A peculiar combination of the privileging of difference and particularities of the ‘primitive’/other - and the perspective, motivations and requirements of dominant cultures and their reproduction - has structured social anthropology for long. The dynamics of the same also been variously critiqued (Gough, Anthropology and Imperialism; Banaji, The Crisis of British Social Anthropology).
Circa 21st century, the intensification of these dynamics seem even more acute as dissipative categories and centralized ‘globalist’ logics combine in new ways. In this rubric, the systemic consensus of invisibilisation of labour as a logic and history can also be understood, finding its peculiar manifestation in social anthropology. Which traditions of anthropology do we draw our resources from, in order to sharpen our critique of both the particular and the universal? How do we, as anthropologists, approach our enquiries to lay bare relationalities - when centralisation of power works through continual segmentations?
The paper seeks to interrogate these questions with reflections on anthropology of the capital-labour contradiction, the elephant in the room. It also seeks to do a reflection our quintessential method, that of fieldwork or participant observation (which Paul Willis called, ‘a supremely ex post facto product of the actual uncertainty of life’) and its spatio-temporal congealement of the subjects of enquiry despite and through focus on specificities, differences, performativities. It also seeks to understand the limits of a simple overturning/inversion (Ranajit Guha, Felix Padel) or imagining ‘ethnographic account upwards’ in fixed patterns of dominations. It will also be an engagement with works of labour anthropology like Willis, Braverman, Aihwa Ong, Parry, and the probable insights from the method of multi-scalar ethnography in the current juncture.
