Livelihoods at the Margins
Surviving The City
James Staples(Editor)
UCL Press
Published on 15. May 2006
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-1-84472-133-7 (ISBN)
Description
This book is an edited volume based on selected papers from a two-day interdisciplinary and multi-regional conference held at SOAS in July 2004. Taken individually, each of the chapters offer fine-grained ethnographic analyses of the varying contexts in which particular marginalised groups - such as Bangladeshi street children, Ugandan drug dealers and migrant European sex workers - make a living on the social boundaries of different urban environments across the globe. Taken together, the contributions serve to unpack taken-for-granted understandings of terms like marginality, poverty and deprivation, while offering more nuanced ways of interpreting people's strategies for survival than mainstream economic analyses generally allow. Refusing to pathologise the marginal, the authors collectively demonstrate how the practices they describe - from casual labouring to begging - are embedded both within the broader contexts of global capitalism and within the very specific circumstances in which they occur.
This is reflected in the ordering of the chapters, which aim to take the reader on an informative journey that shifts back and forth from the micro to the macro, encountering broader discussion of salient social scientific concerns along the way. The tensions between explanatory models that favour agency over structure and how we might overcome those tensions, for example, are innovatively dealt with in several chapters, and a number of them address issues of social exclusion; everyday survival-strategies; and the implications of livelihoods at the margins for NGO action and Government policy. Contributors are drawn from anthropology, development studies and cultural studies backgrounds, and between them their research for this collection spans eight countries across four continents.
This is reflected in the ordering of the chapters, which aim to take the reader on an informative journey that shifts back and forth from the micro to the macro, encountering broader discussion of salient social scientific concerns along the way. The tensions between explanatory models that favour agency over structure and how we might overcome those tensions, for example, are innovatively dealt with in several chapters, and a number of them address issues of social exclusion; everyday survival-strategies; and the implications of livelihoods at the margins for NGO action and Government policy. Contributors are drawn from anthropology, development studies and cultural studies backgrounds, and between them their research for this collection spans eight countries across four continents.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paper over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-84472-133-7 (9781844721337)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
James Staples is a British Academy post-doctoral research fellow in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he also teaches on the Anthropology of Disability. He is author of Odd Bodies: Leprosy, Social Exclusion and Community-making in South India (Orient Longman, forthcoming).
Content
Introduction; No money, no life: surviving on the streets of Kampala; We are the Kings: Children of Dhaka's Streets; Revolta: rebellion, structural violence and street life in Rio de Janeiro; Hindu nationalism and failing development goals: Micro-finance, women and illegal livelihoods in the Bombay slums; Keeping it clean: an exploration of order and controversion in a Bangkok shopping mall; Making Money Fast: Working in the European Sex Industry; Begging questions: leprosy and alms collecting in Mumbai; On The Margins in the City: Adivasi Seasonal Labour Migrants in Western India; 'Moving up and down looking for money': Making a living in a Ugandan Refugee Camp; Collective organisation, ethnicity and political agency among Bolivian street traders.