Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India - Hardcover

Chari, Sharad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080474873X ISBN 13: 9780804748735

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Fraternal Capital examines class, gender, and work in Tiruppur, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners of working-class and Gounder caste origins, who explain their class mobility as hinging on their "toil." This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy.

Fraternal Capital decenters understandings of global capitalism by linking agrarian transition with the adaptation of a singular past in the interests of accumulation. As Tiruppur shifts to global production, this book tracks ways in which gender links sexed bodies to processes of differentiation, in the tenuous search for consent to increasingly despotic work politics. Tiruppur demonstrates the importance of gender and geography to the globalization of capital as it affects the lives of working people in provincial India and elsewhere. This book links the political economy of development to postcolonial and cultural studies, rooting the analysis of globalization ethnographically and geographically. Fraternal Capital provides a window into a decentralized capitalism and thereby critiques macroeconomic portrayals of globalization by showing how history, geography, gender, and work practice shape local sites of global production.

For orders from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, please e-mail Permanent Black at perblack@ndb.vsnl.net.in.

About this title

About the Author

Sharad Chari is Lecturer in Human Geography at the London School of Economics and Senior Research Fellow in the School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal.

From the Back Cover

"The boom fashion-town of Tiruppur in South India has attracted intellectual as well as manual workers. In the boom in scholarly literature, Sharad Chari's meticulous ethnography is outstanding. It puts the concept of accumulation back onto the catwalk. It relates industrial accumulation to the agrarian origins not just of capital but also of the labour process and elaborates a peasant-worker route to accumulation. It also reveals the way culture shapes work and work shapes culture. These are not just major contributions to our knowledge of clusters and industrial districts, they are also very useful contributions to the critical understanding of globalised capital."--Barbara Harriss-White, author of India Working, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University
"Fraternal Capital is an exemplary study of the paradoxical formation of a class of peasant-workers in urban South India who drew on their agrarian past to fashion themselves as a community of fraternal capitalists. Chari examines this process 'genetically, ' revealing how the labor that produced this transformation is the synthesis of multiple relations and embodies the history of these relations. He brilliantly illuminates this history by weaving together its complex strands, linking town and country, individuals and communities, local and world markets, past and present. Through Chari's caring intellectual labor, this capitalism appears as intimately fraternal and yet as violently divisive, as unusually distinct and yet as uncannily familiar, its singularity showing how the global history of capital is also always provincial."--Fernando Coronil, author of The Magical State, Anthropology and History Departments, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

From the Inside Flap

Fraternal Capital examines class, gender, and work in Tiruppur, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners of working-class and Gounder caste origins, who explain their class mobility as hinging on their "toil." This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy.
Fraternal Capital decenters understandings of global capitalism by linking agrarian transition with the adaptation of a singular past in the interests of accumulation. As Tiruppur shifts to global production, this book tracks ways in which gender links sexed bodies to processes of differentiation, in the tenuous search for consent to increasingly despotic work politics. Tiruppur demonstrates the importance of gender and geography to the globalization of capital as it affects the lives of working people in provincial India and elsewhere. This book links the political economy of development to postcolonial and cultural studies, rooting the analysis of globalization ethnographically and geographically. Fraternal Capital provides a window into a decentralized capitalism and thereby critiques macroeconomic portrayals of globalization by showing how history, geography, gender, and work practice shape local sites of global production.
For orders from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, please e-mail Permanent Black at perblack@ndb.vsnl.net.in.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080474873X
• ISBN 13: 9780804748735
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408