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- Convenors:
-
Geert De Neve
(Sussex University)
Henrike Donner (Goldsmiths)
- Location:
- 13M12
- Start time:
- 23 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how urban restructuring in South Asia has engendered new understandings and practices of urban property, marked by processes of contestation. The panel examines various aspects of this new political arena and of the ways that property mediates and is mediated by social relations.
Long Abstract:
Over the last decades, processes of economic transformation and market liberalisation have had far-reaching impacts on property regimes across the world. These transformations are felt particularly strongly in India's cities, where property has been redefined as real estate, and become transformed by neoliberal agendas and aspirations. Thus, rights of ownership, access and customary usage are contested and subjected to intensive processes of re-evaluation as cities and booming small towns emerge as 'loci of the practices of predatory global capital' (Appadurai 2000). These politics of contestation and related economies of desire have already been charted with reference to the emergence of a new middle-class and to new processes of exclusion and dispossession (Baviskar 2003, Fernandes 2004, Rao 2010). This panel will provide insights into the way macro-level processes affect the politics of property at the micro-level through ethnographies of policies, of narratives of 'development'/'progress', and of the ways in which property mediates and is mediated by social relationships. The panel will seek to explore how localised spheres of value (e.g market value as well as values of kinship and sociality) are being transformed by being connected, disconnected and re-imagined through property relations (Strang and Busse 2011). The panel will contribute to current debates on urban restructuring in South Asia but crucially link these to novel approaches to property in anthropology (Hann 1998, Verdery and Humphrey 2004).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai, examines how ‘black money’, in ordinary exchange as well as public debate, underwrites links between property, value and morality in contemporary India
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1950s, public discourse in India has been replete with references to ‘black money’. This refers to undeclared income, in cash or fungible form, and proceeds siphoned off into foreign accounts; it can also denote income obtained through illicit methods. Under post-1947 socialist rule – so as to circumvent high excise taxes, official currency rates, and onerous import controls – black money became ubiquitous both as an everyday practice, and within public discourse. A significant portion of exchange was done off the books; ‘white money’, implying bank drafts and taxable receipts, was balanced by black money, or undetectable cash transfer. During economic crises and periods of political upheaval, the government made black marketeers convenient scapegoats. For example, during the 1970s Emergency, the spectre of black money loomed large; crackdowns on tax evaders, smugglers, hoarders and profiteers figured prominently in state propaganda. Yet it was also during India’s socialist phase that black money became indispensable to democratic politics. Large industrial houses and small-time merchants alike financed aspirants during elections.
Today, years after India’s 1991 liberalization, black money still retains its hold on the imagination. Important purchases, such as for urban property, have carefully negotiated white and black ratios. And during India’s 2014 national election campaign, candidates have vowed to retrieve black money stashed in Swiss bank accounts. Black money is, at once, a means to do business, a barometer of value, an elusive spectre, and a moral outrage. It suggests that an inalienable part of the national essence is being laundered, converted, corrupted and disguised.
But what is black money? And what does its significance in ordinary exchange as well as public debate suggest about the nature of property, value and morality? This paper seeks to address these questions by drawing on ethnographic material from contemporary Mumbai.
Paper short abstract:
This paper sheds light on private-sector efforts to develop an international real estate market in India. It analyzes of industry-internal conflicts to theorize foreign investment in real estate as a cultural project and to illuminate the hierarchies of labor upon which this project depends.
Paper long abstract:
Newly constructed high-rise housing and malls, soaring land prices, and violent confrontations over land testify to the massive urban transformations underway in India today. The private sector, having gained an expanded role in urban development vis-à-vis the state, helps shape urban restructuring; however, few scholars have studied private real estate development in India or revealed the factions that underlie an analytically unitary "private sector." This paper sheds light on private-sector efforts to develop an internationally familiar real estate market in India. I draw on ethnographic accounts of industry-internal conflicts to theorize foreign investment as a cultural process of constructing authority and control. Examining interview data, industry reports, and observations, I show how foreign investors wield discourses of "transparency" and "quality" to transform business practices in India. Using these discourses, foreign investors attempt to establish a normative basis for insisting upon changes in Indian companies' accounting and valuation methods, firm organization, and construction practices and thus to transform Indian real estate into a globally legible set of practices and an international route of capital accumulation. Their attempts do not go unchallenged, however. I argue that the conflicts that emerge between foreign financiers and Indian developers illuminate not only the differences between them but the hierarchies of labor upon which this standardizing, market-making project depends.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research carried out in the city of Tiruppur in South India, this paper describes the processes of land acquisition and the politics of housing that mark contemporary urban class relations.
Paper long abstract:
Post-liberalisation India has been marked by a considerable degree of 'accumulation by dispossession', in which the enrichment of some closely relates to the impoverishment of others. Land and property have long been central to such processes of dispossession, and disputes over low-caste lands appropriated by members of higher caste communities have attracted the attention of media and research alike. More recently, however, headlines have been made by the larger 'land grabbing' projects that led to the displacement of thousands of rural and urban poor for the benefit of big capital, as is the case of SEZs and similar neo-liberal enterprises. While such large displacement projects reveal a darker side of post-liberalisation India, this paper by contrast focuses on the less visible and smaller processes of property acquisition that have nevertheless led to a large-scale dispossession of the urban poor - many of whom are temporary migrants and recent settlers - by an urban class of capitalists. Based on ethnographic research carried out in the city of Tiruppur in South India, this paper describes the processes of land acquisition and the politics of housing that mark contemporary urban class relations. It is argued that urban class formation is increasingly shaped and intensified by processes of what I call 'predatory property', in which increasingly wealthy industrial families come to 'grab' and monopolise the urban property market at the expense of the urban labouring classes.
Paper short abstract:
Mangalore’s intensive building activity is explored through ethnographic work with housing brokers and real estate developers (as crucial agents of access and imagination), analysing the role these two groups of intermediaries play in opening and closing the structures of possibility in the city.
Paper long abstract:
In the past two decades Mangalore has gone from being a city that dwelt almost exclusively below the tree line to a city awash with high-rise buildings. This intensive increase in building activity is related to a number of processes including: in-migration for work and study; migrants' remuneration from the Gulf; increased desire for nuclear family living (especially amongst returnee migrants); capital's need for a spatial fix; real estate's role in washing 'black money'; and a shift towards conceptualising property as an investment. This, in turn, has influenced, and is influenced by, changing imaginations of what constitutes a 'modern' house in a 'developed' city and what sort of people make desirable owners/tenants. Based primarily on ethnographic work with housing brokers and private sector real estate developers (as crucial agents of access and imagination), the paper explores the role these two groups of intermediaries play in opening and closing the structures of possibility in the city in relation to housing and how this mediation intersects with class, caste, community, age and gender. Filling a gap in research on both small cities and the workings of the real estate sector in India, the paper seeks to explore how macro processes are realised in the everyday workings of the urban housing market. More specifically, these interweaving processes are explored through three temporal frames: the launch event of a new building, the life story of two housing agents and their everyday working lives.
Paper short abstract:
As a market-orientated rhetoric takes hold in middle-class India,social relations including those constituting the ideal of the joint family are contested by middle-class couples, who have to engage with new ideas about 'possessive citizenship'.
Paper long abstract:
Economic liberalisation and the consumerist lifestyle that it has brought in its wake have affected even the most intimate relationships of the urban middle-class today. As a market-orientated rhetoric takes hold, practices change and earlier solidarities and publics dwindle as social relations including those constituting the idea of the family are contested. This includes a new focus on home ownership among middle-class couples, which often contradicts to ideologies of appropriate gender and kin relations and threatens domestic arrangements seen as traditional. Thus, the paper argues that the ideal of home ownership does not only imply middle-class citizens in processes of urban restructuring and property markets, it also changes the way the relationship between house and home is constituted and family life experienced. Based on fieldwork in Calcutta, the paper explores various genealogies of ownership as they were negotiated as part of being middle-class in the past, and suggests that whilst owning property has become an aspiration enabling 'modern' families, it causes new conflicts as the normative joint family ideal shapes the way ownership is realised. The ethnography presented here suggests that property ownership continuous to support the joint family ideology, and that member across generations may benefit from foregoing home ownership even where this may stall individual members' aspirations.