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Introduction

Shehzad Nadeem

in Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves

This book explores the paradoxical effects of globalization on young Indians employed in the outsourcing industry: they are reaping the benefits of the corporate search for cut-rate labor but also ... More

This book explores the paradoxical effects of globalization on young Indians employed in the outsourcing industry: they are reaping the benefits of the corporate search for cut-rate labor but also shouldering the weight of the global restructuring of work. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in India and the United States, the book highlights the cyclical humiliations and joys of life under transnational capitalism by focusing on factors such as managerial styles, workplace culture, and family and social relations. It argues that while Indian workers receive relatively high wages (in India), they are also subject to what Karl Marx called the “dull compulsion of economic relations,” and the forms of discipline and surveillance issuing thereof. It also considers the culture of the economy and the economy of culture: the strictures and structures by which social life and human creativity are hedged.Less

A Collaborative Ethnography of Transnational Capitalism

Sylvia Yanagisako and Lisa Rofel

in Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions

This chapter explains how China has become the most promising market for Italian fashion brands, which led to the development of a variety of forms of collaboration between Italian and Chinese firms ... More

This chapter explains how China has become the most promising market for Italian fashion brands, which led to the development of a variety of forms of collaboration between Italian and Chinese firms and entrepreneurs. It discusses the collaborative ethnography of the transnational capitalism that was forged by the Italians and Chinese engaged in textile and garment production and distribution in China. It also talks about the co-authored monograph, Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian–Chinese Global Fashion. The chapter explains how the Chinese and Italians engaged in transnational relations of production that reformulate their ideas and practices of capitalist enterprise, including investment and management strategies, labor, value, and inequality.Less

Mining History: A Political Chronology

Janet L. Finn

in Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata

This chapter chronicles nearly a century of Anaconda Company operations, linking the histories of Butte and Chuquicamata and situating them in the larger story of transnational capitalism. It argues ... More

This chapter chronicles nearly a century of Anaconda Company operations, linking the histories of Butte and Chuquicamata and situating them in the larger story of transnational capitalism. It argues that it is impossible to grasp the cultural, historical, political, and social implications of copper production in one locale without viewing one in relation to the others and to the cultural politics of copper writ large. The chapter offers an alternative model for the practice of transnational research and the research of transnational practices.Less

Jean Baudrillard: Media Spaces

in Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory

This chapter presents Jean Baudrillard's reflections on contemporary space. Baudrillard radicalises ideas held among Saussurean linguists about the arbitrary or motivated aspect of the sign. His ... More

This chapter presents Jean Baudrillard's reflections on contemporary space. Baudrillard radicalises ideas held among Saussurean linguists about the arbitrary or motivated aspect of the sign. His vision of recent history informs an implicit concept of space. He condemns the capitalist trend he determines while admiring its seamless efficiency. He notes that America has to be thought in terms of space but not of an existential territory. Before his death, he attempts to insert his critique at ‘the limit of a tendency’ that would liquidate all resistances in the name of transnational capitalism.Less

Time for Sex: The Education of Desire and the Conduct of Childhood in Global/Hindu Sexology

Ishita Pande

in Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women ... More

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women in India in the early twentieth century. It first describes the constitution of “Hindu erotica” during the period and how these English translations gave rise to a set of foundational texts that would become the basis of global/Hindu sexology while filling them up with clock time. It then considers the ways that these texts attached life cycles to the chronological ordering of time by recasting brahmacharya—a prescription for a stage of life devoted to celibacy and learning—as an age-stratified organization of sexual behavior and a schema for sex education. By using the example of bodily temporality, the chapter addresses questions of sexuality and space in relation to globalization and transnational capitalism, colonialism and development.Less