Abstract
The everyday thinking, much in the way of common sense, outlays the framework of meanings that make sense of the world. It unpacks the complex articulation between migration and nation and pitches the mobilisation of these thoughts in certain ways within the capitalist ideology. Simultaneously, each political formation has its own repertoire of things that creates its own patterns of exclusion and inclusion, forms of hierarchy, and ideas of ethnicity and difference. Migrancy is deeply inscribed in the itineraries of such commonsensical reasoning, sometimes desperate enough to escape the destiny of poverty, and sometimes set in a train by ‘modernisation’ of the growing global economy.
Andrea Wright’s Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil is an anthropologist’s understanding and explanation of labour migration in pursuit of work in oil projects in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. Ethnographically evocative and historically sensitive, the book examines the poetics of ‘ghosts’ and ‘dreams’––the imageries used by aspiring labour migrants; ghosts as the reminder of the hoary past, of the traditions, obligations, and histories that shape up contemporary practices and disrupts the present, and dreams as the future vision of modernity, material comfort, and expanding capitalist frontiers.
Almost one million Indians, mostly unskilled and semi-skilled, migrate to the Gulf annually to work on oil projects. The workforce precarity and insecurity in India can be understood from the fact that about 35 per cent of the casual labour force at any given moment is looking for more work, and seasonal unemployment and employment egregiously overlap and coexist. Gulf promises Indian workers a lucrative capitalist dream by which they could earn more and save more––so much so that in one contract period they could save as much as they can ‘in a lifetime’s work’ in India. Wright explains that this labour movement gets motivated by the discursive logic of ‘scarcity and surplus’––scarcity due to the depletion of oil in the Gulf so the need for labour to transform it into a resource, and surplus in terms of Indian labour with scarce wealth. The migrants, prima facie, are seen as the rational decision-makers seeking to improve their livelihood both in the Gulf and back home.
In the neoliberal imaginations and social practices, the workers are not represented by the political parties and unions, and the labour movements, with their associated dangers, complicate the commodity chain. Wright maintains, through an ethnographic lens, that it is the social practices of familial obligations, friend’s activities and dreams and the given structural inequalities which motivate the migration and, in turn, the migration influences these social practices. For her, migration is quintessentially a social process, and the key social actors in the processes are oil company managers, recruiting agencies and agents, Indian bureaucracy, and migrants and migrants’ friends and relatives. She is well-focused to map how workers move with the constraints and possibilities in the midst of the oil frontiers of global capitalism, and how they build networks and communities leading to contemporary kafala, or sponsorships, wherein workers negotiate their working conditions.
The book outlines the processes of migration—originating from the migrant’s natal village to the oil project and back again—involving all parties, from migrants to corporations. Written in three parts, the book weaves into the narratives of contemporary patterns of migration, with the granular analysis of these patterns based on the author’s extensive fieldwork in both the locales, participant observation at all the hot spots in the migration process, and extensive interviews with the key social actors. Part I, with three chapters, focuses on the commodification of labour (like mangoes, men are commodified and exported), which is reinforced by the marketisation backed by the bureaucracy and recruiting agency, and gets intensified due to competing nation-states. Migration, therefore, gets determined by public policies, including corporate practices and international discourses and, in turn, determines the institutionalisation of these policies and practices. The state, earlier through the colonial emigration laws, leverages the precarity of the ‘vulnerable’ Indian migrant’s life and transforms them into an ‘entrepreneurial migrant’, so that they are cultivated into a better representation of Indian brand (pp. 58–59). The migrants in the Gulf, as higher-quality commodities, are seen as what a neoliberal disciplinary project managed in accordance with Hindu nationalist and upper caste ideals, would want them to be as ‘brand objects’. But, migrants, though working at the margins of the global market economy, form communities and negotiate the processes that are meant to structure their movements. They use, what Wright calls, the ‘poetics of resistance, critique, and refusal of the State and corporate power’ (p. 11). They no longer remain passive pawns of the state, rather they engage in creating their own social capital through powerful actors at home and build transnational networks in their movements.
In part II, Wright focuses on the migrants’ personal and community–filial obligations and explains that to fulfil these kinship commitments, migration appears as a panacea. The migrant men bring gold back home to India to get their daughters and sisters married and to construct homes, and that makes them feel more masculine and dutiful, as brothers and sons. The kinship practices and economic necessity are, therefore, deeply intertwined. Wright demonstrates that the ‘gift of gold’, historically and culturally situated, forms part of kinship practices, imbricates economic transformation and class relations, and becomes a ‘gendered substance, as salient as semen, blood or breast milk’ (p. 112).
Migrants have their own vision of modernity and future (p. 113). They often describe oil rigs as mandirs [temples], partly to get attuned in their construction of nationhood, development, and political inclusion and partly to ‘position themselves as part of India’s development and…critically insert themselves as part of the national body’ (p. 135) when overseas. In doing so, they become a critical community in their analysis of both Indian development plans and American–European practices, and they further argue for a future that is contingent upon values of obligations and connections.
Both in its pomp and crisis, the neoliberal hegemony has its own global and geopolitical implications. It naturalises privileges and refuses to acknowledge the existence of colonial capitalism, imperialism, and the networks of advantage, patronage, and power that maintain the rich. Flexible labour markets that essentially lower the wage cost to the bare minimum are at the heart of the neoliberal project. And, cheap overseas labour could be even cheaper if workers do not possess the basic rights of citizens. The oil economy of the Gulf has all the trappings of neoliberalism with one of its claws beckoning workers in and another stripping them of their humanity. In part III, Wright frames the precarity of workers in terms of forgotten ‘ghosts’, but observes the possibilities of opening up of the system for the new grounds of contestation and bargaining, producing new forms of migrant community challenging the whole liberal notions of political alliance, resistance, and agency. Chapter 6 exposes the systemic failures of neoliberal corporate management practices, which are nothing but reworked colonial laws, and addresses the concerns of labour welfare. It maintains that the intense financial precarity that the migrants face is the function of the neoliberal machinery at work, and further explains that contracting with the companies, in essence, is shifting the risks and insecurity onto the vulnerable migrant labourers. The author, in conclusion, narrates that workers back home build their community narratives to hold corporate and state actors accountable and tell ‘ghosts’ stories related to the shabby treatment of the employees and workers. Ghosts, unlike dreams, appear as the real social beings with their own agency, power, and, at times, danger.
The book essentially, with the dialogic–ethnographic research including archival research, oral histories, and social media, pushes both the disciplinary boundaries and the politics of knowledge production. It is refreshing and riveting as it refashions the studies on the poetics and politics of labour migration, critically rethinks the perceived political notions of temporality and spatiality, and contextualises labour mobility and oil capitalism in the neoliberal corporate power regime.