Professor J Parry, A505

For MSc Social Anthropology, MSc Law, Anthropology and Society, MSc Anthropology and Development, MPA Public and Economic Policy/MPA Public Policy and Management, MSc China in Comparative Perspective and as permitted by the regulations.

This course deals with anthropological perspectives on the industrialization process, on industrial life and industrial work, examined in relation to relevant theoretical debates and with reference to selected ethnographies.  The themes touched on are likely to include the way in which local understandings of modern machine production are laid down on the template of pre-existing cultural assumptions and cosmological ideas; the rural-urban nexus linking neophyte proletarians with peasant villages; the extent to which traditional forms of social structure and inequality are reproduced in the modern factory; the modern factory as an ethnic ‘melting-pot’ and as an agent of the ‘secularization’ and ‘disenchantment of the world’; shop-floor organization, cultural and organizational factors affecting the intensity of labour, and the extent to which factory production requires new concepts of time and new kinds of work discipline; the social organization of the industrial neighbourhood; gender relations in factory and neighbourhood; the extent to which industrial workers in ‘the Third World’ represent an ‘aristocracy of labour’, the contrast between workers in the organised sector and the unorganised sector, and the conditions under which the industrial workforce emerges as a class ‘for itself’; trade-union activism; resistance to and collusion with management; local discourses about industrial pollution and environmental degradation.

Lectures AN421 weekly, Seminars AN421.A weekly.

Students are expected to prepare discussion material for presentation in the seminars.

J Nash, We eat the Mines and the Mines eat us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (1979); A Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (1987); D Wolf, Factory Daughters: Gender, Dependency and Rural Industrialization in Java (1992); S Westwood, All Day, every Day: Factory and Family in the Making of Women’s Lives (1984); F Zonabend, The Nuclear Peninsula (1993); R Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-40 (1994); M Holmstrom, South Indian Factory Workers: their Life and their World (1976); M Holmstrom, Industry and Inequality: towards a Social Anthropology of Indian Labour (1984); J Parry, J Bremen & K Kapadia (Eds), The Worlds of Indian industrial labour (1999).

Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

There is a two-hour examination in the ST.