JBSA Archives

Kinship Across Distances

Kinship Across Distances offers a richly textured ethnography of family life in an era of mobility, tracing how Chinese families sustain intimacy, obligation and care while living apart. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2024 across urban Hangzhou and rural hometowns in eastern China, the book examines how kinship is actively made across distance through everyday practices of visiting, remittance, storytelling and digital supervision.

Introducing the concept of ‘translocal kinning’, Zhenwei Wang reconceptualizes family not as a static unit anchored in co-residence, but as an ongoing, care-centred process forged through movement, mediation and negotiation. The book shows how efforts to ‘do family’ across space both reproduce and reconfigure hierarchies of gender, generation and class. Women remain central caregivers, yet their agency is shaped by intergenerational support and classed resources; grandparents emerge as key brokers of emotional and practical care, and digital technologies reshape what presence, supervision and responsibility mean at a distance.

By foregrounding care as a multidirectional flow rather than a one-way obligation, this book challenges dominant narratives of family breakdown under migration. It offers a timely and original contribution to scholarship on kinship, migration and social reproduction, while providing a grounded critique of how private family struggles are entangled with China’s marketization reform.

Plantation Crisis

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy.

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.

Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton

What is it like to be a young Muslim man in post-7/7 Britain, and what impact do wider political factors have on the multifaceted identities of young Muslim men? Drawn from the author’s ethnographic research of British-born Muslim men in the English town of Luton, Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton explores the everyday lives of the young men and, in particular, how their identity as Muslims has shaped the way they interact with each other, the local community and the wider world.

Through a study of religious values, the pressures of masculinity, the complexities of family and social life, and attitudes towards work and leisure, Ashraf Hoque argues that young Muslims in Luton are subverting what it means to be ‘British’ through consciously prioritising and re-articulating self-confessed ‘Muslim identities’ in novel and dynamic ways that suit their experiences as a post-colonial diaspora. Employing extensive participant observation and rich interview content, Hoque paints a detailed picture of young Muslims living in a town consistently associated in the popular media with terrorist activity and as a hotbed for radicalisation. He challenges widely held assumptions about cultural segregation, gender relations and personal liberty in Muslim communities, and gives voice to an emerging generation of Muslims who view Britain as their home and are very much invested in the long-term future of the country and their permanent place within it.
This short and accessible book will be of interest to students seeking grounding in Islam and Muslim communities in diaspora, and scholars from an array of social science and humanities backgrounds including Anthropology, Sociology of Religion, Political Science, Urban Studies and Cultural Studies.