Alpa Shah

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a framework for studying organizational culture in multi-agency development projects, which draws on selected writings in anthropology and in organizational theory and suggests that these two bodies of literature can be usefully brought together, as well as insights from ongoing fieldwork in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and Peru.

TL;DR: In the Shadows of the State as mentioned in this paper, Alpa Shah argues that well-meaning indigenous rights and development claims and interventions may misrepresent and hurt the very people they intend to help.

TL;DR: The authors argued that seasonal casual labour migration in India has conventionally been understood as the result of extreme poverty whereby villagers are forced to become migrants for the dry six months to subsist or merely survive.

TL;DR: The authors argued that participant observation is not merely a method of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized in action.

Abstract: This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region) – differences that are mobilised for accumulation. Labour migration scholarship has mainly explored sites of production. We extend recent social reproduction theory (SRT) and an older literature on labour migration and reproduction to argue that the intimate relationship between production and social reproduction is crucial to the exploitation of migrant labour and that this means we have to place centre-stage the analysis of invisible economies of care which take place across spatiotemporally divided households, both in the place of migration and in the home regions of migrants. Furthermore, we develop recent work on SRT and migration to argue that an analysis of kinship (gender over generations, not just gender) is crucial to these invisible economies of care. This analysis is important in showing the machinations of capitalist growth and for political alternatives.