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Lockdown and livelihoods in rural South India: rethinking patronage at the time of Covid-19

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posted on 2023-06-10, 02:55 authored by Geert De NeveGeert De Neve, Grace CarswellGrace Carswell, Nidhi Subramanyam, S Yuvaraj
What happened to patronage during the Covid-19 crisis in India? Drawing on ethnography collected during the lockdown in India, we explore how the pandemic inflicted a crisis of care on the informally employed working poor in rural Tamil Nadu. Let down by the state, jobless workers appealed to their employers for support but eventually had to rely on their own kin for survival. We make three arguments. First, the Covid-19 crisis revealed how under neoliberal capitalist employment regimes, patronage turns out to be distinctly instrumental rather than being part of a moral economy of exchange. Acts of patronage were not only very limited but also highly unevenly distributed, with some sections of the labour force more easily abandoned than others. Second, employers mobilised a range of strategies, including debt bondage, to retain control over labour during lockdown. Finally, by externalising the costs of social reproduction to workers’ own households, capitalist employers used the lockdown to further intensify exploitation. Employers’ instrumental patronage and their refusal to share the cost of social reproduction during the crisis thus produced a hierarchy of labour exploitation in India’s informal economy, with low caste and migration labour most blatantly exploited.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Routledge

Pages

226

Book title

How to live through a pandemic?

Place of publication

Abingdon

ISBN

9781032397801

Edition

ASA Monograph 2022

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Helen Lambert, Simone Abram, Jude Robinson

Legacy Posted Date

2022-03-21

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2022-03-21

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