of power and identity in ways that question the use of rigid analytic typologies. In the private sector Tata company town of Jamshedpur, an industrial working class was constructed during the late colonial period from labour migrants, whose employment became heritable within families. In the public sector Rourkela Steel Plant, founded in the mid-twentieth century, the politics of ethno regionalism coincided with state development policy to inform employment reservation for autochthons. Through a historical analysis of urbanization, migration and employment policy, we consider how elite workforces that bound themselves according to the principles of autochthony and descent were formed in the social laboratories of Indias steel towns. We suggest that such processes demand a class concept that engages more subtly with the work of E. P. Thompson.

Social citizenship and ethnicity around a public sector steel plant in Orissa, India

This article is about a modern public sector steel plant in the state of Orissa and its promise to set standards for post-colonial Indias citizenry at large. These steel plants were to provide their workforces with superior social and economic citizenship rights, which in turn were to serve as exemplary industrial relations for the industrialising nation. The steel plants were also intended to forge multi-ethnic workforces into exemplary Indian citizens by transcending their manifold ethnic differences. The trajectory of the public sector steel plant in the town of Rourkela confirms that enhanced social and economic citizenship rights detached public sector steel workforces from labour at large and produced a ‘labour aristocracy’. The trajectory, furthermore, reveals how in Rourkela policies designed to accommodate ethnic differences constantly recreated these differences and hampered the access of large sections of the local population to these enhanced social and economic citizenship rights.

Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on India's Working Classes

With reference to original ethnographic and historical research on India, the papers collected in this forum suggest conceptual refinements that might re-centre the study of class in regional scholarship. Through discussions of class politics in industrial, construction and agricultural contexts, the authors interrogate the conceptual oppositions between stably employed fordist labour forces and the ‘working poor’ that have often constrained ethnographic and historical analyses of Indias working classes. Inspired by Marxist historiography, this forum engages with the historically contingent emergence of Indian working classes through different types of labour, gender and ethnic struggles, and considers the complex political boundaries that are produced by such processes.

Kinship in Western Uttar Pradesh: A Re- interpretation of Sylvia Vatuk’s Model of North Indian Kinship

Abstract This aricle is based upon the researcher’s M.A. thesis. The task of the thesis was to analyse different models of kinship in northern India in a comparative way. The researcher analysed the models of structural approaches by Dumont and Vatuk, the componential and reflectionist analysis by Scheffler and Turner, the approaches of cultural anthropology by Fruzzetti and Östör as well as Inden and Nicholas and the functionalist model by Tambiah. After the analysis of these different models, the researcher offered his own hypot hesis concerning the kinship system of northern India on the basis of Vatuk’s data on kinship in western Uttar Pradesh. In contrast to Vatuk and Dumont he came to the conclusion that affinity has a diachronic dimension not just on the analytical level of institutionalized acts and forms of behavior, but as well on the level of kinship terminology. For the sake of brevity he will restrict himself in this paper to the debate between Dumont and Vatuk and his own hypothesis.