Send message to Author

Paper Short Abstract

For Indian Muslim woodworkers ‘apna kām’ (own work) articulates labour independence and agency. However, via novel debt/credit relations it is incorporated into modalities of labour bondage within circuits of local and global commodity production.

Paper Abstract

Amongst woodworkers in Muslim mohallas (neighbourhoods) of the North Indian city of Saharanpur, notions of jugād (making do) and milansār (conviviality) form vernaculars of urban survival. Ideals of a ‘proper job’ are also prevalent. Counter, however, to discourses of modernity which situate ‘proper jobs’ as formalised and (supposedly) dis-embedded, woodworkers preface notions of ‘apna kām’ (own work) that foregrounds artisanal modes of production, social embeddedness, Islamic ideals, and – to degrees – neoliberal ‘entrepreneurialism’. I ethnographically detail agentive aspects of apna kām – as a life-building and self-making strategy – but also attend to ‘scenes of constraint’. Here, I turn away from (but don’t dismiss) the performative (per Butler’s usage) to foreground materiality. I focus on debt/credit relations that are constituted through temporalities of ‘sticky money’. The ‘delayed’ or ‘partial payments’ this embodies, bind woodworkers to individual exporters and wholesalers. Empirically, I argue, these relations invert normative anthropological/sociological ideas of debt/credit which assume power relations that favour the creditor. ‘Sticky money’, I contend, produces novel time-space formations that penetrate ‘the surrounds’ AbdouMaliq Simone articulates as constituting agentive urban informality, via novel debt/credit relations to incorporate apna kām into modalities of labour bondage within circuits of local and global commodity production.