Donald M. Nonini

Transnational Migrants, Globalization Processes, and Regimes of Power and Knowledge

To begin with, the title of this thematic issue poses its own special questions of interpretation: what, after all, is “transnational labor migration,” and what is meant by the singular “Asia/Pacific/Indian Ocean region”? As geographers have long pointed out, a region is not a self-evident unit of spatial analysis but rather a space defined by one or more kinds of interaction and relationship. In this sense I propose that it is not an extravagance to speak of the Asia/Pacific/Indian Ocean as a region. It is a region, albeit an emergent one, defined by the mobility of persons along certain circuits and by the flow of capital along other, but related, circuits, between specificplaces. In the case of this region, it is demarcated by patterns of movement of wage laborers across the boundaries of national territories, hence transnational labor migration, and by the flow of capital in the form of remittances between the places where wages are earned and the places from which laborers come and where, in part, their wages are spent. For the Asia/Pacific/Indian Ocean region, persons migrate for the purposes of wage labor from their places of birth or residence in South, Southeast, and East Asia to sites of work in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. After periods of sojourn and labor, they usually, but not always, return to their places of birth, citizenship, or long-term residence. In the course of their migration travels, they remit capital — either in the form of money or (as we see in the article by Seddon et al.) as goods — from the sites of their labor to their places of birth, citizenship, or long-term residence. Cr itical Asian Studies

Sacred Cows and Water Buffalo in India: The Uses of Ethnography [and Comments and Reply]

In 1958-59 and in 1977-78, we undertook holistic ethnographic studies of a village in northern India. Profound technoenvironmental change occurred in the 18-year period between the two studies. With regard to cattle, the principal change was a shift from bullock power to machinery. This provided the basis for a test of the two principal positions that have been taken in the sacred-cow controversy: (1) technoenvironmental determinism, which denies that religious belief is an independent determinant of Indian cattle demography, and (2) the position that religious belief is one of a number of factors that affect the demography of Indian cattle. Our data demonstrate that belief in the sanctity of the cow significantly influences the demography of cattle in this village. In an attempt to evaluate the sacred-cow controversy, we note two characteristics of its history: First, it appears to reflect a tendency to dismiss obvious explanations in favor of unexpected ones. Second, the lack of relevant field data for deciding the issue suggests a general decline in holistic ethnographic studies. We argue that our article illustrates the usefulness of analytical holistic ethnography.

A companion to urban anthropology

A companion to urban anthropology / , A companion to urban anthropology / , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

Du Bois and Radical Theory and Practice

as an outstanding African-American intellectual and activist of this century, from first to last W.E.B. Du Bois can be said to have been a radical democrat (Aptheker 1971:56; Marable 1986:ix). As a radical democrat, and despite his sympathies toward historical materialism, throughout many of his writings, in works such as The Souls of Black Folk (1986/1903) and Black Reconstruction (1962), Du Bois posed fundamental challenges to Marxist theory and practice which have long been overlooked.’ These challenges should be seen within the context of Du Bois’ fundamental contributions to Marxist theory and history made in Black Reconstruction and elsewhere in his vast corpus.2 2

Introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois and Anthropology

Those of us on the left in anthropology anticipate with serious misgivings and vigilance the triumphalism and xenophobia that will attend on the quincentennial anniversary of Columbus’ ’discovery’ of the Americas, even as the economies, societies and cultures driven by the forces of economic expansion since the late fifteenth century fall deeper into crisis and, in some cases, collapse. This foreseeable outcome is perhaps a proper coda for the oppressive processes that the Columbian ’celebration’ memorializes. In the waning years of the century, it is an appropriate time to reflect on what W.E.B. Du Bois called ’the problem of the twentieth century’ racism, with its discourses, ideologies, and practices for it is this ’problem’ which, along with capital accumulation, has been the demiurge of the systems of exploitation and oppression in the ’New World’ that have emerged and developed from the ’Age of Discovery’ to the present. It is precisely such a recognition that has led anthropologists to

Bovine Sex and Species Ratios in India [and Comments and Reply]

Despite religious sanctions against the slaughter of cattle, bovine age, sex, and species ratios in all India and Kerala are systematically adjusted to demographic, technological, economic, and environmental conditions. While it is not denied that the apotheosis of cattle has influenced the management of Indias bovine stocks, religious beliefs cannot account for the most important regional and local variations in the utilization of these animals.

“At That Time We Were Intimidated on All Sides”: Residues of the Malayan Emergency as a Conjunctural Episode of Dispossession

ABSTRACT: This article proposes that the Emergency counterinsurgency campaign of the British colonial state should be viewed as a conjunctural episode of dispossession of Malayan laboring people. Conjunctural episodes of dispossession of working people through state violence and racialized rhetoric emerge as a response to crises in capitalist accumulation occurring at multiple and overlapping scales of capitalist systems – the imperial, the national/colonial, and the local/regional. During these episodes state and capitalist strategies destroy political organizations and solidarities among laboring people and demoralize them over long periods of time, through processes simultaneously material and semiotic. Employing new theorizations of the global anthropology of labor, this article first examines the postwar and Emergency years when the multiethnic and industry-wide bases of Malayan trade unions were destroyed while an estimated half a million working people were forcibly concentrated in so-called New Villages. This had the effect of suppressing a discourse of class and class struggle in favor of a dominant discourse of ethnic conflict. In an effort to articulate class struggle despite the presence of this dominant discourse of essential ethnic difference this essay examines the formation of a new working mens “society” in 1978–1980 and a dispute between truck drivers and truck owners in northern Malaysia.