Laura Bear has a PhD in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan. She is a specialist on India and ethnographies of the state, labour, temporality, globalisation and neo-liberalism. Her first research was in a railway company town, Kharagpur, particularly among Anglo-Indian workers and their families. In this project she reread archives from the perspective of workers' accounts of and dispositions towards the past. Her book Lines of the Nation recasts the history of the Indian railways showing their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. It also traces the emotional life of bureaucratic practices and shows how these practices rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Subsequently she followed the theme of nationalism into the context of new forms of labour in fieldwork with international call centre workers in Kolkata.
At present she is on a two year ESRC funded research project carrying out fieldwork with boatmen, shipyard workers, hydrographers, port bureaucrats and river pilots on the river Hooghly in Kolkata. This work tracks the changes in the technonature of, sensory experiences of, religious relationships to and livelihoods on the river that are emerging in the wake of neo-liberal attempts to alter its pleasures and utility. It focuses on the effects decentralized, informal and speculative processes of planning the future have on social experience, the urban landscape and waterscape. It also explores the changing boundaries between religious, bureaucratic and civic life that are emerging on the banks of the river alongside the growth of contractual labour, de-unionisation and privatisation (especially in relation to celebrations of Ganga puja, Viswakarma puja and Durga puja). This work will result in further writing on the history of the river, port and ghats in Kolkata, in particular the Hooghly’s movement from a place of (often Muslim) labour to a Hindu place of middle class worship and working class recreation. Her interest in the changing symbolism of the river will also later lead to an analysis of the literary versions, films and linked practices of worship associated with the Poddo Puran and Monosha Mangal. She is currently editing two films related to this fieldwork, one on the celebration of Durga puja in a middle class East Bengali neighbourhood and the other on the urban waterscape of the Hooghly.
Building on her research interests in temporality, neo-liberalism and globalisation she is the co-director with Stephan Feuchtwang of the ESRC funded research network, “Conflicts in Time: rethinking contemporary globalisation.” The research pages can be viewed here|.
Selected publications:
Forthcoming publications:
2012 (Autumn), Sympathy and its Material Limits: necropolitics, labour and waste on the Hooghly River," in C.Alexander and J. Reno (eds) Recycling Economies, Zed Press.
2012 (Autunm), 'This Body is Our Body': vishwakarma puja, the social debts of kinship and theologies of materiality in a neo-liberal shipyard" in F.Cannell and S. McKinnon (eds) Vital Kinships, SAR Press.
2011 (Autunm), "Making a River of Gold: speculative state planning, informality and neo-liberal governance on the Hooghly," in Focaal Vol. 6.
2007. Lines of the Nation: Indian railway workers, bureaucracy, and the intimate historical self. New York: Columbia University Press.
2007. Ruins and ghosts: the domestic uncanny and the materialisation of Anglo-Indian genealogies. In Ghosts of memory: Essays on remembrance and relatedness, J. Carsten (ed). Oxford: Blackwell.
2007. (with G. Pollock & M. Burki) The politics of display: Warte Mal! and social documentary. In Exhibition Experiments, P. Basu (ed). Oxford: Blackwell.
2006. An economy of suffering: Addressing the violence of discipline in railway workers' petitions to the agent of the East Indian Railway, 1930-47. In Discipline and the Other Body, A. Rao and S. Peirce (eds). Durham: Duke University Press.
2005. School stories and the interior frontiers of citizenship: Tracing the domestic life of Anglo-Indian education. In Education and nationalism in Europe, South Asia, China: Manufacturing citizenship, V. Bénéï (ed). London: Routledge.
2001. Public genealogies: Documents, bodies and nations in Anglo-Indian Railway family histories. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 35(3): 356-88.
2000. The Jadu House: intimate histories of Anglo-India. London: Doubleday.