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In Kerala, political activists with a background in Communism are now instead asserting political demands on the basis of Indigenous identity. Why did a notion of Indigenous belonging come to replace the discourse of class in subaltern struggles' Indigenist Mobilization answers this question through a detailed ethnographic study of the dynamics between the Communist party and Indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of Indigenist visions in the changing everyday working lives of subaltern groups in Kerala

Kolonialisme en Racisme is een boek dat uit de pas loopt met hedendaagse debatten over deze onderwerpen binnen de antropologie/sociologie en in activistische kringen. Dat is soms ongemakkelijk maar vaak inspirerend, vooral wanneer Jan Breman het belang benadrukt van het analyseren van racisme op het niveau van het mondiale kapitalisme. Het boek toont racisme in dienst van de wereldwijde uitbuiting van arbeid, die in gebieden buiten het directe gezichtsveld van de Nederlandse lezer haar meest extreme, dodelijke excessen blijft tonen. Ik ga graag de dialoog aan met Jan Breman over de inzichten die hij in zijn boek aandraagt en in die context wil ik ook een kwestie aansnijden die ik bijzonder opvallend vind: dat we momenteel in de paradoxale situatie zijn beland dat de grotendeels witte, liberale eigenaren en beheerders van het kapitaal – diegenen die in Jan Bremans boek nog zo duidelijk naar voren komen als actieve organisatoren van racistisch gedachtegoed en racistische wetten – zich inmiddels voordoen als grote voorstanders van antiracisme. En dat terwijl gevestigde linkse partijen en antiracistisch activisme nu vaak op gespannen voet staan. Voortbouwend op Jan Bremans historiserende en antropologische methode en mijn eigen onderzoek in Kerala en Cuba, zal ik ook ingaan op hoe we in deze paradoxale situatie terecht zijn gekomen – en hoe dat aansluit bij het laatste hoofdstuk van Kolonialisme en Racisme.

AbstractFollowing the police raid on the 'Muthanga' land occupation by Adivasi ('indigenous') activists in Kerala, India, in February 2003, intense public debate erupted about the fate of Adivasis in this 'model' development state. Most commentators saw the land occupation either as the fight-back of Adivasis against their age-old colonization or the work of 'external' agitators. Capitalist restructuring and 'globalization' was generally seen as simply the latest chapter in the suffering of these Adivasis. Little focused attention was paid to the recent class trajectory of their lives under changing capitalist relations, the exact social processes under which they were having to make a living, and what had only recently—and still largely ambiguously—made them ready to identify themselves politically as 'Adivasi'. Demonstrating the usefulness of ethnographic curiosity driven by an 'expanded' class analysis, as elaborated in Marxian anthropology, this article provides an alternative to the liberal-culturalist explanation of indigenism in Kerala. It argues instead that contemporary class processes—as experienced close to the skin by the people who decided to participate in the Muthanga struggle—were what shaped their decision to embrace indigenism.

In August 2001 there was widespread protest in Kerala, a state otherwise known for its remarkable achievements in 'human' development, at the starvation deaths that had occurred in a number of adivasi colonies. This prompted a continuing debate on the meaning of the Kerala 'model' of development for adivasis, in which a consensus seems to have risen that adivasis are the victims of Kerala's development experience and in which their current mobilisation is seen as the first time in history that their interests are being politically articulated. This article argues that such an interpretation is unwarranted and dangerous in that it ignores the present limitations of neo-liberalism on initiatives for the emancipation of subaltern groups and prevents them from using their historical political experience to dynamise their present political initiatives.

The past decades have seen significant urban insurrections worldwide, and this volume analyzes some of them from an anthropological perspective; it argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally informed and deeply embedded in local and popular histories, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation. The book examines cases of mobilization across the globe, and employs a Marxian class framework, open to the diverse and multi-scalar dynamics of urban politics, especially struggles for spatial justice