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 long 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.