Winnie Lem - Class, Contention, and a World in Motion

General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Don Kalb, University of Utrecht & Central European University, Linda Green, University of Arizona

The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neo-liberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth-century and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the 21st century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks, which reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.

Volume 1

Where Have All the Homeless Gone?: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis

Anthony Marcus

Volume 2

Blood and Oranges: European Markets and Immigrant Labor in Rural Greece

Christopher M. Lawrence

Volume 3

Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People

Edited by Stef Jansen and Staffan Lfving

Volume 4

Slipping Away: Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean

Mark Moberg

Volume 5

Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics

Massimiliano Mollona

Volume 6

Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development: Eritrea in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by David O'Kane and Tricia Redeker Hepner

Volume 7

When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue: and Other Essays in Historical Anthropology

Hermann Rebel

Volume 8

Class, Contention, and a World in Motion

Edited by Winnie Lem and Pauline Gardiner Barber

Volume 9

Crude Domination: An Anthropologyof Oil

Edited by Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna, and Gnther Schlee

Volume 10

Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China

Hans Steinmller

Edited by Winnie Lem and Pauline Gardiner Barber

Berghahn Books

NEW YORK OXFORD

First published in 2010 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

2010, 2013 Winnie Lem and Pauline Gardiner Barber
First paperback edition published in 2013

All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Class, contention and a world in motion / edited by Winnie Lem and Pauline Gardiner Barber.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84545-686-3 (hbk.)--ISBN 978-0-85745-794-3 (pbk.)

1. Human beingsMigrations. 2. Migrations of nations. 3. Culture and globalization. 4. Emigration and immigrationPolitical aspects. 5. Emigration and immigrationEconomic aspects. I. Lem, Winnie. II. Barber, Pauline Gardiner.

GN370.C54 2010

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-0-85745-794-3 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85745-827-8 Retail Ebook

The editors would like to thank Gus Carbonella, Don Kalb, Bruce Barber, Gavin Smith, Vivian Berghahn, and Marion Berghahn for their encouragement and support in making this volume possible. Chapters by Barber, Leach, Lem, Per, and Zontini are revised versions of articles that were previously published in Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, vol. 51, 2008. We extend our thanks to Berghahn Books and the editors of Focaal for permission to include these works. We also gratefully acknowledge the reviewers of this volume for their insightful comments, criticisms and enthusiasms. For their careful work in helping to prepare this manuscript, we thank Luisa Steur and Catherine Bryan. A final note of thanks is owed to Melissa Spinelli and Mike Dempsey for their diligent work in overseeing the production of this book.

This book brings together the work of scholars who are concerned with illuminating the relationship between capitalist transformation and the configurations of class in global migration. The contemporary dynamics of transformation under capitalism tend to be encapsulated by the overused but nonetheless apposite gloss of globalization. Globalization encodes the multiple and varied social, economic, political, as well as cultural processes through which nation-states are traversed and weakened. Contemporary migration is itself deeply implicated in globalization as both a product and part of this process. This book therefore focuses on migrants both as subjects of and participants in the processes of globalization. Our point of departure is to undertake an analysis of migration by questioning the ways in which the formation of classes within capitalist transformation intervenes in the spatial movements of populations. We address this problematic by focusing on the multiple ways in which migrants are produced as political subjects. We do this by problematizing the relationship between political mobilization and the class locations of women and men who must continually negotiate and the social conditions under which they make a living as migrants. In each of the chapters, therefore, the analytics of class are brought to the forefront in studying the question of spatial mobility.

Our concern with class is driven by the ways in which globalization has been conceptualized in the discipline of anthropology. At the risk of oversimplifying, we hazard that there are, at least, two broad approaches to the study of globalization in anthropology. On the one hand, global processes and transformation tend to be emphasized as cultural flows. rather than to questions of how the processes of capitalist transformation produce populations that are differentiated into mobile and non-mobile groups, economically, politically, socially, and also spatially.

Arjun Appadurai (1990, 1996), for example, set the tone for many globalization research agendas with an innovative articulation of the paradoxes of cultural flows that are associated with transnational imaginaries. Following Benedict Anderson's (1983) conceptualization of imagined communities, such imaginaries are linked to differentiated and disjunctive flows termed scapes. This is a metaphor drawn from the idea of landscape with its connotations of vistas, sentiment, memory, and temporality. Appadurai is careful to acknowledge that populations are socially and economically differentiated. He notes too that historical migratory interactions are often initiated by powerful elites; economic transactions, he proposes, are factored into financescapes. Nonetheless, cultural flows associated with the image, the imagined, the imaginary (1996: 31) are given a privileged place in conceptualizing and understanding the movement of commodities, resources, and also of people over space. This model provided a hugely influential yet culturally circumscribed research agenda for translocal scholarship. While we train our sites on Appadurai's work, it is but one example in which studies of globalization and mobility are emphasized as cultural flows and in which class, when acknowledged, appears under the long shadow cast by culture (see also Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Tsing 2002; Ong 1999).