Embodied Working Lives Manual Laboring in Maharashtra, India [Hardcover]

The use of qualitative data is well-done, with lots of examples and nuances of meaning drawn out of the interviews. Care is taken to analyze the effect of caste, the shades of inequality and their reflections in various parts of people's lives. The dialectic of the mind and body, the delving into the question of balancing pain and pleasure of working, the exploration of the quality of thought regarding the dignity of labor is outstanding. The discussion of relative agency of workers in body management and conditions of work is also profound.Embodied Working Lives explores the work-a-day of seasonal migrant laborers in India through a nexus of embodiment theories to enhance our understanding of what constitutes the intense, lived, and physical experience of such work. Echoing constructive explorations of labor science (Bernard Doray) but in the sentiment and with the intense rigor of contemporary phenomenology and labor studies, Louise Waite gives us unique and original ethnographic research to help enhance our understanding of laboring bodies and the policies that effect them.Both theoretical and empirical social science approaches to manual work in developing countries emphasize the infusions of power in social relations between workers and employers. But little attention has been paid to either the lived experiences of non-industrial and industrial manual workers or to the particularly physical character of their work. In Embodied Working Lives Louise Waite contributes to an expanded understanding of both. The concept of embodiment recognizes that bodies' habitual relations with the world engender subjectivities and life experiences. The most careful consideration of everyday-embodiment is found in the phenomenological tradition that theorizes 'incarnated consciousness' and 'embodied subjectivities.' This book follows such an understanding of embodiment, whose essence is to bridge the biological and the social. Waite incorporates embodiment into an ethnographic exl39