A Casualised Ethnography of the Jamshedpur Working Class

The book focuses on the industrial workforce of Jamshedpur-a city frequently portrayed as an island of peace and order, industriousness, and prosperity, in the midst of the general chaos, inefficiency, and poverty that characterise the surrounding countryside-in the tribal-dominated state of Jharkhand. Against this broadly self-congratulatory rhetoric, Sanchez's book attempts to highlight the constitutive role of criminality and corruption in the political economy of Jamshedpur and thereby offer a more critical perspective on the social relations that underwrite capitalist accumulation. [...]the distinction he draws between the elite beneficiaries of corruption and the dispossessed masses corresponds quite nicely to the naive elite/subaltern dichotomy of the early volumes of Subaltern Studies. [...]his analysis seems to be designed to evaluate each social practice based on its function, whether it advances class domination by managerial elites or strengthens the critical consciousness of the working classes.