This article explores the social category of work as it intersects with pleasure (mazaa). Through an ethnography of beauty workers in urban New Delhi, in interwoven digital and non-digital spaces, I interrogate how certain forms of work are valued at the expense of others. Beauty work refers to the broad category of work that enhances the physical appearance of oneself or others. It is a part of the new categories of entrepreneurial work that have emerged in postliberalization India, where demands for consumer goods and services have escalated. I focus on makeup artists and beauticians: two categories of relationally produced beauty workers. While the former are popularly constructed as creative workers, the latter are viewed as providing mundane and dull forms of labor pertaining to bodily cleanliness, like body-hair removal. Pleasure, through creativity, sutures practices of work in relation to categories of class, capital, labor, caste, gender, and aesthetics. Creativity and pleasure, then, emerge as sites of articulating caste-based immunocapital (Olivarius 2019). I argue that mazaa becomes a negotiated and historically situated site for negotiating caste-based immaterial (immuno)capital.
This collectively written essay reflects collaborations between three graduate students and their dissertation advisor. We turn to inspirations like Zora Neale Hurston to make our fieldnotes central to collective writing, thinking and translation across language and discursive traditions. We use small fieldnote in a subversive sense to illustrate a feminist mode of this pedagogical exercise and to refuse foreclosure of our analysis. We push back against the burden of working with complete pieces of writing, and the anthropological commitment to the thickness of description. Anthropological pedagogy conventionally attributes to thick description and completeness, not just scholarly superiority but also a moral one. Using a feminist pedagogical approach that centers the small as possibility troubles presumptions of conventional anthropological pedagogy. Instead, we picked notes from one or two ethnographic encounters or a single day of fieldwork to experiment collectively with where they could lead us. The essay that has resulted from this collective feminist classroom is what we see as a feminist‐dividual piece of pedagogy and writing. We anticipate that it will provide others a hopeful way to begin and sustain intellectual collaborations and writing across scholarly generations by celebrating the potential of small, incomplete, and otherwise uncelebrated pieces of writing.
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