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Cultures of servitude : modernity, domesticity, and class in India / Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Ray, Raka.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Household employees--India--History.
- Household employees.
- Master and servant--India--History.
- Master and servant.
- Social classes--India--History.
- Social classes.
- India--Social conditions.
- India.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (431 p.)
- Place of Publication:
- Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, c2009.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere. This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.
- Contents:
- Approaching servitude in Kolkata
- Colonial legacies and spatial transformations : from the big house to the flat
- Between family retainer and freelancer
- Disquieting transitions : from 'part of the family' to the wage contract
- The failure of patriarchy
- The cultivation and cleavage of distinction
- Traveling cultures of servitude : loyalty and betrayal in New York and Kolkata.
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-248) and index.
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)
- ISBN:
- 9780804771092
- 080477109X
- OCLC:
- 793166855
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