Tea In The Harem Summary

Migration

While the subject of migration has received enormous attention in academic journals and books across the social sciences, introductory texts on the matter are few and far between. Even fewer books have explored migration through a critical and explicit engagement with spatial concepts. Now in its second edition, Migration remains the only text in more than a decade that emphasizes how geographical or spatial concepts can be used critically to understand migration. The multi-disciplinary text draws on insights from human geography, political science, social anthropology, sociology, and to a lesser extent economics. All of the chapters focus on key terms, theories, concepts, and issues concerning migration and immigration. The book argues that in the context of migration, two opposing ‘spatial positions’ have emerged in the wake of the critique of ‘methodological nationalism’. On one hand is the significance of ‘transnationalism’, and on the other, the importance of ‘sub-national’ or local processes. Both require more nuance and integration, while many of the concepts and theories which have thus far neglected space or have not been ‘treated’ spatially, need to be re-written with space in mind. Pedagogically the text combines a carefully defined structure, accessible language, boxes that explore case studies of migrant-related experiences in particular places, annotated suggestions for further reading, useful websites and relevant films and summary questions for student learning at the end of each chapter. Migration provides a critical, multi-disciplinary, advanced, and theoretically informed introduction to migration and immigration. Revised and updated with new material, new maps and illustrations and an accompanying website (https://migration2ndedition.wordpress.com/), it continues to be aimed at advanced undergraduates and Masters-level graduate students undertaking courses on migration and immigration.

A Time for Tea

In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system. Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion. A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism. Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

Signs of Cupidity