New Left Review 61, January-February 2010

Aaron Benanav

LANDSCAPES OF LABOUR

Contemporary research on poverty tends to adopt one of two approaches. The first, based in political economy, is policy-driven, in line with the latest World Bank prescriptions; it operates a closed shop of mutual references and rarely admits dissenting views. The second, rooted in anthropology, consists of micro-level village studies. While quantitative analyses—even where they are informed by a more critical outlook—convey very little about the actual people concerned, field notes, conversely, generally lack a sense of the broader social, political and—above all—historical determinants of the contexts within which their subjects operate. The sociology of Jan Breman stands out for its combination of closely specified accounts of the real conditions in which people live and work with analysis of the structural forces that shape their trajectories [1] Jan Breman, The Poverty Regime in Village India Oxford University Press: New Delhi 2007, Rs 795, hardback 458 pp, 978 0 195 69083 5. Famous for his field studies in India, he has also written on Indonesia, Pakistan and now China. Breman is an unparalleled storyteller. His careful descriptions of individual lives capture a totality of human relations in a single instance: the precarity of life at the bottom of the village economy; the lucky accidents that propel one or another out of the morass of poverty, and the churning of an informal economy that inevitably causes them all to slide back down. These realities tend to disappear behind reams of numbers showing healthy gdp growth and even declining poverty in India. As Breman writes, such figures do not accord with what he has seen with his own eyes in Gujarat, one of the most ‘dynamic’ states in India. His work in the country’s lower depths tells a different story, in which vast inequalities and crushing deprivation persist.

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