Organizer and Chair: K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University
Discussants: Michael R. Dove, Yale University; Ben Crow, University of California, Santa Cruz
Agrarian change inevitably entails transformations of the labor process. The changes we have in mind can be understood as the multiplication of rural-urban linkages. This is happening through occupational diversification for rural labor, the spread of rural industrialization, the increased prevalence of contract farming, and the greater seasonal, interregional, migration of labor due to the reduced labor intensity of farming in both irrigated and dryland areas. As more and more people enter into new work arrangements in their rural homes, and travel periodically to work in industrial and urban centers, their sense of self, as well as its relation to a sense of place, and understandings of work, undergoes changes that are manifest in identity formation.
This panel will study co-existing plural labor forms where individuals and groups participate in labor processes that stretch across a continuum of pre-capitalist, capitalist, and post-capitalist relations. We are also interested in the relatively new situations where labor becomes part of a traveling culture and is exposed to diverse worlds of signification and association. The emergence of cosmopolitan laboring groups and the tightening of labor markets can combine to produce new forms of labor and identity. The effects can be seen in ethnic, gender, and regional politics, as they intersect with changes in land and economy. Taking different Asian cases we examine a shared set of issues, centering on local expressions of flexible accumulation, from perspectives of food security, regional geography, and working class culture.
Vinay Krishin Gidwani, University of British Columbia
India boasts a formidable literature on food security from the economic perspective of exchange entitlements, specifically how households manage subsistence risk via asset accumulation and liquidation cycles, portfolio diversification, social safety nets, mutual insurance systems, credit markets, and precautionary savings. In addition, migration is a commonly-noted strategy of risk mitigation for labor households. It is thought to offset the adverse economic effects of seasonality in agricultural employment, or else permanent reductions in labor demand caused by mechanization and/or regional shifts in cropping patterns from cereal to non-cereal crops (including plantations). Less is known about the duration and spatial characteristics of the migration cycle, the working conditions of migrants, and the economic and nutritional impact of migration members of the household who stay behind. Almost no studies entertain the possibility that migration, particularly into non-farm jobs, may have the perverse effects of undermining food security. So, why does migration occur? Because it allows agents to repudiate traditional, oppressive forms of authority and control that are exercised through the rural labor process (patriarchal labor relations, debt bondage, and the drudgery of alienated wage work being the most visible examples of compulsion).
Harnessing primary and secondary information from Gujerat, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu, this paper will suggest that cultural and psychological aspects of migration—and more generally, rural labor processes—remain poorly understood, thereby limiting the analysis of agrarian change. The purpose is not to forsake conventional material explanations, but to expose how results contrary to economic rationality can emerge from a deeper cultural ‘logic of practice.’
Mary Beth Mills, Colby College
Rural-urban migrants and especially young women constitute the cheap flexible labor force upon which Thailand has built its more than two decades long economic boom. As is common throughout Asia, migrant women are the preferred labor force of many Bangkok industrial employers at least in part because of assumptions that women’s gender socialization combined with continuing obligations to rural families make them easily disciplined, submissive workers. Migrating from rural communities all over Thailand, these new entrants into Bangkok factory work do retain close ties to rural kin and most plan to return home after a few years. Nonetheless some of these migrant industrial workers have become active players in Thailand’s struggling labor movement. Drawing upon recent ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses upon the union activities and daily interactions of activist women members of one independent textile union in the Bangkok metropolis. Despite their diverse backgrounds these women find common ground in the labor movement. They explore new ways of thinking about themselves and their gendered experiences. Though limited in both means and opportunity for oppositional expression, unionized migrants contest not only their experiences of inequitable labor relations but also of gender roles, invoking instead a discourse of their "rights" as workers and women. By challenging dominant cultural themes about women’s (and workers’) obligation and service both at work and in the household, their actions have the potential to disrupt broadly based ideologies of authority in contemporary Thailand as well as widespread images of a passive, feminine, Asian workforce.
Gregory Ruf, SUNY, Stony Brook
This paper explores how historical experiences in changing relationships of labor have reshaped enterprise strategies, property rights, and social identity in a rural market township of West China’s Sichuan province. Collectivization in the 1950s created a bifurcation of town and countryside, suppressing popular patterns of production, exchange, and consumption through an administrative regime that extracted rural surplus to support state development plans. "Peasants" and "urbanites" came to inhabit largely separate social domains, experiencing profound differences in subsistence security, capital accumulation, educational opportunity, and occupational mobility. The post-Mao reforms restored considerable autonomy to both town and village families, leading to the development of many new forms of labor organization, strategies for mobility, and rural-urban linkages. This study focuses on a site that is both the lowest level of formal state administration as well as a basic forum for the organization of local exchange relationships between farmers and townspeople. It examines how family relations and individual identity within a "standard marketing community" have been affected by apprenticeships and partnerships, commercial trade and enterprises. Based on field research, and drawing upon broader comparative literature, it offers an assessment of how changing labor practices, expressions of property rights, and strategies of accumulation in agriculture, rural commerce, and village industry have reshaped notions of self, community, and nation in the 1990s.