Abstract
Harnessing primary and secondary evidence from India, our essay conceptualizes the cultural dynamics of migration. In so doing, it demonstrates the incompleteness of standard marginalist and Marxist accounts of labor circulation. As a corrective, we examine the linkages between culture, politics, space, and labor mobility and offer a way to think about them by building on poststructural critiques of development and postcolonial theories of migrant subjectivity. The proverbial compression of space-time not only has made extralocal work more viable for members of proletarianized groups but, more importantly, has allowed them to transfer their experiences of new ways of being into local contexts through acts of consumption and labor deployment that can become elements of a Gramscian counterhegemonic praxis. We argue that the possibility of this sort of "body politics" compels not merely a critique of the modernization paradigm that has organized classical migration studies but, more profoundly, a reassessment of the way we understand modernity itself. We advocate an approach that provincializes the Eurowest and foregrounds the existence of pluritopic "regional modernities."
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 186-213 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Annals of the Association of American Geographers |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2003 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Special thanks to John Paul Jones III for his advice on content and organization, and to the various anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the original article. We particularly acknowledge the detailed critiques of two referees, who compelled us to undertake difficult but entirely necessary revisions and, we hope, write a substantially stronger article. We are grateful to Ron Aminzade, Ben Crow, Michael Dove, Ben Rogaly, James Scott, and Mark Steinberg for their meticulous comments on earlier versions of this article, and we thank Paul Alexander, Tania Li, Mary Beth Mills, David Mosse, Pauline Peters, and Jeff Romm for helpful conversations along the way. Thanks also to Sula Sarkar for her cartographic assistance. Responsibility for remaining errors or inconsistencies is entirely ours. The various pieces of research on which this essay is based were supported by grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Izaak Walton Killam Foundation of Canada, the Population Council, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute of Development Studies, the University of Sussex, U.K. and the Royalty Research Fund, University of Washington. Our heaviest intellectual and emotional debts are to friends and acquaintances in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal who made our research possible. Our abiding thanks as well to V. Arivudai Nambi and Muniappan for their crucial support during field research in Tiruvannamalai District, Tamil Nadu, in 1999, 2000, and 2001.
Keywords
- Consumption
- India
- Migration
- Regional modernities
- Work