India – Page 2 – The Duke Reader

The Anthropologist Goes to Bollywood

9 Apr 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality, Purnima Mankekar, Duke University Press, 2015.

It’s all in the title. UNSETTLING. INDIA. AFFECT. TEMPORALITY. TRANSNATIONALITY. The key concepts are all listed here, in a sequence that will be repeated over and over in the book, like a devotional mantra. It is, if you will, the anthropologist’s “Om mani padme hum”, the way she attains her own private nirvana. Purnima Mankekar’s objective, as she states repeatedly, is to examine “how India is constructed as well as unsettled as an archive of affect and temporality in contexts shaped by transnational public cultures and neoliberalism.” Each word in this mission statement opens a particular space for ordering the observations that she gathered in the course of her fieldwork in India and in California. Indeed, the chapters of the book hold together by a thread, and this common thread is provided by the words listed in the book’s title. So let me engage with them one by one, in no particular order of succession.

Diasporic subjects and transnational imaginaries

TRANSNATIONALITY refers, first, to the two sites where the author conducted fieldwork, gathered observations, and interacted with her informants. The ethnographic material of which the book is composed was collected through the course of nearly two decades in various locations clustered around New Delhi and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where many immigrants from the South Asian subcontinent have settled. Transnationalism has been defined in anthropology as “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.” Mankekar complicates this definition by noting that diasporic subjects often cannot be pinned down to one place of origin or to one settlement location, as they frequently move across borders and develop modes of identification that are not tied to territory. In addition, transnational imaginaries also affect non-migrants who can only dream of settling abroad but for whom the distant foreign is brought close to home by television programs or consumer culture.

In a more restricted manner, transnationality applies to transnational public cultures as they are studied by the author: Bollywood movies, TV dramas, commodity consumption, ideologies of nationhood, discourses of morality, and fictive identities as in the call centers where young Indian operators impersonate the role of typical Americans. Mankekar treats transnational media as text to be subjected to textual analysis, but also as a practice to be experienced in tandem with her informants. She tells how she is able to break the ice with a busy IT executive by referring to a Bollywood drama, how she brings an Indonesia-born Sikh Indian-American to an old Raj Kapoor movie, or how she discusses gender roles and sexuality with lower-middle class and working-class informants in New Delhi based on TV serials and commercials. Public cultures are transnational because they address or interpellate a public wider than the national community; because they mobilize the forces of borderless capital and commodity fetishism; and because they often picture diasporic subjects while enabling men and women to acquire the capacity to imagine life in other places.

DDLJ, K3G, and B&B

The movies Mankekar discusses are known to many English-speaking audiences in India and abroad by their acronyms or abbreviated titles. “DDLJ” tells the story of young lovers straddling borders and communities to win parental approval to marry. “K3G” is about an adopted son expelled from his rich home for disobeying his father’s marriage injunction and then brought back into the family fold by his elder brother. Bunty and Babli is a road movie about two swindlers who escape from their small town by impersonating rich people’s identities. These stories resonate with the courting of nonresident Indians or NRIs by the Indian state appealing to their investments and skills (DDLJ); they espouse the ideology of Hindi nationalism by producing a fantasy of a reterritorialized Global India in which religious and other minorities are conspicuous by their absence (K3G); or they reflect the increased capacity to aspire of call center operators and other lower middle-class Indian who adopt new names and borrowed identities (B&B). Viewing these movies while reading the book in parallel provides the reader with a wonderful introduction to a fascinating cinematic genre.

AFFECT is a category that is mobilized on different counts. It is a dimension of ethnographic fieldwork, on par with cultural sensitivity and theoretical foregrounding. As Mankekar notes, “conducting ethnographic analysis is itself a deeply affective process and entails an engagement with the entire being of the ethnographer.” She situates her encounters with informants in their sensory and emotive contexts, providing notations on tastes, smells, likes and dislikes. “India shopping” in the ethnic grocery stores run by South Asians in the San Francisco Bay Area involves a whole range of affects, experienced by the author and her informants in intimate, embodied, and often visceral ways. They bring into play “senses of touch, smell, sound, sight, and taste.” These stores provide spaces where community members gather and exchange news about community events, and where new arrivals can learn about neighborhoods, schools, and employment opportunities. They are also places where the community exercises its surveillance upon its members and sanctions “loud” or deviant behavior. All is by no means positive in the outlook and values of Indian Americans, or in the political orientation of citizens back home. In particular, the author develops strongly negative affects towards people who espouse the Hindutva nationalist ideology and who wield campaigns of “aggressive national regeneration” aimed at religious minorities or, more prosaically, against Valentine Day celebrations. The ethnographer’s rapport with her informants is not always based on empathy and understanding.

The political economy of affects

Affect is also part of a political economy of affective labor, affective capital, and affect circulation. Michael Hardt has noted that whole sectors of the economy are “focused on the creation and manipulation of affects.” In particular, affect is constitutive of forms of labor central to the global capitalist economy, as in the transnational service sector where India claims a distinctive competitive advantage. Elaborating the notion further in The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed conceives of affect as a form of capital. Analogous to the production of surplus value in capitalism, affects assume value cumulatively through circulation. Affective economies are composed of affective investment, affective value, affective circulation, and affective regimes of production and consumption. Affect is distinct from feeling (the domain of individual subjectivity) and emotion (the domain of the linguistic). Affects are generative of subjectivity—of action and agency, the capacity to act and be acted upon.

Mankekar uses these theoretical insights in a fine-grained ethnography of call center operators in a New Delhi suburb. Call centers have become the most visible part of the business outsourcing industry and have been heralded by media pundits and globalists as proof that “the world is (becoming) flat.” Mankekar demonstrates the value of ethnographic writing as opposed to media reporting. She describes affective labor as based on affective repertories – of courtesy, familiarity, friendliness, helpfulness, and, above all, caring. It is also based on the alienation of workers who refashion their only means of production—their own selves, their own bodies—through practices of impersonation and borrowed identities. As the two movie characters Bunty and Babli, call center agents become themselves by becoming others. Their aspirations to upward mobility, glamour, and success is also nurtured by transnational media: they are required to watch Hollywood films and episodes of US television shows such as Friends, and to use them as resources to acquire American accents, adopt American colloquialisms, and learn about the American way of life. They engage in virtual migration through IT-mediated work and cultivate lateral mobility by moving from one employer to the next. But the end of distance doesn’t bring the end of place. The virtual migration of call center agents coexists with forms of emplacement and immobility (and in some cases, virtual incarceration) through technologies of regulation and surveillance.

Nostalgy for the future

TEMPORALITY is the second repertory or archive mobilized, in conjunction with affect, to delineate the production and unsettling of transnational India. Describing the modern imagination as an expanded “capacity to aspire,” Arjun Appadurai suggested that we foreground aspiration in order to “place futurity, rather than pastness, at the heart of our thinking about culture.” Indian residents or diasporic subjects locate India not so much in the past as in the future. In this new regime of temporality, tradition emerges as an affective process that entails “not so much the invocation of a past as the generation of a set of practices enabling subjects to imagine and embrace specific forms of futurity.” Among diasporic Indians who carry India in their heart wherever they go, Indianness is not constructed as static or unchanging but instead is portable and flexible. Similarly, Hindu natinonalists experience “nostalgia for the future”: their longing for a glorified and mythic past combines with an aspiration to march toward a glowing future as moral subjects of Global India. In this sense, “time has agency or, at the very least, a force of its own.” Time combines with affect to shape subject formation and social process.

INDIA is constituted as an archive of affect and temporality by transnational public cultures. What “India” means is very different for each of her informants in New Delhi or in the San Francisco Bay area. Some subscribe to Hindu nationalist discourses of national purity, while others adhere to secularist conceptions of nationhood. Some insist on bounded territory and fixed identities, while others are engaged in transnational deterritorialization processes and multifaceted roles. Diaspora members carry India in their hearts wherever they go, while some individuals construct their own private India with disparate elements assembled through identity bricolage. Second-generation youth express their identity in terms of cultural difference: for these transnational consumers of Bollywood musicals and ethnic productions, “it’s cool to be Indian now”. Food is of particular significance to communities that travel across transnational space. As a mother testifies, “now that the kids are in school, they’re forgetting their Gujarati. But the least I can do is to give them one Indian meal a day.” Some see India as a country of origin, while others identify it as the land of the future.

Indian settlements and unsettlements

UNSETTLING is a common analytic that hints at the subversive nature of academic writing, politically and culturally. The disciplines of gender studies, media studies, critical theory, or cultural studies are particularly unsettling in the sense that they introduce ambiguity and uncertainty where the dominant ideology tries to impose certitude and conformity. Like many cultural critics committed to a progressive agenda, Mankekar does not take categories for granted. She refuses to essentialize notions of nation, gender, class, or ethnicity, while at the same time recognizing their relevance for interpreting social processes of identity formation and collective mobilization. In particular, she unpacks and decanters the totalizing claims of nationhood. She shows that “unsettlement is intrinsic to the production of India, such that Indian culture is conceptualized as chronically in flux, as always emergent.” India is unsettling as a nation: it challenges aspects of American identity, and is deemed particularly threatening to the self-representation of the US as a technological leader. Outsourcing service activities to India elicits reactions of rejection or even racist slurs, as when Americans realize they have been connected to a consumer service located in India. As the author notes, “we rarely see the same virulence in discussions about outsourcing to Israel and Ireland.”

Unsettling India is also part of a wider project of unsettling nations. India is not the only nation to be constituted and unsettled by regimes of affect and temporality. As Mankekar claims in her conclusion, “I have wished to sketch the contours of a conceptual and political framework that may enable us to unsettle the exclusionary and violent claims of the US nation.” In post-September 11 America, fear and rage against people of South Asian and Middle Eastern origin, in particular those “deemed to be Muslims” (such as Sikh men wearing a turban) contribute to the creation of a nation predicated on the marginalization and demonization of racial and cultural Others. This book is about unsettlement as an ethnographic strategy as well as an analytic. “It is vulnerable to the irruption of surprises, emergences, and potentialities, and to the ineffable, the inarticulate, and the inscrutable.” Traditional conceptions of family, gender, or Indianness are displaced and unsettled by images of sensuality and erotic longing. Even the most conventional romance stories or the most obtuse nationalist discourse carry a twist, a fault line that opens them to the dimension of desire. It is the hero’s respect for Indian women’s sexual purity that makes DDLJ a truly erotic movie. The controversies surrounding Valentine Day in India underscore the greater visibility of romantic love and displays of affection between young men and women. India is constructed and unsettled in the same move. Mankekar revels in revealing these shifts and cracks in the fabric of social life.

Rewriting Marx’s Theory of Capital for the Twenty-First Century

5 Mar 20175 Mar 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Duke University Press, 2006

biocapital Biopolitics is a notion propounded by Michel Foucault whereby “life becomes the explicit center of political calculation.” The increasing use of this notion in the social sciences underscores a fundamental evolution. In the twenty-first century, as anticipated by Foucault, power over the biological lives of individuals and peoples has become a decisive component of political power, and control over one’s biology is becoming a central focus for political action. Used by the late Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France, biopolitics and its associated concept, governmentality (“the conduct of conducts”), are now in the phase of constituting a whole new paradigm, a way to define what we are and what we do. Biopolitics and governmentality are now declined by many scholars who have proposed associated notions: “bare life” and the “state of exception” (Giorgio Agamben), “multitude” and “empire” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), “biological citizenship” and “the politics of life itself” (Nikolas Rose), “biopolitical assemblages” and “graduated sovereignty” (Aihwa Ong), “cyborg” and “posthumanities” (Donna Haraway), etc. This flowering of conceptualizations is often associated with a critique of neoliberalism as the dominant form of globalized governmentality, and to a renewal of Marxist studies that revisit classical notions (surplus value, commodity fetishism, alienation of labor…) in light of new developments.

From Foucault to Marx

By adding the notions of “biocapital” and “postgenomic life” to the list of new concepts, Kaushik Sunder Rajan positions himself in this twin tradition of Marxist and Foucaultian studies. As he states in the introduction, “this book is an explicit attempt to bring together Foucault’s theorization of the political with a Marxian attention to political economy.” As mentioned, the paradigm of biopolitics and governmentality has changed the traditional ways of thinking about politics, and has led to a new understanding of basic notions such as sovereignty and citizenship. But Foucault was mostly interested in deconstructing political philosophy, and failed to acknowledge that biopolitics is essentially a political economy of life. This is where the reference to Marx comes handy. As Sunder Rajan underscores, one doesn’t need to adhere to Marx’s political agenda in order to interpret his writings (“I believe that Marx himself is often read too simply as heralding inevitable communist revolution”). Instead, he uses Marx as “a methodologist from whom one can learn to analyze rapidly emergent political economic and epistemic structures.” His ambition is to rewrite Marx’s theory of capital for the twenty-first century, and to situate in emergent political economic terrains by using the tools of the ethnographer.

For Sunder Rajan, biocapital is the result of the combination of capitalism and life sciences under conditions of globalization. The evolution from capital to biocapital is symptomatic of the turn from an industrial economy to a bioeconomy in which surplus value is directly extracted from human and nonhuman biological life rather than from labor power. The extraction of surplus value from biological life requires that life be turned into a commodity, tradable on a market and convertible into industrial patents and intellectual property rights. Life sciences transforms life into a commodity by turning the biological into bits of data and information that is then traded, patented, or stored in databases. Research in genomics and bioinformatics translates the DNA into a string of numbers, and develops methods for storing, retrieving, organizing and analyzing biological data. As a consequence, life sciences become undistinguishable from information sciences. Biocapital determines the conversion rate between biological molecules, biological information and, ultimately, money. It then organizes the circulation of these three forms of currencies–life, data, capital–along routes and circuits that are increasingly global.

Turning life itself into a business plan

But Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life is not only a theoretical intervention in the field of Marxian and Foucaultian studies. It is, as defined on the book cover, “a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India.” The constitution of new subjects of individualized therapy and the genetic mapping of populations are obvious terrains for the application of Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentally. Similarly, Marx’s analysis of surplus production and surplus value can be brought to bear in ethnographic descriptions of Silicon Valley start-ups living on vision and hype, and turning life into a business plan. As Sunder Rajan writes, “ethnography has always prided itself on deriving its analytic and empirical power from its ability to localize, and make specific, what might otherwise be left to the vague generalizations of theory.” In addition, multi-sited ethnography allows the anthropologist to follow the globalized routes of life resources, biological data, and monetary capital, that cannot be grasped and conceptualized in a single location.

The author’s initial ambition was to observe biotechnological research within laboratories and to put them in their larger social and cultural context. His interest in the relation between biotech companies and pharmaceutical corporations led him to approach various business ventures and present requests for interviews and participant observation. But as he recalls, “trying to get into the belly of the corporate beast” was a frustrating experience. Getting access to companies and laboratories was made difficult by the value associated with intellectual property rights in the biotech industry. As the author notes, “many of these people live in worlds where information is guarded with almost paranoid zeal.” The secretive aspect of corporate activity was compounded by the wish of corporations to strictly monitor what gets said about them. Research proposals for participant observation were vetted by teams of lawyers and were usually rejected. In India, corporations and research centers had a more open attitude to the ethnographer, who could fit into the more fluid environment and leverage his ethnic identity; but the bureaucratic state imposed additional hurdles through paperwork and red tape.

“We must get ourselves a bioethicist!”

Paradoxically, the fact that genome sequencing had already been the topic of a book by a famous anthropologist facilitated first contacts and self-presentations: “I’ve read Paul Rabinow, so I know exactly what you want to do,” was how the head of the GenBank database greeted the young PhD student sent to the field by his teacher adviser. Corporate executive and research managers tried to fit the ethnographer into known categories. “We must get ourselves a bioethicist!” concluded the CEO of an Iceland-based genome company after a short interview. A public relations official at Celera Genomics wondered whether his visitor needed to be offered the “investor tour” or the “media tour”, these being the only two categories of PR communication. The author finally gained access to GeneEd, an e-learning software company co-founded by two Indians in San Francisco that sells life science courses to corporate clients. During his job interview, he provided an overview of his own field of science studies and cultural anthropology, eliciting questions about marketing strategies and employee motivation. The two CEOs agreed to have an in-house anthropologist, and let him wander around while using his skills as a marketer.

Despite the obvious limitations of his terrain, being more than one step removed from the biotech startups and big pharma industries that are at the core of biocapital, the author was able to conduct an interesting case study of corporate life that is presented in the last chapter of the book. As GenEd’s client base shifted from small biotech to big pharmaceutical companies, the status of graphic designers declined to one of mere executioners, while software programmers became the key resource of the company. By participating in industry conferences, meeting with people, and simply being there, Sunder Rajan was also able to accumulate valuable observations on biotech startups and research labs in the Silicon Valley. In particular, conferences and business events are “key sites at which unfolding dynamics and emergent networks of technocapitalism can be traced.” They have their rituals, like speeches and parties, their messianic symbolism of “going for life,” and their underlying infrastructure of competition for capital and recognition.

The biocapital ethics and the spirit of start-up capitalism

High tech startups that depend on venture capital funding have developed what the author describes as the art of vision and hype: making investors and the public at large believe in unlimited growth and massive future profits, even they don’t have a product on the market. Hype and vision form the “discursive apparatus of biocapital”: this discourse declined in “promissory articulations”, “forward-looking statements”, and the initial public offerings of “story stocks”, as these ventures are known on Wall Street. The excitement generated by endeavors like the Human Genome Project has increased the enthusiasm of state funders and private investors for anything related to the genome, even as the pragmatic applications of genetics research seem distant if not unachievable. “At some fundamental level, it doesn’t matter whether the promissory visions of a biotech company are true or not, as long as they are credible,” notes the author. Promissory articulations are performative statements: they create the conditions of possibility for the existence of the company in the present. As a result, the spirit of start-up capitalism is very different from the protestant ethic as described by Max Weber. It is “an ethos marked by an apparent irrationality, excess, gambling.” It is also, at least in the US, a neo-evangelical ethics of born-again Protestantism that promises an afterlife in one’s own lifetime: a future of health and hope, of personalized medicine and vastly increased life prospects–at least, for those who can afford it.

This is where India comes as a useful counterpoint. India entertains different dreams and visions. In 1982, Indira Gandhi addressed the World Health Assembly with the following words: “The idea of a better-ordered world is one in which medical discoveries will be free of patents and there will be no profiteering from life and death.” Since then, the world has moved into the opposite direction, and India has positioned itself as a key player in the “business of life”. Medical records and DNA samples are collected in Indian public hospitals for commercial purposes, and the nation-state itself operates as a quasi-corporate entity. India in the 1990s has emerged as a major contract research site for Western corporations, which outsource medical trials at a significantly cheaper cost. The challenge for the young entrepreneurs and government officials interviewed by Sunder Rajan is to move beyond a dependence on contract work for revenue generation, and toward a culture of indigenous knowledge generation through patenting and intellectual property appropriation. It is also an ethical challenge: in the course of his research, Sunder Rajan visited a research hospital in Mumbai that recruits as experimental subjects former millworkers who have lost their jobs as a result of market reforms. The “human capital” that forms the basis of these clinical trials experiments is very different from the often vaunted software engineers and biotech specialists who have become the hallmark of “India Shining”: it is constituted of life itself, of life as surplus, and therefore blurs the classic division between capital and labor that Marx locates at the origin of surplus value.

Fieldwork in a multi-sited ethnography

Like many anthropologists, Sunder Rajan is at his best when he connects particular reporting on field sites and informants with theoretical discussions on Marx and Foucault. The objects of his study are inseparable from the larger epistemological and political economic contexts within which they are situated. In line with other scholars in the field of STS studies, he insists on the mutual constitution of the life sciences and the socio-economic regimes in which they are embedded. There is no neatly divided partitions or clear distinctions between “the scientific”, “the economic” and “the social”; rather, these categories enter in complex relationships of coproduction and coevolution. However, Sunder Rajan’s theoretical arguments do no always receive ethnographic support, and his empirical base is spread rather thin. Multi-sited ethnography as a different way of thinking about the field runs the risk of turning into reportage or graduate school’s tourism; and it is not sure that fieldwork, once defined as hanging around, can easily be substituted by wandering about.