Day 295: Moving Subjects, Moving Objects

Let us say you were in an Indian town at the onset of winter, and you had forgotten to pack a warm sweater. In all likelihood, all you would need to do was to get a taxi or rickshaw and ask the driver to take you to the ‘Tibetan sweater market’. Most drivers would immediately know where to go: to a market or a bunch of market stalls, built by Tibetan itinerant traders, where you would be able to choose from a wide range of sweaters to keep you warm. Since the 1980s, Tibetans in India have very successfully filled the economic niche of selling sweaters during the winter months. Their market stalls have become a fixture of the winter scenery in many towns all over India. For the Tibetan traders, this involves buying sweaters wholesale from Indian manufacturers and merchants in industrial centres such as Ludhiana and Delhi, and reselling them during the winter season on temporary markets in Indian cities and towns across the subcontinent. The traders themselves call this activity tshong, Tibetan for ‘business’.

The sweater business necessitates that Tibetan traders spend a significant part of the year outside their refugee settlements and in intensive engagement with the Indian host society. As the traders buy and sell sweaters, they operate inside Indian local economies and engage with Indian merchants and customers. In this chapter, I will examine how Tibetans build relationships and boundaries between themselves and Indians through trade interactions. The material objects of the trade – the sweaters bought, transported, stored, displayed, haggled over and sold – will take prominent place in the ethnographic narrative I will develop. In other words, this chapter traces the exchange and significance of sweaters in the Tibetan itinerant trade. It follows a commodity through various kinds of exchange to produce a social analysis, and could therefore be seen to follow in the analytic style of The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986). Similar to the contributions in that seminal volume, the value of the objects in question will be highly significant for my argument. In the present study, this value will appear mainly in the guise of risk and the techniques of its management. However, the sweaters as material objects are not merely placeholders of value and risk. They are also, and very importantly, things through which persons engage in social relations with each other. This perspective will allow me to discuss how Tibetan traders relate to Indians through the objects exchanged between them. I will show that, while the traders evaluate their relationships with merchants and customers in both positive and negative terms, the risk-management techniques employed in the trade are simultaneously based on and give rise to notions of trust. In a social field of marked ambivalence in which Tibetan traders may perceive themselves to be exploited, they nonetheless establish and express personal trust-based relationships with Indians through the exchange of sweaters. In the course of my argument, I will draw out the theoretical implications of this for our understanding of the social aspects of commodity exchange, and suggest that we may view the sweaters traded as objects which mediate agency. In conclusion, I will show that the idioms of trust and distrust connect exchange and belonging as two central concerns of Tibetan traders in the Indian diaspora.

Since the 1950s Tibetans have come to India as refugees, and today their number is estimated at over one hundred thousand. Of the first tens of thousands of Tibetans who came to India, the vast majority had been farmers who had relied on livestock and agriculture in Tibet. Since they had to leave land and animals behind, they lost the basis for their subsistence and lacked economic skills matching their new circumstances. Tibetan refugees arriving in India initially found homelessness and poverty, and the absence of economic opportunities which accorded with their skills and knowledge. The first economic foothold they gained was working on road construction sites in the northern states of India, where over twenty thousand Tibetan refugees were employed by the Indian government in just under a hundred road construction sites. Although Indians thought of Tibetans as physically suited to working in high-altitude mountainous terrain (Kharat 2003: 288), many of the Tibetans working in harsh conditions died of diseases or in landslides.

In this context, the business of selling sweaters during the colder winter months as street vendors outside Indian shops, or roaming through Indian villages, was initially discovered as an economic niche in the 1960s by a handful of Tibetan refugees from the province of Amdo (Lau 2007). As the practice proved to be lucrative, it spread among the Tibetan refugee population. From its humble beginnings, itinerant trade involving sweaters had by the late 1980s evolved into the main economic activity of Tibetans in India. In the estimation of my Tibetan informants, including officials of the Dalai Lama’s Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), most Tibetan households in India are today involved in the trade through one or more of their members. In many cases, the market stalls have been passed on from the original traders to their children, who are themselves now adults and continue the trade their parents first engaged in. Some of these second-generation traders bring their own children along in the school holidays, providing them with some first-hand trade experience and early insight into the functioning of the sweater market.

For a significant proportion of the Tibetan refugee population in India, then, the itinerant sweater trade takes central place in the annual calendar. The Tibetan traders leave their home settlements in October to start the trading season, selling sweaters on more or less makeshift markets or from roadside stalls in Indian towns, and most do not return home again until February or March the following year. They form transient communities, disbanding and reforming anew every year at their trade destination, where they are organized in market associations. These associations count the Tibetan traders of a particular market as their members and fulfil a number of functions, both as trade associations within Indian local economic contexts, and as new and democratic institutions regulating Tibetan sociality in the market (ibid.).

The particularity of the traders is clearly reflected in both Indian and Tibetan perceptions of Tibetans as sweater sellers. In India, the distinctive identification of named groups associated with a certain professional activity has long-standing roots. This idea is, of course, basic to the social ideology of caste. Although the particular idea of caste does not readily apply to Tibetan traders, Indian local economies have incorporated them as a named group of traders. For Tibetans themselves, however, the label of being sweater sellers has become intrinsically connected to their own understanding of their refugee identity. Although some Tibetans do work in a range of professions in India, from call-centre operators to academics, most of them stay in refugee settlements where economic opportunities are far and few between. They sell sweaters during the winter, and many are either involved in other petty trading activities or remain economically inactive for the rest of the year. Very often, this goes hand in hand with the assumption that they cannot choose another profession. In spite of evidence to the contrary, many of my informants would say: ‘We are refugees, therefore we have to do sweater business’. At first, this may seem like Tibetans exist in isolation from the Indian economy and larger society. But, as sweater sellers, Tibetans are in fact interacting closely with their Indian host society.

~~ESSAY :SWEATER BUSINESS: COMMODITY EXCHANGE AND THE MEDIATION OF AGENCY IN THE TIBETAN ITINERANT SWEATER TRADE IN INDIA -by- Timm Lau
~~Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions -ed- Maruška Svašek

Day 174: Book Excerpt: Crossing the Bay of Bengal

In early 1870 W. L. Hathaway, subcollector of the South Indian district of Thanjavur, condemned the “traffic” in people across the Bay of Bengal. He alleged that migration between South India and Malaya was “a regularly organized system of kidnapping.” Time and again, “captives were shipped from Negapatam for Penang and other countries, where the males were employed as coolies, and the females sold to a life of prostitution.” This “traffic,” Hathaway wrote, “is contrary to the law . . .[that] makes it illegal to assist any native of India in emigrating.” He insisted that the Madras government intervene to stop the traffic, and embarrassed the authorities in a long letter to the Friend of India, a journal read by British and Indian critics of imperial policy.

Hathaway made the “traffic” his personal mission. From his base in Nagapatnam he pursued shipowners and labor contractors. At the start of 1870’s “emigration season,” he ordered a raid on a ware house where migrants waited to board ships for Southeast Asia. The problem arose when their cases came before the local magistrate. Each migrant insisted that he acted of his own free will. Young boys declared that the labor recruiters were their “fathers” or “uncles”; they hadn’t signed contracts, so there was no evidence that they were “migrating for the purposes of labor.” “It is useless to attempt to unravel the real facts of the case,” Hathaway lamented; “people themselves will not reveal the truth.” This was an old problem. The local Police Weekly Circular had reported a similar case a few years earlier. On finding a ware house full of “coolies crowded together like beasts,” the police superintendent refused to let their ship depart. Questioning the detained men, he concluded, “I fancy they had got their stories cut and dried ready for use; for they answered satisfactorily enough; and they all produced parents, uncles, or guardians.” The superintendent thought, “This coolie trade has reached such large dimensions that there is plenty of room for an Emigration Agent here.” This goal was finally secured in 1873, when a protector of emigrants was appointed to oversee migration to Southeast Asia.

By 1870 circulation between South India and the Straits Settlements was entrenched, and it looked set to grow. Already cases of overcrowded ships and fugitive shipowners had come to the government’s attention. With the planters of the Straits crying for more labor, Hathaway and his colleagues in local government argued that it would be disastrous to lift legal restraints on movement between India and Malaya. British planters and their spokesmen in the Straits responded with the case for free migration. Connections across the Bay, they argued, were entirely natural. Malaya was really an extension of India; Indian laborers hardly thought it a “foreign” land. The tension between freedom and migration would resurface time and again in the years to come.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was pivotal in the Bay of Bengal’s history. The slow intensification of “traffic” through the nineteenth century was jolted into expansion, and the trickle became a torrent. Steam energy made the crossing faster, easier, and cheaper. Imperial power charged into the interior. By treaty and by conquest, colonial states moved beyond their coastal strongholds, preceded or followed by European, Chinese, and Indian investors. Coffee. Sugar. Tea. Tobacco. Rubber. Southeast Asia’s frontiers promised vast profit. Wherever in the world they found local communities stubborn in their economic independence— cultivators who found wage labor unattractive, or people who resisted enslavement— European settlers perpetuated the “myth of the lazy native.” “No gain,” Alexander Kyd wrote from Penang, “will induce a Malay to constant and unremitted Industry.” So labor, like capital, had to be imported. Chinese capitalists had a ready source: through their brotherhoods and regional associations they mobilized men in ever greater numbers as steamships brought the China coast nearer. Europeans, without access to Chinese networks, turned where the sugar planters of Mauritius and the Caribbean had first resorted after the abolition of slavery— to British India.
...
Now consider this in a global context. Migration around the Bay was comparable in scale to transatlantic migration in the same era. Some 26 million people arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1930 from southern and eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific. Add Chinese migration to Southeast Asia to the equation— around 19 million people in the century after 1840, more widely dispersed than their Indian counterparts— and it is clear that the region where the Indian Ocean met the South China Sea was home to one of the world’s great migrations. The main difference between the Asian and Atlantic circuits lies in the numbers of those who settled rather than returned. Between 6 million and 7 million people of Indian origin, and a similar number of Chinese, had settled overseas by the end of the 1930s; American demographer Kingsley Davis contrasted this with the 85 million people of British origin who lived outside the British Isles by that time.

~~Crossing the Bay of Bengal -by- Sunil S. Amrith

Day 166: Book Excerpt: Modernity At Large

As with mediation, so with motion. The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new feature of human history. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.

Thus, to put it summarily, electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination. Together, they create specific irregularities because both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces. Of course, many viewers may not themselves migrate. And many mass-mediated events are highly local in scope, as with cable television in some parts of the United States. But few i mportant films, news broadcasts, or television spectacles are entirely unaffected by other media events that come from further afield. And few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities. In this sense, both persons and images often meet unpredictably, outside the certainties of home and the cordon sanitaire of local and national media effects. This mobile and unforeseeable relationship between massmediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. In the chapters that follow, I show that the work of the imagination, viewed in this context, is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.

Ever since Durkheim, and the work of the Annees Sociologiques group, anthropologists have learned to regard collective representations as social facts-that is, to see them as transcending individual volition, as weighted with the force of social morality, and as objective social realities. What I wish to suggest is that there has been a shift in recent decades, building on technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that there is anything new about the role of the imagination in the contemporary world. After all, we are now accustomed to thinking about all societies as haVing produced their versions of art, myth, and legend, expressions that implied the potential evanescence of ordinary social life. In these expressions, all societies showed that they could both transcend and reframe ordinary social life by recourse to mythologics of various kinds in which social life was imaginatively deformed. In dreams, finally, individuals even in the most simple societies have found the space to refigure their social lives, live out proscribed emotional states and sensations, and see things that have then spilled over into their sense of ordinary life. All these expressions, further, have been the basis of a complex dialogue between the imagination and ritual in many human SOcieties, through which the force of ordinary social norms was somehow deepened, through inversion, irony, or the performative intensity and the collaborative work demanded by many kinds of ritual. All this is the surest sort of knowledge bequeathed to us by the best of canonical anthropology over the past century.

In suggesting that the imagination in the postelectronic world plays a newly significant role, I rest my case on three distinctions. First, the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. Of course, this has precedents in the great revolutions, cargo cults, and messianic movements of other times, in which forceful leaders implanted their visions into social life, thus creating powerful movements for social change. Now, however, it is no longer a matter of specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, injecting the imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation.

~~Modernity At Large -by- Arjun Appadurai