Hi Everyone,
All welcome to the next RAI Research in Progress seminar:
Title: Mapping Labour and Work Ideologies in Contemporary rural India
Speaker: Smita Yadav, University of Sussex
FRIDAY 8TH MAY: 4.30-6PM
To book a free ticket: http://smitayadav.eventbrite.co.uk
Abstract : How do contemporary ethnographies of labour and work reveal the redundancy of traditional ways of understanding rural societies as in India? Historically speaking, village studies on India have traditionally tried to focus on the role of kinship, family, and caste institutions. Based on a year long fieldwork in a labour colony in central India, I study contemporary rural Indian which on the contrary shows an Indian village is extremely dynamic and is highly contested by the State and is shaped by the wider economy thus challenging this current tradition dominating Indian village studies. My study is on the Gonds, a tribal community in central India who are facing a threat to their traditional forms of living due to forest enclosures and restricted access creating unintended forms of social aspirations and desires for the Gonds's families like care and social protection. Instead of the traditional views of protests and resistance to forest restrictions, the Gonds respond to these economic challenges by laboring in the informal economy and perform non-forest based livelihoods like road construction, migration, and home construction in the Indian cities and remain debt-free and independent to their extended kinship relations. In this paper, using the case-study of Gonds households, I intend to show how increasingly important it is for anthropologists studying India to be aware of such dynamic working lives of vulnerable populations like Gonds which is reshaping their relation with the neoliberal Indian state. It demands the need to go beyond family, kinship, and other social categories and instead, focus on the relation of vulnerable populations with the informal economy.
VENUE: RAI MEETING ROOM, 50 Fitzroy Street, London, W1T5BT
We still have slots available on the 22nd May and the 5th June. Interested speakers please send me a title and an abstract.
Gemma Aellah
Royal Anthropological Institute
50 Fitzroy Street
London
W1T 5BT
Mobile 0745 0249 070
www.therai.org.uk
www.londonanthropologyday.co.uk
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