Book Review: Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007

Dube, Saurabh

doi:10.1177/0308275x09345430

Cited by 10 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…Daniel 1984: 109). It is through the control of substances in the house and the substances of the woman's body that the purity of a caste group and a lineage is preserved and reproduced (Bear 2007).…”

Section: Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this article, I contribute to a rich literature on class as a constantly evolving cultural project (Liechty 2003) that is generated, historically, through inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, caste, ethnicity, and kinship (Bear, Ho, Tsing & Yanagisako 2015; Heiman, Liechty & Freman 2012). In India, the middle class is inherently lacking in clearly defined markers (Baviskar & Ray 2011) and has taken on different historical forms, many of which involve a particular orientation towards the home as a private and secluded sphere (Donner 2011; Ray & Qayum 2011) where women are responsible for the cultivation of particular ideals of domesticity and sexual propriety (Bear 2007; Donner 2017; Maqsood 2017). Scholars have charted the origins of middle‐class domesticity in colonial legal regimes that sought to collect taxation from discrete household units, arbitrate marriage and inheritance processes through patriarchal descent lines, and discipline female sexuality (Chowdhry 1994; Kapila 2004).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Ghar ki tension: domesticity and distress in India's aspiring middle class

Simpson

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Tension is a polysemic term used across South Asia to describe the strains and scrapes of life, like ‘worry’ or ‘stress’ in Euro‐American discourse. Yet in the formerly agro‐pastoralist and upwardly mobile Gaddi community of Himalayan India, it is used by women with the qualifying ghar ki – ‘household’ – to indicate a deeper disruption to bodily humours, intimate relations, and household materiality. This article takes ghar ki tension, with a particular focus on the layered qualifier ghar, as a window into the precarity of middle‐class domestic life as it is experienced in the bodies of the women who pursue it. Rather than focusing on the communicative functions of women's distress within the household, this article looks to the relational, affective, and material ways in which women see their bodies and houses as mutually constituted and disrupted. This approach reveals how women's domestic labour is both a source of dignity and a burden. This burden is experienced in ghar ki tension, in bodily symptoms of overheating, and visits from supernatural beings. This article suggests that ghar ki tension might offer a novel way of looking at distress as the psychic and embodied cost of upward social mobility beyond the Gaddi context.

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Section: Distressmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ghar ki tension: domesticity and distress in India's aspiring middle class

Simpson

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…While there is an abundance of anthropological literature and theory about how workers are disciplined in and through their jobs—phenomena that are undoubtedly experienced by PATs as well—I focus here on how railway personnel perceive their roles as disciplinarians. As employees of the country's only national railway, workers are invested with their authority by the state apparatus (Bear, 2007). Yet personnel are themselves also subject to the authority of the CFL administration and the Luxembourgish government, who dictate which management tools are at their disposal.…”

Section: Discipline Versus Servicementioning

confidence: 99%

Giving up control: Devaluation of railway work in Luxembourg's fare‐free public transportation system?

Ruud

2023

Anthropology of Work Review

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Luxembourg's implementation of a nationwide fare‐free public transport (FFPT) policy in March 2020 transformed the everyday work and imaginaries of railway accompaniment personnel who had previously been responsible for fare control. It also sparked debate among both workers and the public about the value of their work. Dialoguing with discursive uses of devaluation as a shorthand for specific hopes and fears about the future of transit work, this article explores railway workers' experiences and perceptions of the transition and proposes a new framework for conceptualizing devaluation. Drawing from ethnographic research with the Luxembourgish national railway agency, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Luxembourgeois (CFL), this article interrogates what it means for accompaniment personnel to give up the task of fare control by tracing the effects on their work rhythms, interactions with passengers, sense of authority, and visibility. In the absence of fare control, accompaniment personnel continue to produce value for a broader public and largely see their own work as valuable, yet there has been a rupture in the social validation of their labor, which produces feelings of devaluation.

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“…In addition, the tempos of the state unevenly authorize, structure and distribute political power (Agathangelou and Killian, 2016;Clark, 2019;Cohen, 2018;Gokmenoglu, 2022;Pursley, 2019). The political time of the nation form, in another register, was founded upon the attempt to produce temporal simultaneity among diverse communities rooted in the representations of homogeneous historical and cultural time based on kinship metaphors (Anderson, 1991;Allen, 2008;Bear, 2014Bear, , 2007Kaplan, 2009;Stoler, 1995). Furthermore, technologies of time including navigational tools index forms of time reckoning related to nonhuman environmental forces often connected to deep natural time (Bear, 2014: 7;Gould, 1987;Higman, 2020;Mackenzie, 2001;Pickering, 1995;Pickering and Guzik, 2008;Povinelli, 2016).…”

Section: Abstract 'Clock' Time and Early Capitalist Social-property R...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonial Capitalist Heterochronicity: Socio-Ecological Rhythms of the Sugar Plantation and the Formal Subsumption of Historical and Cultural Difference

Kolia

2023

Critical Sociology

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The Black and Third World Marxist tradition have demonstrated that colonialism is inseparable from historical accounts of global capitalism. This paper contributes to that project through an account of heterochronic capitalist time by indexing both its uneven incorporation of socio-ecological temporalities and its disciplining of enslaved people. To illustrate this, I examine how Western industrial temporal relations are generative of, and imposed through, its conflictual relations with Indigenous Taíno and enslaved West African socio-ecological forms of time within the Caribbean sugar complex. In addition, I emphasize that despite colonial capitalism seeking to merge African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge into abstract labour, it is never a totalizing process. In effect, while colonial capitalism wields various techniques to incorporate Indigenous and African life worlds, there are always phenomenological remainders of cultural temporal difference that do not reproduce the logic of capital. Highlighting two contrasting postcolonial readings of Marx’s notion of subsumption, I argue that we can index the existence of a multiplicity of non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and futurity. Inscribing their own emergent dialectics, however, I caution that preserved forms of temporal difference can potentially be taken up in service to reactionary political projects.

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Book Review: Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Ghar ki tension: domesticity and distress in India's aspiring middle class

Ghar ki tension: domesticity and distress in India's aspiring middle class

Giving up control: Devaluation of railway work in Luxembourg's fare‐free public transportation system?

Colonial Capitalist Heterochronicity: Socio-Ecological Rhythms of the Sugar Plantation and the Formal Subsumption of Historical and Cultural Difference

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