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.

Culture has received increasing attention in critical development studies, though the notion that there are important cultural differences within and between development organizations has received less consideration. This paper elaborates elements of a framework for studying organizational culture in multi-agency development projects. It 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 on insights from ongoing fieldwork in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and Peru. At the centre of this framework is the analysis of context, practice and power. Where development projects involve multiple organizations (such as donors, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups) an analysis of cultures both within and between organizational actors can help explain important aspects of project performance. The paper argues that organizational culture is constantly being produced within projects, sometimes tending towards integration, often towards fragmentation. This fragmentation, indicative of the range of cultures within development organizations, is an important reason why some projects fail, and why ideas stated in project documents are often not realized, especially in the case of the newer and more contentious objectives such as 'empowerment'.

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Neoliberal globalisation has resulted in the bypassing of agrarian transition-led industrialisation and classic proletarianisation, and class-for-itself class struggles are rare. Drawing on analyses of class relations, racism and other forms of social oppression, this contribution explores how processes of 'conjugated oppression' are central to the spread of contemporary capitalism. The focus is on India and on how the co-constitution of class relations and social oppression based on caste, tribe, gender and region is entrenching Dalits and Adivasis at the bottom of social and economic hierarchies. The analysis has deep-seated consequences for how we think about political struggles, in this case ones that foreground caste and tribe and focus on both labour and land.

In the last two decades transnational concerns over indigenous people, indigenous rights and indigenous development has reignited a history of heated debate shrouding indigeneity. This article analyses these debates in the context of the anthropology and historiography of indigeneity in India. From the production of ‘tribes of mind’ to the policies that have encouraged people to identify themselves as ‘Scheduled Tribes’, or ‘adivasis’, the article reviews the context that gave rise to the tensions between claims for protection and assimilation of India's indigenous peoples. Today these debates are shown to persist through the arguments of those that seek to build a support base from an adivasi constituency and are most acute with on the one hand, the work of the Marxists and indigenous activists, and on the other hand, the Hindu right‐wing. Inviting serious scholarly examination of the unintended effects of well meaning indigenous protection and development measures, the article seeks to move the debate beyond both the arguments that consider the concept of indigenous people anthropologically and historically problematic and those that consider indigeneity a useful political tool. In so doing, the article warns against a ‘dark side of indigeneity’ which might reveal how local appropriation and experiences of global discourses can maintain a class system that further marginalises the poorest.

This article explores why in India's Jharkhand, Mundas, often depicted as poor tribals, participate in elections to keep the state away, seeing it as foreign, dangerous, and juxtaposing its self‐interested and divisive politics with a sacral polity, the parha. Munda disengagement with the state results from a complex combination of their contrasting the state with the sacral polity, historical experience of exploitation by state officers, and social relations with rural elites who, seeking to maintain dominance, reproduce Munda imaginings. The article thus draws attention to multiple co‐existing notions of politics and the importance of a local political economy in the social production of cultural imaginings of the state.

Keywords: Maoist or Naxalite, agrarian question, modes of production, Jharkhand, India, land, labour, capital, class differentiation INTRODUCTION To many anthropologists, the question of how to analyse modes of production might seem a preoccupation of the past. The evolutionist premises of the debates (from slavery to feudalism to capitalism etc.) were overtaken by Althusser in the 1960s and moved forward through ideas of the articulation of different modes. Attempts, inspired by Althusser, were made by many anthropologists to transcend what they saw as Eurocentric models (through lineage, kinship or domestic modes of production in stateless societies; the Asiatic mode of production in China Alpa Shah, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK E-mail: a.m.shah@lse.ac.uk. This paper is part of a much bigger project on understanding social transformations in rural Jharkhand that I have been exploring for the past decade. The field data used here are a result of field research conducted over twenty months with the anthropologist George Kunnath to whom I am deeply grateful for all that we have shared. The questions of this paper were led by respondents in the field who I hope will one day read it.

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