Situated in the backdrop of the Eloor-Edayar industrial belt, this book delves deeper into the ways in which capitalism infiltrates and manipulates the social movement landscape in Kerala. It shows how the hegemonic coalition between the state, industries and institutionalised trade unions enable capitalist rationality to mediate and control social movements in postcolonial settings.

Using an ethnographic approach, the book seeks to embark on a journey to understand the tensions between two progressive social movements – a trade union collective and a local environmental movement – foregrounding the experiences of members of the respective groups. The analysis presented here shows how the contestations/conflicts between the movements stem from interpretive as well as ideological differences surrounding economic development and environmental justice.

The post Labour, Nature and Capitalism appeared first on UCL Press.

This book reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person and the family. It is a contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centred on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia.

The post Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan appeared first on UCL Press.

Focusing on the intersection of gender and Islam, Viola Thimm shows how this intersection develops and changes in a pilgrimage-tourism nexus as part of capitalist and halal consumer markets. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, Thimm sheds light on how Islam and gender frame Malaysian religious tourism and pilgrimage to the Arabian Peninsula, but she raises many issues that are of great importance beyond these regional contexts.

This book also offers an innovative methodological-analytical toolkit to research mobility and intersectionality across socio-geographic scales ‘Scaling Holistic Intersectionality’. By bringing methodological holism into a fruitful engagement with the antiracist-feminist framework intersectionality, Thimm argues that hierarchical relationships, i.e. marginalisation, power and empowerment, can shift for an individual or a social group depending upon the social sphere.

Shopping with Allah will primarily be of interest to readers within the anthropology of gender, the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of religion more broadly.

The post Shopping with Allah appeared first on UCL Press.

Offering much needed nuance to commonplace descriptions of Mongolia’s post-socialist transition, this study presents rich ethnographic detail through the eyes and voices of the state’s most geographically marginalized. It is of interest not only to experts of political-economy and post-socialist transition, but also to non-academic readers intrigued by the interplay of value(s) and capitalism.

The post Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands appeared first on UCL Press.

Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era planation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India’s tea belt.

The post Plantation Crisis appeared first on UCL Press.

The post Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region appeared first on UCL Press.

Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia details this complex story through the intimate lives of five women. Building on long-term friendships, which span over 20 years, Rebecca documents their personal journeys in an ever-shifting landscape. She reveals how these women use experiences of living a ‘life in the gap’ to survive the hard reality between desired outcomes and their actual daily lives. In doing so, she offers a completely different picture from that presented by economists and statisticians of what it is like to live in this fluctuating extractive economy.

The post Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia appeared first on UCL Press.

By working across the dialectic of marginality and connectedness, Thomas Chambers thinks through these complexities and dualities by providing an ethnographic account that shares everyday life with artisans and others in the industry. Descriptive detail is intersected with spatial scales of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘international’, with the demands of supply chains and labour markets within India and abroad, with structural conditions, and with forms of change and continuity. Empirically, then, the book provides a detailed account of a specific locale, but also contributes to broader theoretical debates centring on theorisations of margins, borders, connections, networks, embeddedness, neoliberalism, subjectivities, and economic or social flux.

The post Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans appeared first on UCL Press.

In The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia, Dulam Bumochir aims to avoid the pitfalls of this debate by adopting an alternative theoretical approach. He focuses on the indigenous representations of nature, environment, economy, state and sovereignty that have triggered nationalist and statist responses to the mining boom. In doing so, he explores the ways in which these responses have shaped the apparently ‘neo-liberal’ policies of twenty-first century Mongolia, and the economy that has emerged from them, in the face of competing mining companies, protest movements, international donor organizations, economic downturn, and local and central government policies.

Applying rich ethnography to a nuanced and complex picture, Bumochir’s analysis is essential reading for students and researchers studying the environment and mining, especially in Central and North East Asia and post-Soviet regions, and also for readers interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, nationalism, environmentalism and state.

The post The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia appeared first on UCL Press.

Following the way that people discuss the ethics of urban change, emerging urban political subjectivities and the seeking of ‘quality’, Plueckhahn explores how conceptualisations of growth, multiplication, and the portioning of wholes influence residents’ interactions with Ulaanbaatar’s urban landscape. Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia combines a study of changing postsocialist forms of ownership with a study of the lived experience of recent investment-fuelled urban growth within the Asia region. Examining ownership in Mongolia’s capital reveals how residents attempt to understand and make visible the hidden intricacies of this changing landscape.

The post Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia appeared first on UCL Press.