An ‘Expanded’ Class Perspective: Bringing capitalism down to earth in the changing political lives of Adivasi workers in Kerala

Abstract

Following the police raid on the ‘Muthanga’ land occupation by Adivasi (‘indigenous’) activists in Kerala, India, in February 2003, intense public debate erupted about the fate of Adivasis in this ‘model’ development state. Most commentators saw the land occupation either as the fight-back of Adivasis against their age-old colonization or the work of ‘external’ agitators. Capitalist restructuring and ‘globalization’ was generally seen as simply the latest chapter in the suffering of these Adivasis. Little focused attention was paid to the recent class trajectory of their lives under changing capitalist relations, the exact social processes under which they were having to make a living, and what had only recently—and still largely ambiguously—made them ready to identify themselves politically as ‘Adivasi’. Demonstrating the usefulness of ethnographic curiosity driven by an ‘expanded’ class analysis, as elaborated in Marxian anthropology, this article provides an alternative to the liberal-culturalist explanation of indigenism in Kerala. It argues instead that contemporary class processes—as experienced close to the skin by the people who decided to participate in the Muthanga struggle—were what shaped their decision to embrace indigenism.

Tania Li, Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indiginous Frontier

“…Land's End presents a culmination of relational historical-realist thinking about how capitalist change involves indigenous people, emerging in the wake of the late twenty-first century global rise of indigenist activism. Such thinking is already seen in Tania Li's earlier work (Li 2000(Li , 2010, and also in that of anthropologists working in similar places where capitalist changes in the relational context that indigenous people live in did not come in the form of dispossession through large-scale, internationally financed development projects or multi-national companies, but in more subtle and insidious forms (see, for example, Dombrowski 2002, Steur 2014, Sylvain 2002. The point of such work has not just been to deconstruct colonial or essentialist notions of indigeneity as capitalist modernity's Other but to understand the tremendous role that class processes and a capitalist relational context have in directing and limiting change in indigenous livelihoods and politics.…”

Development and Gender Capital in India

“…Adivasi) and sexuality. Adivasi marginalisation within the Kerala model, often cited as a paradox within a paradox ( Chandran, 2012 ;Steur, 2014 ), raises questions for Kerala Adivasi women, where the cumulative effects of gender, ethnicity and class are played out through their "difference" and "oppression". Thus the intersecting role of gender, class and spaces then become signifi cant in exploring connections between habitus and fi elds .…”

“Ginger is a gamble”

“…In addition, the old feudal 9 custom of giving presents to laborers on holidays like Vishu (the fi rst day of the Malayalam calendar) has experienced a revival. Mutalāl≥ i are keen to pay advances in order to bind laborers to them; most also provide a daily allowance of alcohol, the availability of which is rumored to be one of the main attractions for migrant workers in Karnataka, whose migration experience is otherwise oft en narrated in terms of violence, abuse and being cheated (see Steur 2014Steur : 1344. As a result of cheap liquor, many laborers and medium-scale farmers, those cultivating ginger by themselves and staying in Karnataka, have become alcoholics.…”